Growing up obsessed with baseball and a lifelong fan of the game, I really loved this book. Great stories and perspectives that captured all of the nostalgia I had hoped for. I enjoyed learning more about players and the game before my time. I'd recommend to anyone who loves the game or sports.

Peter Golenbock’s Baseball Heaven is his second compilation of player interviews he has gathered throughout his career, following 2022’s Whispers of the Gods. Golenbock features interviews with former playing legends such as Gary Carter, Elston Howard, Johnny Pesky, and the enigmatic Dock Ellis, as well as some peripheral figures.

My first foray into Golenbock’s work was a book I picked up in high school which was incidentally his first work and the piece that made many of the interviews in this book necessary: Dynasty: The New York Yankees, 1949-1964. I’ve also read a few of his other books, notably Bronx Zoo with Sparky Lyle. However, most of that is neither here nor there, since if you’re coming into this book expecting the prose of Mr. Golenbock, you won’t find a lot of it.

Most of the interviews, save the Dock Ellis interviews, are simple transcripts of questions and answers. For the most part, Mr. Golenbock keeps his distance and does not offer commentary other than perhaps a clarifying question or shedding light on a comment another person made. In one way, this makes the interviewees come alive even though several have been dead for decades.

Of course, this lack of commentary is especially fascinating when Golenbock finds the men in power and lets the reader decide. Most books of this sort - including Golenbock’s first volume - stick to players and managers. Golenbock brings in the influencers. Happy Chandler, the second commissioner of baseball and the one who put an end to the color barrier, comes off as bitter about not being in the Hall of Fame and a tad pompous (trying to take credit for Kentucky basketball and arguing that Nixon got a raw deal only a handful of years after Watergate). Del Webb, the former Yankees owner who apparently never met a curse word he couldn’t fit into a sentence, brags about building a concentration camp for Japanese-Americans, calling it one of his greatest accomplishments, discusses how he thought J. Edgar Hoover should have been the commissioner of baseball, and how he held it against Casey Stengel that he was bitter about being fired. It’s…something. It’s a fascinating read but it’s definitely…something.

On an entirely different note, one chapter is an interview with Donald Hall, the late poet who was a prominent talking head in Ken Burns’ Baseball. Hall discusses his love of the Brooklyn Dodgers and his childhood as a fan, which is a refreshing palate cleanser from the Del Webb bits.

As a package, this is the sort of book, you can read a chapter here, a chapter there, skip around and what-not. I think we all try to find those books where we can read in chunks in between our other books and Baseball Heaven certainly qualifies as that.

As a lifelong baseball fan this was a great romp through baseball history. It was at times a little long in the tooth but I personally don't mind. Lots of great stories and history I had never known and it takes place during a period I've read a lot about over the years.

A series of transcribed interviews with major league players and others connected to the game from the 1930s to the late 1980s. Because they are transcribed interviews, the reader gets a real feel for each person's character.

In this important book Peter Golenbock has proved himself to be baseball's version of Studs Terkel as he has managed to persuade baseball greats from the last century to open up and provide their own detailed and unexpurgated accounts of their careers and the major incidents which they viewed and were part of.

The author has been at the forefront of baseball history and writing for the past 50 years and he knows just how to ask the right question and then melt away to the sidelines and allow the interviewee the time and space to answer at length.

I learned so much about the Boys of Summer and so many other Hall of Famers.

A massively educational and entraining read.

Highly recommended to all students of the game.