A False Spring: A Memoir

"One of the best and truest books about baseball, and about coming to maturity in America." --Time In the late 1950s, acclaimed sportswriter Pat Jordan was a young pitching phenom, blowing away opposing batters for his Fairfield, Connecticut, high school baseball team. Fifteen major league clubs offered him a contract, but it was the Milwaukee Braves who won out, signing Jordan to a $45,000 bonus--one of the largest paid to any new player by the organization--and shipping him off to McCook, Nebraska, to play for their Class D ball club. It did not take long, however, for Jordan to realize he was out of his depth in professional baseball's backwoods. He battled with inconsistency and a lack of control for three dismal seasons in such far-flung locales as Keokuk, Iowa, and Palatka, Florida, before the Braves released him and he gave up his dreams of big league greatness. Declared "unforgettable" by the Los Angeles Times and "a major triumph" by the Philadelphia Inquirer, A False Spring is a powerful and deeply affecting memoir about the gift of athletic talent and the heartbreak of unfulfilled promise.

About the Author :
Pat Jordan is a celebrated sportswriter and novelist whose work has appeared in the Atlantic, GQ, Harper's, the New Yorker, Playboy, and the New York Times Magazine, among many other publications. A top high school pitching prospect, he spent three years with the Milwaukee Braves organization before leaving professional baseball to pursue a writing career. Time magazine praised A False Spring, a memoir about his time in the minor leagues, as "one of the best and truest books about baseball and about coming to maturity in America," and Sports Illustrated named it one of the Top 100 Sports Books of All Time. In the follow-up, A Nice Tuesday, Jordan chronicles his unlikely return to the mound at the age of fifty-six. His numerous other books include the sports anthologies The Suitors of Spring, Broken Patterns, and The Best Sports Writing of Pat Jordan, and the crime novels a.k.a. Sheila Doyle and a.k.a. Sheila Weinstein.

Review :
"A poignant, moving portrait." --Roger Kahn, author of The Boys of Summer "A sports memoir unlike any other . . . A consideration of what it means to own the gift of talent and then to abuse it, an account of the passage from boyhood to maturity, and--Jordan's career notwithstanding--a celebration of the joys of baseball." --Jonathan Yardley, Sports Illustrated "A False Spring, by turns rueful, amused, nostalgic and disgusted, is just fascinating, probably the best book imaginable about baseball's underpinnings." --The Boston Globe "Pat Jordan has really captured what happens when an athlete reaches for stardom, and never makes it. . . . He has tremendous sensitivity for the feelings in an athlete's heart." --Tom Seaver