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The Last Best League by Jim Collins

With the end of the 2005 Cape Cod Baseball League season, I picked up this book to extend the season. It’s a non-fiction story that goes behind the scenes with the 2002 Chatham A’s, one of the Cape League’s most celebrated teams (also featured in the movie Summer Catch). As a fan of the Cape League, and having attended the baseball clinics as a kid, I found it very interesting to learn how much work goes into assembling and maintaining the teams–equally interesting, was peering into the lives of the players, who are mostly slighty younger than me at 20 and 21 years old.

Whether non-baseball fans will enjoy this book, I don’t know. But if you’ve ever been to a Cape game, you should probably pick this one up, as well as the Cape League documentary DVD Touching the Game. Every player who steps foot on a Cape League field has a story, and this book does a great job at capturing some of the fascinating ones. I was amazed by how much detail the book went into, seemlessly peering into player’s minds and maintaining the storyline at the same time. An excellent read that I would highly recommend.

Now, I’m going to start reading Baseball by the Beach, a slightly older book on the Cape League that takes a different spin by looking at the history behind it, beginning before the days of NCAA and MLB sponsorship.