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The Entitled: A Tale of Modern Baseball

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Overview

In men like Traveler and Alcazar we find the beating heart and struggling soul of baseball..."
--Jeff MacGregor, Sports Illustrated; author of Sunday Money

Howie Traveler never made it as a player--his one major league hit and .091 batting average attest to that. He was
cursed with that worst of professional maladies, the ill fortune of almost.

Now after years of struggling up the coaching ladder, Howie's finally been given his shot: as manager of the Cleveland Indians. But America's pastime has changed. Whether Howie can spot a small flaw in a batter's swing won't matter if he can't manage his superstar outfielder Jay Alcazar, a slugger with enormous talent (and an ego to match).

No crisis on the field fazes Jay and no woman off the field ever rejects him. But one night at the hotel Howie sees something at Jay's door he wishes he hadn't...and it leaves Howie with an impossible choice.

From six-time National Sportswriter of the Year and NPR commentator Frank Deford comes a richly detailed, page-turning tale that takes you deep into America's game. From the dugouts to the tabloid scandals, from the lights of the field to the glare of the media, The Entitled is the great novel of baseball's modern era.

"The Entitled is a baseball masterpiece, like The Natural and Field of Dreams; the difference is the plot and the characters depict the true inside world of baseball. Frank Deford writes like he played in the majors for ten years. If you have a passion for baseball, this is a must read."
--Mike Schmidt, Baseball Hall of Fame

"Frank Deford is not just an immensely talented sportswriter, he's an immensely talented American writer. The Entitled is his wise and pleasurable portrait of a Willy Loman-like baseball manager finally getting his chance in the Bigs late in his career."
--David Halberstam

"Engrossing...Readers are exposed to a richly textured understanding of baseball and, no less, of estrangement, ambition, mendacity and the search for one's destiny--notwithstanding the cost in human or financial terms."
--Library Journal

"I loved The Entitled and could not put it down. It was a great read from start to finish with characters that reminded me of the many people I've known and played with--pure baseball."
--Lou Piniella, Manager, Chicago Cubs

" The Entitled contains all of the keen insider knowledge one expects of America's premier sports journalist. It also displays Frank Deford's gifts for dialogue and intricate plotting and his poignant grasp of character. It proves once again that Deford can play at the highest level in any league."
--Michael Mewshaw, author of Year of the Gun

"Deford scores another hit with this novel of athletes behaving badly...tackles timely and provocative issues without flinching."
--Publishers Weekly

Editorial Reviews

Sportswriter, screenwriter and author Deford (Alex: The Life of a Child; Everybody's All-American) scores another hit with this novel of athletes behaving badly. After a career spent knocking around in the minor leagues as a player and manager, Howie Traveler has finally made it to the majors as manager of the Cleveland Indians. The team, however, is struggling, and Howie's job is in jeopardy when the team's star player, Jay Alcazar, is accused of rape. Though Howie's playing career stalled out in Triple A, his big league management career depends on how well he can handle Alcazar, heralded as "the best player in the game." Alcazar insists he's innocent--perhaps even believes it--but Howie suspects otherwise, having witnessed a troubling scene involving accused and accuser the night of the alleged rape. Now, Howie has to choose between his conscience and his dream job. The resolution won't please everyone, but Deford tackles timely and provocative issues without flinching. (May)
Copyright (c) Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Author Information

Bio of Frank Deford

The author of fourteen books, Frank Deford has worked in virtually every medium. He is senior contributing writer at Sports Illustrated, where his byline first appeared in 1962. A weekly commentator for NPR's Morning Edition, he is also a regular correspondent on the HBO show Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel. As a journalist, Deford was most recently presented with the National Magazine Award for profiles, and has been elected to the Hall of Fame of the National Association of Sportscasters and Sportswriters. Voted by his peers as U.S. Sportswriter of the Year six times, he was also cited by The American Journalism Review as the nation's finest sportswriter and was twice voted Magazine Writer of the Year by the Washington Journalism Review. He has been presented with a Christopher Award and awards for distinguished service to journalism from the University of Missouri and Northeastern University. For his radio and TV work, Deford has won both an Emmy and a George Foster Peabody Award.

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Additional Info

Imprint

Sourcebooks Landmark

Filesize

1.27 MB

Number of Pages

336

eBook ISBN

9781402219887

Excerpt from: The Entitled by Frank Deford


That Night

So, for Howie, it was, at last: neither resignation on the one hand, nor anger on the other. No, it was sim�ply awful, horrible disappointment that tore at him. That it all must end this way. No, not this way. Any�way it ended would be a calamity, because despair would follow, and Howie understood himself well enough to know that he didn't possess the creative resources to really ever overcome that despair.

This is the way he put it, over the phone, to Lindsay: "I'm a dead man, sweetie. I know I won't get outta Baltimore alive."

Howie was, after all, a practical man. Whenever one of his regulars would go onto the disabled list, all the writers would flutter around him, asking how the team could possibly manage until the wounded star returned.

"I don't deal with the dead," Howie would reply. That concluded the discussion. Ask me about the ones who could suit up. You play with what you had. And now it was he who was the dead man, because he was positive that he was going to be fired in Baltimore, and that would mean the end of his life in baseball, which was the only existence he had ever known.

There was a singular blessing. Because his demise was so clear-cut, he had, for the short term, found a certain calm within, so by the time he got to Baltimore he was concerned mostly with how, when the inevitable happened, he must display dignity upon his leave-taking. There would be no grousing. He would, in fact, thank the Indians for giving him the opportu�nity to manage in the major leagues. He would wish the team and the organization well.

There would be no backbiting. Of course, yes, he would, in passing (only in passing, you understand), recall how well the team had done under his aegis his first year on the job. He would not embellish that fact, but he would mention it (in passing) so as to remind everyone that just because Howie Traveler was a busher, he had shown that he could damn well man�age a team in the big leagues. He had proved that. It was important to leave the media bastards with that. Especially the talk radio bastards, those who spewed venom for a living, and those amateur venom-spewing bastards who just called in.

When he got to Baltimore and found the time, Howie was going to write down what he wanted to say, and then commit it to memory so that he would display extemporaneous eloquence in his last public appearance.

In the meantime, he tried to pretend that he was not dwelling on what everyone knew. The pallbearers were assembling. Not only the columnists from the Plain Dealer and the Akron Beacon Journal, but, as well, the lead columnist of the Columbus Dispatch had signed onto the press manifest this trip, ready to dress up his obituary on the spot for the enlightenment of central Ohio fans. After all, a road trip offered the kind of time�table general managers preferred for these proceedings. Fire the manager away from home. Let an interim manager--in this case, the team's trusty old reliable, Spencer "Frosty" Westerfield, the bench coach--handle the next series, in Chicago, and then have the new man on hand, prepared to assume command-- "take the helm," as the papers would have it--when the team returned to Cleveland, ready to start fresh, turn a new leaf, salvage the season, restore the damage that he, Howie Traveler, had indisputably done.

Never was anything so pat. So Howie just waited for Moncrief to fly in from Cleveland and fire him. Of course, everybody knows that baseball managers are, as it is written in stone, hired to be fired, but this was cold comfort when you were the manager in question and this was your time to be eighty-sixed.

O'Reilly, one of the newspaper beat men who liked Howie and drank with him sometimes, told him that Diaz was already in Cleveland, working out his deal. Nobody could locate Diaz, but O'Reilly said they knew he was there. This figured. Even when the Indians had hired Howie, the season before last, there had been a lot of speculation that Diaz would get the job instead.