The New Yorker Book of Baseball Cartoons

Baseball fans will love this collection of cartoons that capture the essence of baseball in the American psyche. My two favorites in the collection appear on pages 34 and 72. The one on page 34 features a man wearing a religious collar standing in the stands and yelling, "Thou hast eyes to see, and see not!" On page 72 a player is being tagged while sliding into home. The umpire says, "I don't know when I've seen a more magnificent slide. You're out!" Fans, owners, players and the role of baseball in the American society are all presented in a delightful and amusing manner.

I love baseball as much as I love a good joke, so this collection was a "double" for me. Being a New Yorker collection, a few cartoons are Yankee-specific, and the Mets are lightly ribbed, but any baseball fan will appreciate this look at the sport's many sides. My favorite cartoon shows a player telling the media, "Hey, I'm just happy to be making an obscene amount of money." If only real players were that honest!

This is a funny and wryly amusing collection of 100 baseball cartoons that first appeared in "The New Yorker." Although illustrators are credited, no dates are given. (This would have been helpful in discerning which jokes are relatively old, and which just sound old.) Some of the material is fairly trite, deriding such easy targets as umpires and over zealous fans. Most of them are quite funny though, including a picture of seven infielders gathered close to home as one fan explains to another "They expect him to bunt," and another showing an umpire pondering how to call a play with a wonderful Jack Benny-like expression and the equally Benny-esque caption "I'm thinking!" (with 'thinking' underlined).A major problem is the formatting, all the `toons are given equal size, and hence equal weight. A number of these are just "throwaway" jokes, pictures and captions without much weight or originality. As a small illustration added--like a condiment--to a large text, these are appropriately lightweight and amusing, but as large pictures they don't compare to the more creative and funnier efforts here. After a while, the similarities begin to inoculate you against the humor. A better format might have been to present these in the size in which they originally appeared. However, this would make a good gift for baseball fans and those who live with them. Overall, it's an excellent coffee table book that doesn't take up the whole coffee table.

Everyone will find favorites in this collection, whether they are about kids and baseball or overpaid, over-egoed pros. One favorite part for me is the running motif of umpire jokes. The New Yorker's cartoonists are simply the best. I loved The New Yorker Book of Golf Cartoons, but this is even better.