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The Last Real Season: A Hilarious Look Back at 1975 - When Major Leaguers Made Peanuts, the Umpires Wore Red, and Billy Martin Terrorized Everyone | 
 enlarge | Author: Mike Shropshire
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Category: Book
List Price: $25.99
Buy New: $11.00
You Save: $14.99 (58%)
New (32) Used (12) from $10.08
Avg. Customer Rating:  4 reviews
Sales Rank: 269937
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6.1 x 1.2
ISBN: 0446401544
Dewey Decimal Number: 796.3570973
EAN: 9780446401548
ASIN: 0446401544
Publication Date: May 14, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
There are baseball books and there are baseball books.
But for the baseball cognoscenti, there are just a few "must-have" classics: BALL FOUR by Jim Bouton. THE LONG SEASON by Jim Brosnan. WILLIE'S TIME by Charles Einstein. And SEASONS IN HELL by Mike Shropshire, which was a hilarous first-person account of Mike's travails serving as a daily beat writer covering the hapless 1972 Texas Rangers.
Now, in The Last Real Season, Shropshire captures the essence of a different time and different place in baseball, when the average salary for major leaguers was only $27,600...when the ballplayers' drug of choice was alcohol, not steroids...when major leaguers sported tight doubleknit uniforms over their long-hair and Afros...and on July 28th, 1975, the day that famed Detroit resident Jimmy Hoffa went missing, the Detroit Tigers started a losing streak of 19 games in a row. On the day that the Tigers blew a 4-run lead in the bottom of the ninth, Shropshire recalls: "I drank three bottles of Stroh's beer in less than a minute and wrote that 'Jimmy Hoffa will show up in the left field stands with Amelia Earhart as his date before the Tigers will win another game.'"
And so it goes. Filled with just the kind of wonderful baseball stories that real fans crave, this is the funniest baseball book of the year.
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| Customer Reviews:
"This is a baseball biography. Not of a player, but of a season." August 19, 2008
"This is a baseball biography. Not of a player, but of a season."
Mike Shropshire's newest book focuses on one of his favorite subjects....the 1975 Texas Rangers and how terrible they were. The Last Real Season actually looks at major league baseball during the 1975 season. Back in the good old days when major league players made an average of $26,000 a season, and negotiated their contracts without agents. Billy Martin (just crowned Manager of the Year for the previous season) was at the helm of the Rangers...the team who had managed a second place finish the season before. The very Texas Rangers being mentioned as a World Series possibility. With amazing recall for someone who imbibed his way through the baseball season, Shropshire recalls those days when players played for the love of the game, the drug of choice was usually on ice after the game, and the players modeled $49.00 leisure suits in the pages of the local papers. The Last Real Season holds nothing back, the infighting, the power struggles, the skirt chasing, the drinking, the weirdness that was the 1975 Texas Rangers (but no mention of the player who kept a gun with him in the bullpen or the night a batboy grabbed an open mike during a national telecast and asked "hey, Cosell, how does it feel to know the whole state of Texas hates your f@!!**@* guts?). Under the "leadership" of pugnacious Billy Martin (who was harder to control then any of the team) the Rangers began to implode before the All-Star break. Shropshire also serves as an eyewitness to Martin's final days (and possible behind the scenes high jinks that landed him at the helm of the Yankees a few day later) ...........and provides the ultimate fan quote "... I guess if you can get rid of the president of the United States, you can get rid of Billy Martin, too."
The Last Real Season is the chronicle of a bygone era. Shrophire looks at the entire 1975 season throughout the major leagues. The 1975 season was the last year before free agency took hold, when polyester ruled, baseball had many larger than life personalities and the hope for the Rangers to make it to the World Series was not yet tainted by years of "almost made it". This book covers one of my favorite times. I worked at the big orange monstrosity called Arlington Stadium and suffered through 1975 with all the rest of the fans (and people who had to be at the fall games when the season was already over). Working for the Rangers for the three years before I moved away to go college, was the best job for a baseball loving Texas girl and provided me with memories of people, a time and a place never to be seen again. The Last Season brought it all back and made me laugh out loud.
 Sorry, But I'm Disappointed August 18, 2008
Sequels rarely live up to the original. Mike Shropshire wrote one of the funniest baseball books I have ever read in Seasons in Hell. I enjoy anecdotes about players more than I do baseball statistics, but I found The Last Real Season to become a tiresome read of profanity and players over-indulging in alcohol and other drugs. To me at least I found my interest waning by the time I read two-thirds of the book. I imagine another author could write a book of any team and include similar anecdotes. I realize the story of the Texas Rangers of 1975 is a light-hearted effort, but I personally prefer a book about The Summer of '41, The Boys of Summer, October, 1964, or The Tigers of '68. I brought three copies of The Last Real Season prior to reading it, one for myself, another for a friend, and a third for the school library. My mistake! It was three copies too many.
 excellent read May 28, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
very fun and quick read. almost as good as season's in hell. can't wait for his next book!
Ah, Major League Baseball--with all its warts--1975 style May 21, 2008
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
Today in major league baseball the use of steroids is rampant, while the average salary of even a journeyman ballplayer is half a million dollars. This has not always been the case. As recently as 1975, before the advent of free agency, the average professional baseball player's salary in the majors was $27,600. Except for a handful of superstars, baseball players had other jobs or at least played in Latin America in the off-season to make ends meet.
Mike Shropshire, a former Fort Worth Star-Telegram sports writer, recounts the highlights of the 1975 season in his personal journal as he follows the trials and tribulations of the Texas Rangers and their American League opponents.
Shropshire writes in a lighthearted gonzo style, where his antics are as much of the story as the events and the people he is covering. This cynical offhanded approach is incorporated with a tendency toward exaggeration, which is the want of many a sportswriter. What is clear is that players of that day and the journalists who covered them, drank to excess, smoked or chewed tobacco incessantly, and chased women with abandon. It would also appear that at least in the recent past, baseball was rife with more than their fair share of characters.
Shropshire's chronicle is not for the faint of heart, the politically correct or the prudish. But if you long for the day when booze was the drug of choice, and the ranks of baseball consisted of men like Ferguson Jenkins, Sparky Anderson, Reggie Jackson, Charlie Finley, and the irrepressible and mercurial Billy Martin - this may be the book for you.
Armchair Interviews agrees.
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