Odd Man Out: A Year on the Mound with a Minor League Misfit, Matt McCarthy

[Majordave]

I recently found this book in a pile of used books in one of the neighboring houses here in Afghanistan. Once I started I couldn't put it down and I seriously laughed my butt off from cover to cover.

Matt McCarthy is now a Medical Doctor. He is a Yale University graduate who was a lefty pitcher there during what was apparently one of the worst periods for Yale baseball. Fortunately for him he could throw 90 MPH occasionally and was drafted.

This book is based upon some notes he took during the 2002 Rookie Season in Provo, Utah. He essentially takes on anything and everything that goes on in professional baseball at that level. He is the odd man in many ways, first a lefty, second a pitcher, third a middle reliever, fourth a college graduate, fifth an Ivy League college graduate, sixth a bio-chemistry major college graduate.

Needless to say, he has a very distinctive view of things and exposes a lot of things baseball does not want exposed. For instance, the way professional baseball treats its latin ballplayers- how they are essentially brought to the US with minimal language skills and education, boatloads of money and left largely to themselves to figure it out. He discusses, with great humor in my opinion, the racism of baseball versus the hispanic players. His team refers to all hispanic players as the Dominicans regardless of the actual country they came from and all white players are warned not to go into the showers until the Dominicans are finished or risk unmentionable abuse. I have some personal insight into the latin culture. When I was an Army Private in Basic Training back in the summer of 1980 we had a significant number of Latino soldiers in my platoon and we had to take group showers. Needless to say the stories Matt related about the sophomoric behavior of his latin teammates I was able to experience firsthand way back then.

I liked the book enough to read part of it again while waiting for another Amazon.com shipment of new reading material. Some of those books I will review later.

I took the liberty of looking up the author on the internet and read the press releases and commentary and other reviews of the book. Apparently Dr. McCarthy does not or did not have the support of anyone in baseball and many of those quoted or written about deny the facts of the book. It is still a very entertaining book and I would recommend it.

If you read it you will like it but beware, you probably won't be able to put it down and I dare you not to laugh out loud at some of the stories he tells.

Edited December 9, 2010 by Majordave