The Complete Game

The Complete Game – by Ron Darling

Ron Darling was a very good Major League Baseball pitcher during the 1980s and 1990s. He was also known as rather cerebral.  When the Yale graduate starting pitching for the New York Mets, he was asked by one reporter what he liked best about New York.  Darling’s reply?  “New York has great libraries”. He's one of the few fortunate who now has a baseball life now that his playing days are over; he’s been a successful broadcaster for the New York Mets for over ten years.  So it shouldn’t surprise anyone that such a person would also go on to pen a few books. As I write this review, he’s written three. This one is his first.

In an effort to set this work apart from the plethora of sports books written by ex jocks, Darling goes for a unique approach. Rather than reminisce of the glory years with stories, anecdotes, and comparing the game of yesteryear to today, Darling chooses to focus on what a pitcher is going through during every inning of a baseball game.  He wisely doesn’t choose one game, but rather various games throughout his career (including one or two as a broadcaster observing another pitcher).   Each of the innings that we read about are mostly interesting, but sometimes Darling gets stuck a tad deep in the weeds. I would guess an average inning for a major league pitcher lasts 7-8 minutes, yet it takes much longer when we actually read about these innings within a book. 

Darling covers it all. We read about what the pitcher thinks about before the game, before the inning, the strategy to each batter, what the batter is probably thinking, what his teammates are thinking, what the manager is thinking, and on and on and on.  Most of this is good for the faithful fan, but there are times when the reader requires a degree of patience.

In fact, I felt the best parts of the book were the beginning, when he first came up to the Major Leagues, and the end, when he realized that it was time to hang up his cleats.  The reason is that these parts require a more human story instead of the ongoing minutia of pitching strategies.  This leads me to believe that Darling could probably tell a much more interesting story had he focused on the normal things we read about in baseball retrospectives.  Of course, it wouldn’t surprise me if Darling considered writing a book about the famous (infamous?) New York Mets teams of the 1980s but changed course after he realized that there were already oodles of books out there about 1986.  Why add another?  That doesn’t seem like Ron Darling’s style.

I should point out that of his two other books, at least one focuses more on people and stories, and I’ll definitely pick that one up at some point as Darling has proved here that he can write good stuff.  This book was a good, brief read.  But even though it’s aided by brevity, it still felt a bit long at times.  

Come to think about it, you could probably say the exact same thing about the majority of Major League Baseball games that you watch.