Baseball books actually tell stories of perseverance

If John Smoltz doesn’t make it into the Hall of Fame, it won’t be because of his own efforts but because the voters don’t know how to put all the pieces of his remarkable career together. From 1988 to 1999, he was, along with Greg Maddux and Tom Glavine, part of the best trio of starting pitchers in baseball, helping the Atlanta Braves dominate the National League’s Western Division and later the Eastern Division.

After developing arm trouble in 1999 that required surgery, he missed the 2000 season but made an amazing recovery, saving 154 games over the next four seasons and establishing himself as the league’s best reliever. And to top that off, he came back again as a starter, winning 44 games from 2001 to 2004. He retired in 2009 after 21 seasons, 213 wins and 154 saves.

If fans are late in coming to an appreciation of the man himself, then Smoltz is in large part to blame. “My career,” he says in his thoughtful and entertaining autobiography, "Starting and Closing," “always seemed to invite people to wonder ‘What the heck is this guy thinking?' The media, of course, tried to fill in the blanks and provide some answers, and countless reports along the way have attempted to pin me down and define me as a baseball player.”

In his book Smoltz isn’t so much out to set the record straight as to establish it for the first time. He has pretty much always, he tells us, been defined by three things: One, all he ever wanted to do is win. Two, he was not afraid to fail, and three, he never did anything in his baseball career just to set a record. Also, “I wanted to be an Atlanta Brave. Those are the answers to 99% of the questions about my career. It’s really as simple as that.”

Well, perhaps not quite that simple. It’s also about learning to cope with failure, not once but several times in his life. “I’m one of those guys,” he says, “who was always kind of digging out of a hole.” And making it. So when Smoltz tells us that his Christian faith, which began for him in earnest in 1995, pulled him through, he has the right to be taken seriously on issues both big and small.

Regarding the latter, Smoltz claims -- emphatically -- that the famous story about him burning himself while trying to iron a shirt he was wearing is fictitious (a stem iron he was using spit out some water and burned him on the neck). The story went viral that he had burned himself before the term “viral” even existed, and “I seriously doubt it will die now even after this book.”

Oh, well, there are more important things to discuss, such as what it’s like to face the end of your career as a pitcher and have the grit to survive being put out to pasture in the bullpen, recovering from a failed marriage, and turning down a lucrative offer from the Yankees to avoid the media zoo in New York.

“Don’t be afraid to fail,” he advises his readers. “Learn how to rally, and trust that you have the ability to find your own measure of success in life. If an accordion-playing kid from Michigan can do it, believe me, so can you.” Anyone with the courage and humor to admit they played the accordion deserves to be listened to.

Allen Barra writes about sports for The Wall Street Journal and the Daily Beast. His next book is "Mickey and Willie -- The Parallel Lives of Baseball’s Golden Age," due out this fall from Crown.

Author appearance: John Smoltz. May 10 at Barnes & Noble Bookstore Buckhead, May 17 at Books-A-Million at Discover Mills Malls and May 21 at the Atlanta Press Club Luncheon, The Commerce Club, 191 Peachtree St., 49th Floor, noon. (For more information, call 404-577-7377.)

NONFICTION

"Starting and Closing: Perseverance, Faith, and One More Year"

By John Smoltz with Don Yeager

William Morrow, 304 pages, $26.99

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Another ballplayer who’s earned the right to be listened to is R.A. Dickey in his memoir "Wherever I Wind Up."

The child of an alcoholic mother, Dickey spent part of his youth sleeping in abandoned houses. Nonetheless, he pitched his way to the University of Tennessee, where he played baseball and studied the work of Hemingway and Faulkner. He became a bonus baby (paid more than $800,000 by the Texas Rangers), then nearly lost his career to right elbow pain only to discover doctors had made the wrong diagnosis. With grit, determination and a brand-new hopping knuckleball -- a la Jim Bouton -- Dickey managed to survive, pitching for eight minor-league teams and five big-league teams until finally having his best season with the New York Mets in 2011.