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| Detailed Book Review |
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| Mendoza's Heroes: Fifty Batters Below .200 |
| By Al Pepper |
| ISBN: 978-1-929763-11-5
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| Price: $17.95 |
| Shipping: $4.00 |
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| Baseball's honor rolls are filled with legendary deeds of batting prowess. Throughout history, crowds
have
risen in unison to cheer the majestic trajectory of a white sphere "crushed" by the likes of Babe Ruth,
Mickey
Mantle, and Barry Bonds. But, what about the players who repeatedly produced little more than pathetic
squibbers to third base, infield pop-ups, and ego-bruising strikeouts? What could possibly be their value
to a
baseball club? Plenty. Al Pepper reveals the unique, unusual, and offbeat stories of fifty of these men
by
using eye-opening statistics, interviews with players, and anecdotal biographies. Foreword by ex-big
leaguer
Mike Stenhouse. Illustrated by Jon Gordon. As a life-long fan of the Philadelphia Phillies and the
late-
lamented Washington Senators, Al Pepper knows a thing or two about baseball mediocrity.
Mendoza's Heroes: Fifty Batters Below .200 is also available as an ebook on Amazon.com for the Kindle.
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| Book Review Details: |
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| Reviewed Appeared In: Baseball Spot |
| Reviewed By: Tim Morris |
| Text Of Review: Brief biographies of fifty major league position players who had careers of some length but lifetime batting averages below the famous Mendoza Line. (Mario Mendoza is only an honorary member; he finished at .215). This is an agreeable book. To be completely honest, almost none of these ballplayers is very interesting. But Pepper keeps individual entries short and to the point. A lot of the players listed are catchers from the dead-ball era or the 1960s. Some were pretty good: Bill Bergen, Bill Plummer, Mike Ryan; even the great bad Bob Uecker was better than his post-retirement shtick leads one to believe. Brian Doyle won World Series glory in 1978; Ray Oyler was immortalized in Jim Bouton's Ball Four. Herman Franks and Tony LaRussa went on to manage in the majors. Maybe Pepper's book will lead to the opening of a small, hard-to-find wing in Cooperstown. After all, how many of us in our own careers have gotten above the Mendoza Line in our field?
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