Benchwarmer

March 23, 2015
"I've never been able to cry about life but only over aging sports heroes getting their numbers retired," muses Wilker, a sports writer, after he learns that his wife is pregnant, her "belly growing into a wrecking ball." He feels adrift as the birth of the child approaches, and his sense of detachment from the sure bets in his lifeâthe rise and fall of careers, batting averages, and victory formationsâlikewise offers the reader very little mooring in a sea of self-absorption. Rather than proceeding chronologically, he cannily relates the events of his first year of fatherhood in the style of an A-Z sports almanacâwith entries for figures ranging from Los Angeles Dodgers relief pitcher David Aardsma to New York Giants quarterback Joe Pisarcik, and for terms like benchwarmer, quitter, and zeroâin an effort to examine whether his failures at sports have any bearing on his skills as a father. Wilker's account is poignant at times: after asking, "So what is a father?" he notes, "All inherited definitions are reeling, rigid hoaxers flailing at untouchable baseline truths." Elsewhere, the author comes across as achingly naïve: "Becoming a father had forced me into a position, an uncomfortable one for a benchwarmer, of making conscious choices."

February 15, 2015
A sports-obsessed memoir of fatherhood.The delights of this fatherhood confessional are various. Perhaps most striking and unusual is Wilker's (Cardboard Gods: An All-American Tale Told Through Baseball Cards, 2010) choice of framing his narrative in the form of an almanac. The almanac becomes a moving metaphor for a universal need to organize the chaotic borders of life experience. The author divides the book into four volumes spanning the first year of his son Jack's life. The almanac is then subdivided alphabetically, starting with Aardsma, David, ending with Zidane, Zinedine, and running a curious gamut of terms, personae, ideas and anecdotes. The first entry in Volume 4, section W, for example, is Webber, Chris-the now retired all-star NBA player. The entry beneath his name reads, "Time can't be stopped," referencing his disastrous timeout in the 1993 national championship game, while making light of the fact that there are no convenient timeouts in real life, either. For sports fans (who also happen to be experiencing fatherhood), Wilker's almanac is rife with poignant, essayistic forays into these dusty corners of sports history. Perhaps the memoir's most important takeaway is the acknowledgment that even the best of parents are sometimes faking it, doing what they can to make the world less dangerous for the young and still innocent. "When Jack was first born I didn't know how to hold him," writes the author, "but within a week or so the awkwardness of holding him gave way to the feeling that holding him was the thing I'd been born to do, the feeling that made me whole." This almanac of fatherhood (and other failures) is honest, relatable and humorous-an indispensable read for fathers (and sons) whose joy in life comes not from winning the big game but being alive to witness the beauty of its happening.

May 1, 2015
The author of Cardboard Gods (2011) expands from the world of baseball cards into, as the title implies, parenthood and more baseball. Like so many baseball fans, he relishes the statistical certainty that the sport's many reference books provide, though mourns that assurance in the age of asterisks, steroids, and franchise blurs. Also, as a bewildered new parent, and as a former college benchwarmer never sure when he would get to play, he misses that certainty in his life. Perhaps in an attempt to restore it, his book is arranged by topic alphabetically, encyclopedically, a contrivance that does not always work, but that allows Wilker a framework to expound randomly on his lifelong fandom and new fatherhooddescribed with sometimes amusing though excessive self-deprecationamidst a pantheon of athletic failures, goof-ups, goats, mediocrities, and losers. Most fans will find something in that litany to enjoy and will be happy to learn that author, new baby, and baseball all survive.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)