Book Review: Mel Ott: The Little Giant of Baseball

One guess why I chose to read this biography. :) I had actually never heard of the guy until I saw him on a stamp last year, and I got so excited cuz he has my name! (almost) So I looked him up in the library catalog and decided to save reading this bio til I was going through baseball withdrawl. And so I read it now.

It was a quick read, and it was nice because I felt like I was learning a lot. The author usually referred to him as Ott, but a couple times when he referred to him as Mel, I thought, 'hey that's me!' So that was fun. (I also go excited every time I recognized a name or place.) Mel Ott played for the New York Giants from 1925-1947, and managed the team from 1942-1948. He was a nice guy, and actually the phrase 'nice guys finish last' originated from a statement another team's manager said about Ott and his team when they were last in the division in 1946. He hit 511 homeruns, was #1 in the league in RBIs in 1934, led the league in runs in 1938 & 1942...and I could keep going with the stats.

That was the problem with this book. Basically the author, Fred Stein, just put stats into sentence form. And they weren't just Ott's stats. He would go off on the team's stats, players on the team's stats, players not on the team's stats, and so on. At the end of each chapter there was usually a 3 sentence paragraph on Ott's personal life, but that was it.

I am glad I read it, though. If you read the same things all the time, you'll never learn anything new. So I now feel more well-rounded. Besides, the guy's name was Mel Ott. How cool is that?