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List Price: $29.95 | | Publisher: Publishing Mills
Salesrank: 4085415
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| Used Price: $3.55 |
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| Media: Audio Cassette |
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Editorial Review:
Gil Davison is the coach of an amateur baseball team in Michigan, national finalists many times over but champions never. He has spent his adult life juggling his roles as coach to the team, father to his estranged son, and caretaker to his own disapproving father -- a man disdainful of Gil's passion for the game. Now, in this one season, Gil's star pitcher is losing his arm , his son has made it clear that he is doing just fine without him, and his father is dying of cancer. So when a hot rookie hitter wanders into town -- fresh from a stint in prison and determined to make a clean start -- Gil convinces himself that this season his team must win the championship, their one last chance to fulfill an elusive dream. But the events that unfold are unexpected, enlightening and overwhelmingly powerful -- and they will change each of these men forever.
With the voice of a born storyteller, a gift for capturing the subtleties of men's interactions and a tireless pursiut of our most vulnerable truths -- in love, parenting, competition, and death -- Scott Lasser lays bare the unspoken bonds and implicit understandings that exist between all men -- silences that substitute for compassion, silences that can eventually implode from the pressure of their own restraint.
Description of Battle Creek:
In his first novel, Scott Lasser takes on that time-honored topic, arms and the man--pitching arms, that is. But Battle Creek is no overblown baseball epic. Instead, the author focuses on a minor-league team--one whose propensity to lose in the final round of the nationals makes its sponsorship by a funeral home somehow appropriate. Can veteran coach Gil Davison turn things around? He's determined to do so, even if it means a touch of dugout downsizing:
He has made up his mind that this will be his last season. He wants to go out on top. In previous years he kept some people on board out of loyalty, or because he liked them, or because he liked their wives or girlfriends, or just to avoid having to fire them, but this year he won't do it. This year a player has to produce, or he's gone.
Gil, who's been diverting money from his father's checking account to keep the team in cleats, is the center of the novel. But Lasser introduces us to the rest of the roster, too. There's sexual athlete and power pitcher Ben Mercer, who succumbs to baseball's equivalent of the Dark Side and starts throwing spitballs. (Mercer, by the way, is a stockbroker when he's not on the mound, which may make for a certain harmonic convergence between him and his bond-trading creator.) There's also a young hitter, Luke James, whose promising career gets truncated by a well-placed bean ball. Throughout, Lasser has a fine, glancing touch with "the dance of infield practice and the pop of the ball in the catcher's mitt, the flicker of signals from the catcher with a man on second, and the lean of a ballplayer as he rounds third base." But aside from the generational head-butting between Gil and his father, the author's explorations of the wild and wooly world of American masculinity have something tentative to them. Aiming, perhaps, for the back fence, he has an unfortunate tendency to check his swing. --James MarcusBattle Creek Reviews:
Spellbinding! 
2003-03-12 - Mr. Lasser writes a compelling tale about people. The premise is baseball, which admittedly is a subject that doesn't interest me, but in spite of that, I really enjoyed the book. A true work of literature, and not just another mindless page-turner, this high-quality work is haunting and yet strangely uplifting.
Somewhat disappointing... 
2001-03-14 - An ardent baseball fan, I found this book to be something of a disappointment. While the book certainly lacks little in its description of the details of the game and those involved in it, the plot and characters never seem to ascend beyond cliche. The ending, too, left me wanting for something not just more, but better. A decent first effort for Lasser, but the there are many in the catalog of written works about baseball that I have found more engrossing and enjoyable than Battle Creek.
As Compelling as a Check Swing Single
2000-10-26 - Like baseball, this book can be enjoyed at a very basic level. Unlike baseball however, Battle Creek lacks the depth and complexity to be treated as much more than a pleasant diversion. I sped through Battle Creek quickly and easily, without having to put too much thought into it. Being a Michigander, and a baseball fan, Battle Creek should have grabbed me and not let go. Instead, it merely guided be through page after page of everyday life. The characters were drawn well enough, they just never really popped from the pages. The baseball scenes seemed realistic and the relationships possible, if not a little shallow. I have no real complaints about this book. Likewise, I wouldn't call a friend to tell them to read it either. Instead, I'd suggest that anyone looking for real baseball reading pick up Bart Giamatti's "A Great and Glorious Game" and read the first essay, "The Green Fields of the Mind." That four page masterpiece contains more human drama, baseball knowledge and rich prose than Battle Creek achieves in over 200 pages.
Lasser explores price of victory in touch 'em all novel 
2000-09-29 - Battle Creek joins Bang the Drum Slowly and The Natural in its exploration of the lure and costs of baseball on the American psyche. Focusing on the final season of generationally-sandwiched head coach Gil Davison, the novelist Scott Lasser is at his best when the themes of competition and success mingle with the tensions engendered in families which do not function well. His descriptions of his terminally ill father are, to me, the strongest aspect of the novel.
In addition, his evocative narrative of actual games reveal a man who knows and respects the beauty of baseball. Unfortunately, the women who populate his novel are distressingly unidimensional: either poetically detached or built like centerfolds (with little personality or intelligence to attract them to readers who would prefer "real" women to affected groupies).
Nevertheless, I commend the novel for its exploration into the darker sides of our character, our obsessions with winning and our delusions as to how much victory truly means.
Best "guy" book this girl's ever read
2000-07-19 - I became so immediately involved with the characters in this story that I forgot I was reading a book about baseball and men's lives ... I was completely engaged in everything about the story, and hated to see it end ... Thanks to Scott Lasser's amazing craft for characterization, I am now intrigued with baseball and the players and looking for an amateur baseball game, as well as Scott Lasser's next novel...
