Make no mistake about it, Five Seasons is a "baseball book." It is, in point of fact, one of the two best baseball books we have—the other being Angell's The Summer Game, published in 1972—and anyone who loves our national pastime is going to love Five Seasons. But it is also so much more than a baseball book that a grave injustice will be done if only diehard fans read it. If its central subject is a game, it is also deeply concerned with larger, and in some cases darker, questions….

As one who admired The Summer Game with unreserved ardor, I followed Angell's dispatches [in The New Yorker] in the five years after its publication with uneasiness and apprehension; it seemed to me that he was in danger of repeating himself, and that he was becoming a member of the Baseball Establishment, that pack of journalists...