Jim Brosnan, Who Threw Literature a Curve, Dies at 84

The New York Times ^ | July 4, 2014 | Bruce Weber

[EveningStar]

Jim Brosnan, who achieved modest baseball success as a relief pitcher but gained greater fame and consequence in the game by writing about it, died on June 29 in Park Ridge, Ill. He was 84.

The cause was an infection he developed while recovering from a stroke, his son, Timothy, said.

In 1959, Brosnan, who played nine years in the major leagues, kept a diary of his experience as a pitcher, first with the St. Louis Cardinals and later, after a trade, with the Cincinnati Reds. Published the next year as "The Long Season," it was a new kind of sportswriting -- candid, shrewd and highly literate, more interested in presenting the day-to-day lives and the actual personalities of the men who played the game than in maintaining the fiction of ballplayers as all-American heroes and role models.

[EveningStar]

Jim Brosnan is not to be confused with Jim Bouton. Bouton's book, Ball Four, came out a decade after Brosnan's first book, The Long Season.

WaPo: Jim Brosnan, big-league pitcher and author of ‘The Long Season,’ dies at 84

LAT: Jim Brosnan dies at 84; relief pitcher wrote inside look at baseball

Wikipedia

Career statistics

[Cyman]

Never heard of the guy or book and I love baseball. Guess I will need to find a copy.

[windcliff]

ping

[onedoug]

RIP

[fieldmarshaldj]

RIP.

[namvolunteer]

It was a good book, the first by a player’s perspective of a full season, some controversy included.