Screwball

Rating:
Summary: The writing shines!
Review: A solid debut for former reporter David Ferrell, who recently left the L.A. Times to pursue a career as a novelist full-time. When his next novel comes out it'll definitely be on my "must read" list.

In Screwbell, Mr. Ferrell uses a flowing writing style and a formidable knowledge of baseball to take a dark, humorous, insightful look at what the sport has become. The zany baseball world brought to life by Ferrell's prose begins with rookie phenon Ron Kane, whose blazing fastball has given the sad sack Boston Red Sox a chance to win a World Series.

"Kane emerged from the showers, his red hair hanging in wet arcs on his forehead. His freckled torso rose up from gray boxer shorts like a genie from a lamp, a V-shaped fuselage of sinew and steel, lean but hard."

Ferrell uses Kane's twisted off-field activities to construct a world where every ball player has a laughable quirk and the Red Sox management will go to any lengths to achieve a World Series championship.

The writing shines.

David Witty
Taiwan

Rating:
Summary: An Intelligent Satire
Review: David Farrell's Screwball is a delightful read-funny, well-written and a joyful, sarcastic take on American major league baseball. It is a very intelligent satire, not only of baseball, but of the American winning-at-all-cost style of life.

Rating:
Summary: All Star New Author
Review: David Ferrell hits a home run with Screwball. It is a fast paced 'tour de farce' in the Carl Hiassen genre. We follow the Boston Red Sox through an improbable season and watch as their management struggle to balance winning with murder and deception. Screwball also provides insight into the insanity of the demands of today's players and their agents. It is a laugh-out-loud gem, and perfect summer read. I highly recommend this book, and look forward to future efforts from this author.

Rating:
Summary: Great Book!
Review: I couldn't put the book down. I was hooked after the first few pages. I've always been a Joseph Wambaugh fan and Ferrell's characters are just as quirky and twisted and fun to read about. I'd recommend it to baseball fans and everyone else who likes well-written, entertaining books.

Rating:
Summary: Achingly bad
Review: I couldn't wait for this one to end.

The Red Sox are a team I root for, and baseball is a sport I love. This book, written by a sports writer, could have been so much more, but the characters had no life. They were either arrogant ballplayers, arrogant owners, or struggling protaganist. We know that superstars can have egos - that's nothing new. Why couldn't Ferrell have given them some depth? Has he that much contempt for the people he covers? Or is he not a good writer? I'm not sure, but either way, it helped ruin the book for me.

He also seems intent to not include anyone that even resembles a real life player, as if he didn't want to offend anyone that he currently covers. There was even fictional history written about the Red Sox, which really rang false with me, for the same reasons. Even the players we hear from in the story seem to be absurd portraits and amalgamations of several players he's known over the years, and we never really get to know them at all.

Also, there is little in the way of suspense. We know who the killer is very early on in the story, and all we're left with is a cynical view of how the team will deal with it's problem.

The only part of this book that I enjoyed was Ferrell's descriptions of games - the close plays, the stats of the game - and I felt that it was where Ferrell was most comfortable writing, as it flowed the best.

I would recommend that this be left on the shelf. Spend the money on a real ball game - you'll remember those few hours a lot longer and get more out of it.

Rating:
Summary: More downs than ups...nothing to get excited about.
Review: I don't do fiction. I haven't read a novel in more than 20 years. So there wasn't a snowballs chance in hell that I would have ever read "Screwball" had it not been for one of our fellow reviewers who noted that I was a fellow New Englander and a big Red Sox fan. She sent me the book for my perusal and I must say while I appreciated her kind gesture I rediscovered why I dislike fiction so much.
Let's just say that I found "Screwball" to be rather far fetched to say the least. David Ferrell seemed to be on the right track in the early going and it looked to me like the story might develop into a pretty good "Whodonit". After all, the Red Sox were still trying to "reverse the curse" and they had the best young pitcher in the game. It seemed all was right in Red Sox Nation until a series of disturbing murders began to upset the proverbial apple cart. A preponderance of the evidence ssemed to suggest that someone connected with the ballclub was involved.
It was at this point that the author began to lose me by introducing a myriad of charactors I found difficult to follow and a whole bunch of bizarre subplots that I felt detracted from what was a potentially interesting main story line. Add to that the frequent use of unnecessary vulgarities and explicit language and this one went down the chute in a big hurry. I felt the same way as another reviewer who "could not wait for the book to end".
In the end this was a great idea that got messed up somewhere along the way. Not recommended.

Rating:
Summary: More downs than ups...nothing to get excited about.
Review: I don't do fiction. I haven't read a novel in more than 20 years. So there wasn't a snowballs chance in hell that I would have ever read "Screwball" had it not been for one of our fellow reviewers who noted that I was a fellow New Englander and a big Red Sox fan. She sent me the book for my perusal and I must say while I appreciated her kind gesture I rediscovered why I dislike fiction so much.
Let's just say that I found "Screwball" to be rather far fetched to say the least. David Ferrell seemed to be on the right track in the early going and it looked to me like the story might develop into a pretty good "Whodonit". After all, the Red Sox were still trying to "reverse the curse" and they had the best young pitcher in the game. It seemed all was right in Red Sox Nation until a series of disturbing murders began to upset the proverbial apple cart. A preponderance of the evidence ssemed to suggest that someone connected with the ballclub was involved.
It was at this point that the author began to lose me by introducing a myriad of charactors I found difficult to follow and a whole bunch of bizarre subplots that I felt detracted from what was a potentially interesting main story line. Add to that the frequent use of unnecessary vulgarities and explicit language and this one went down the chute in a big hurry. I felt the same way as another reviewer who "could not wait for the book to end".
In the end this was a great idea that got messed up somewhere along the way. Not recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Kane Rose Up!
Review: In attempting to write the Great American baseball novel, David Ferrell starts out with two strikes against him.

For one thing, he's a journalist - worse yet, a sports journalist. That means that he talks more and knows less about the world - especially the world of sports - than anyone else.

As if that weren't bad enough, he writes for the Los Angeles Times, the worst newspaper in the country. Actually, it's tied with about 1500 other newspapers for that honor.

And there are holes in this story. Some of them are fairly minor. I've only been a baseball fan for about 35 years or so, but I was under the impression that if first base is empty and a batter is hit by a pitch, the ball is dead and the runner on second base doesn't go to third.

David Ferrell sees other things that I haven't seen in my 35 years of following the game. He sees a professional sport dominated by career criminals and anti-social elements. He might be confusing baseball with boxing. Baseball does have its share of ne'er-do-wells, and if self-centeredness was a capital crime, the feds would have used the Organized Crime and Racketeering Act to shut down the game long ago. But it's hardly populated by prison inmates.

To be honest, his book is at least partially meant as a satire, and it may be that Ferrell meant to satirize the occasional baseball felon by creating a world filled with them. Ferrell himself may not be sure whether he meant to write a serious work or a dark comedy. The team in this novel, the Boston Red Sox, of course, is genuine baseball team, and the Sox's opponents are genuine baseball teams. The names of players on the Sox and their opponents are a mixture of fact and fiction.

But I doubt that we're supposed to take seriously a parent corporation known as "Amalgamated Ball Cocks, the world's largest producer of toilet valves, floats and rubberized accessories".

The premise in this book is simple: Despite several very close calls, the Boston Red Sox have not won a World Series in the memory of any living person and are widely regarded as a team cursed by destiny with the inability to ever win one. Giants fans can relate to this frustration very well, but then again so can Cubs fans, White Sox fans, Indians fans, etc.

In the book, the Red Sox have put together a team that, in spite of a complete absence of chemistry (the 1919 White Sox were a fraternal brotherhood, by comparison), has the chance to win the gold ring and end that curse - but a rash of serial murders connected with the team threatens to blow away their championship dreams.

This story is largely about a corrupt front office that seeks to obstruct and even mislead justice in order to win a baseball championship, but I found the notion interesting as a personal challenge, rather than as an attack on corporate malfeasance. The book made me look into my soul to find out how far I would go to bring the Giants a world championship if such a thing were possible on planet Earth and if I had such power. I was startled by what I found.

"Screwball" is an attack on a baseball world that doesn't really exist, in spite of the kudos given on the back cover by would-be renegades such as Jim Bouton. Ferrell imagines an ultra-competitive world of sports where winning is everything and subsumes all considerations, moral and otherwise.

But anyone who really believes this has never witnessed any of the numerous occasions where an overpriced superstar received considerably more playing time than a minimum-wage youngster with superior ability. Baseball history is also replete with occasions where management tried to force a successful player with an unorthodox style into conforming with a textbook form that didn't suit him.

And there was a time when major league owners, spending ungodly sums of money on "name" players, were insanely trying to appear penny-wise by reducing their rosters from 25 to 24 - often depriving themselves of talented low-cost substitutes who can often make a difference in a close pennant race.

Winning ISN'T necessarily a priority in baseball; it often takes a back seat to other factors such as egotism, corporate arrogance, budgetary constraints (real and contrived), and, of course, political correctness. Ferrell is wrong to distort and oversimplify the picture by suggesting otherwise.

He should know better because journalists like him, who never would have dared to physically confront John Rocker, an immensely talented pitcher, destroyed Rocker's career for a few intemperate and politically-incorrect public remarks of the nature that most people would chuckle at in private - and perhaps even echo.

The idea that a talented baseball player could be protected from accountability for serial murder - when his livelihood can be endangered for complaining about spiked hair on New York subways - is sheer whimsy.

But for all of its faults, "Screwball" is a very readable story, with a rip-roaring climax that will provide more than enough thrills for any baseball fan or crime novel aficionado.

And Ferrell also gets grand-slam credit for his creation of the awesome and surrealistic Ron Kane: a 110 mile-per hour fastball (!!!!) packed into six feet four inches of impervious and supremely masculine athleticism and ultra-charismatic menace: a combination of Richard III, The Major (from Stephen King's "The Long Walk"), and Sidd Finch.

I worship every foot of ground that Ron Kane walks on and pray that a merciful God will breathe life into David Ferrell's fictitious character and bring him to the Giants. I pray that a vengeful God will clone him, and put one in every neighborhood where a journalist resides. Where ANY pompous authority figure resides.

To borrow again from Stephen King - this time from "Cain Rose Up" - eat the world, Ron Kane! You gulp that sucker right down!

Rating:
Summary: Good, but could have been great
Review: Let me just say, that for at least the first half of the book, I thought this was going to be one of the better sports fiction books I had ever read, but then it started going downhill at the end. The story was set up magnificently, but there were just a few things I didn't get. During the middle of the book I thought it may have been a mystery, turns out it wasn't. Then I thought we'd find a reason for everything at the end, but instead, it just kind of ended. Don't get my wrong, I enjoyed it, but I stayed up late one night to get to the end, and felt like I stayed up for no reason. (I tried not to give any real spoilers, that's why I was so general with my comments.)

Rating:
Summary: I can't decide what's worse.
Review: Ok, the storyline for the book was very enticing to me. I had high hopes - being a big baseball fan, and a fan of boths ports books and muder myster. Seems like the ultimate combo. Right? Wrong. My biggest issue - There was only one person in the entire book even remotely likeable. And he was constantly abused on a grand scale. So you're left feeling sorry for the hero the entire time, and trying to decide what you want to happen more - See the Red Sox win the World Series, or the idiots running the team get their just due.

In the end, I just came away frustrated witht he whole thing.