Out of My League

by George Plimpton

A classic of sport, and the first of George Plimpton's remarkable forays into "participatory" journalism, OUT OF MY LEAGUE chronicles with wit, charm, and grace what happens when a self-professed amateur wonders how he would fare on a baseball mound in a major league game.
On an ordinary afternoon in the third-base-line seats of Yankee Stadium, Plimpton hits on what seems an inspired idea--to get on the mound and pitch a few innings to the All Stars of the American and National Leagues. What begins as a fun-filled stunt, for the "average man" to pitch in the Big Leagues, comes to a nearly humiliating end. This honest and hilarious tale features Mickey Mantle, Billy Martin, Willie Mays, Ernie Banks, Whitey Ford, Ralph Houk, Richie Ashburn, and other baseball greats. What happens when America's favorite sports dilettante tries his arm against the likes of hall-of-fame baseball players recalls every young boy's forgotten dream of heroics on a baseball diamond; and for that fact alone, OUT OF MY LEAGUE remains one of George Plimpton's most beloved works.

Genres: Baseball, Sports, Nonfiction, Journalism

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1983

About the author

George Ames Plimpton was an American journalist, writer, editor, actor, and gamesman. He is widely known for his sports writing and for helping to found The Paris Review.

He was the grandson of George A. Plimpton.

Reviews

[Dan · Rating 2 out of 5]

George Plimpton really likes to hear himself write. This book seems like it was originally written as a feature-length article about an interesting event for Sports Illustrated, which, after he had finished it, he padded with digression after digression and pointless meandering to make it something like book length. While the actual events of the book are interesting enough, I got really annoyed with Plimpton for being such a doofus--for example, thinking that he could pitch to 16 major league batters without ever doing anything to get his arm into shape beforehand. One continually wonders how someone who is apparently so intelligent could be so ridiculously stupid. And where on earth he got that dumb-sounding voice in his head. This book would have been much less annoying if it had been written by anyone other than George Plimpton.

[Joe · Rating 3 out of 5]

Is this really well-written? Eh.

Is this great journalism? Not really.

But what it is, if you're a baseball fan, is a trip back in time to the way the game was played 60 years ago.

If you're familiar with George Plimpton, you know that among many other accomplishments, he participated in sports against top professionals and wrote magazine articles and books about his experiences (see: Paper Lion). This was the first time he tried this experiment.

Watching a random Yankees game near the end of the season, Plimpton decided that he wanted to try pitching against major-leaguers to see what it felt like. Thus starts an amazingly innocent journey to do so.

First, Plimpton approaches Sports Illustrated to put up prize money, knowing the players wouldn't do it except for some reward. Immediately after the season ends in three weeks, a team of NL stars (Mays, Hodges, Ashburn, etc.) will play a team of AL stars (Mantle, Fox, Howard, etc.) in Yankee Stadium. The magazine puts up $1,000 to be split among the team that totals the most bases against Plimpton.

Plimpton then goes about arranging, on his own, to pitch in this contest. No contacting the league, or the Yankees, or anyone. He contacts Toots Shorr, who puts Plimpton in touch with an agent. This agent is not like today's agents, he helps the players get side gigs to make money during the off-season. This guy agrees.

Plimpton then spends three weeks doing pretty much nothing. He finds a uniform and a hat. He spends a day and a half practicing throwing (he played a little bit of baseball in middle school). Then he just shows up at Yankee Stadium. He has no glove (he borrows on from the trainer's kid) and the players have no idea who he is or what he's doing there. They are told a half an hour before gametime what Plimpton is doing and the rules of the contest.

What I love about this book is the innocence of all of this. This could never happen today. You'd have to arrange this with the players' union, and the t.v. networks, and the commissioner's office, etc., etc. There would be interviews and analysis and waivers. It would suck.

Plimpton makes a deal on his own, shows up, and gets to pitch against Mantle, Mays, et. al. He plays pepper with Henry Aaron (anyone remember pepper?). There's chewing tobacco and gum and a water cooler. There's infield chatter.

This book is all about the beauty and innocence of baseball before all of this - everything we know today. I'm not saying it's better, but it's a great look into what it was like back then. If you remember those times, you'll love going down memory lane. If you never lived through it, but love baseball, you'll love learning about what it was like when it was just a game.

[Cale Herreman · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is pretty lightweight-- it's just an account of one day in one man's life, having what could easily be classified as "one of his goofy adventures." But the challenge here is pitching against the entire lineup, both leagues, of the 1959 All-Star Game. Mickey Mantle! Willie Mays! So who's this George Plimpton guy? Suffice it to say, he's not a pro, but he's a lifelong baseball fan, played a bit at Harvard, and really has very little in common with the boys in the dugout. An ace writer, though, who weaves anecdotes of some of the great personalities of the game into this tale of participatory journalism. A lot of his dry wit, lyrical descriptions of The Game in its many forms, I thought this book was a lot of fun.

[Du · Rating 4 out of 5]

I couldn't tell if I was going to like this at first. There is a smug style to the opening chapter, as if the book was an article by a sports writer you have been reading for years, which probably most of the readers have. After that rocky start though, the book switched gears and became nerd tries to be jock. I won't agree with the term hilarious, but I did find it funny and enjoyable. It is also short and sweet. 3.5 stars

[Oliver Hodson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have read bits of this in plimpton collections and it is extended here as a short book. His reflections of the game mesh seemlessly with reflections on the self, boyhood, and manhood. Love the story about the search for a glove - from the shop, to the losing it, to the rental of a glove. Hilarious and effective at setting up the fish out of water situation of the actual pitching to the legends.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'd been looking for this one for years, and was honestly a little let down by it. Unlike Paper Lion, Plimpton does very little preparation, and seems to take on the challenge of pitching to the NL and AL All-Stars as not much more than a joke...he even has to borrow a glove. Lovely writing, but not the immersive George Plimpton I have loved in other books.

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

George Plimpton lived a life and spoke in an accent it is very difficult for me not to envy. Good dresser too. But while I would give any amount of money to be an urbane but funny magazine writer who pads around 50s literary New York and gets to pitch to Willie Mays I must say this by way of gentle and deferential correction: I would have found way, way more time to practice than he does here.

[Jillian · Rating 3 out of 5]

This kind of stunt feels like a Buzzfeed series, except this scenario would never actually happen today: a random amateur getting to pitch to both starting line-ups ahead of the All Star Game just because he's a sports writer and his editor put up a $1000 prize for the winning players to split. Also Plimpton's disinterest in actually training for the event in any way boggles the mind a bit. It certainly all makes for a bizarre and entertaining story, especially since the players Plimpton pitched to included Willie Mays and Micky Mantle. There are quite a few jaw-drop moments in this one. Plimpton understandably found it difficult to be both a pitcher immersing himself in (and surviving) the experience and a journalist gathering details from these players at the same time, but he did an admirable job of trying and spins a very interesting story.

[Ken Heard · Rating 3 out of 5]

George Plimpton's first book actually reads more like a padded article for Sports Illustrated about the Walter Mitty fantasy of pitching to major league baseball players. The book I have comes in at 130 pages, but it very well could have served as a long SI article instead.

Plimpton glosses on and on and on about watching a baseball gathering in France (spending a lot of time about a sun-dressed woman fumbling about in the outfield and calling for her boyfriend). He also wrote quite a bit about his "ineptitude" toward the game, but also admitted he really didn't' practice much before pitching in this exhibition contest.

Plimpton is an amazing writer, and his later books prove that. This is his first work and it shows.

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the book that started it all for George Plimpton - he attempts to pitch to the MLB All-Stars lineup with amusing results. As the "professional amateur" for Sports Illustrated, Plimpton goes on to try his hand at other sports, but this baseball outing is the original. The edition I checked out from the library had a cover blurb from Ernest Hemingway - pretty good for what some might dismiss as merely a sports book.

[Jim · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the late 50s, in the early days of participatory journalism, George Plimpton managed to get Sports illustrated and MLB to let him pitch to major league players prior to an all star game so he could write about it. It’s an entertaining read for baseball geeks, complete with his own experience, which sounds exhausting, and historic relevant caveats. In his hurried push to put the deal together he overlooked getting an umpire. Reading between the lines it seems the players got great joy for this oversight, and punished Plimpton accordingly.

[JBP · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was kind of a disappointment as I'd read George Plimpton's PAPER LION as a kid and loved it. In this, a very thin book of Plimpton pitching to some big leaguers at an all-star game, Plimpton squeezed out every last detail of what it is like to pitch to Mantle, Houk, Mays, Banks, Ashburn were some of the guys playing that day. This is what started Plimpton's path down the sports participatory journalism and I like where he went more after this one.

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

George Plimpton is among the finest "gonzo" journalists ever. In this brief-but-fun tale, he immerses himself, for an afternoon, in the world of an All-Star pitcher.

It is a wonderful ode to baseball, and the only thing he excluded that might rightly have been included, was that everything he felt was likely common to the All-Stars... they just knew how to handle it better. Recommend for fans of baseball.

[Julie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Had the opportunity to hear George Plimpton speak at a writing conference in Baltimore in the late 1990s. Thoroughly enjoyed his humor then, and I loved this glimpse at the younger Plimpton trying to pitch to the greats as part of a Sports Illustrated writing project. His sentences are constructed with amazing precision, and his descriptions take you right onto the field with him.

[Joe Rodeck · Rating 4 out of 5]

George Plimpton pitches to the all stars. Lots of baseball lore, anecdotes; and customs, superstitions,and lingo of the pros. A boy's fantasy? or masochistic nightmare!! This is a fun, short, easy read. A Nook freebie :)

(Would rate higher,but he only made thru 7 NL batters. Not 8 NL and 8 AL.)

[Margaret · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although I have long been an avid baseball fan, reading this book certainly enhanced my pleasure in watching the game. I am now so much more aware of the pitcher’s hard work on the mound. Sounds silly I know, but I had never understood that pitching is HARD! While watching a struggling pitcher, I can’t help but think of Plimpton’s ordeal.

[Chris Gager · Rating 4 out of 5]

The edition I had was a small hardbound book with a couple of real baseball players on the cover. Ernie Banks? Willie Mays? Gil Hodges? The cover picture looks like Plimptom had some bad plastic surgery. Date read is a guess.

[Linda]

The classic hilarious account of an amateur's ordeal in professional baseball. I remember enjoying this and reading more of his accounts about taking part in other professions, especially one in which he played the triangle for Leonard Bernstein and the National Philharmonic.

[Dominic Forbes · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very interesting read for baseball fans and anyone who’s played a sport and wondered about being a pro. Also excellent social history. However it’s really a slightly extended magazine article so not worth the price of a full paperback.

[Stevejs298 · Rating 2 out of 5]

The most interesting aspect of this book was seeing how much life has changed from when it was written until now. There is no chance that such an ill-conceived, poorly organized event could occur in this day and age.

[Hanny]

(In "Looking for Hemingway," Talese calls this the emblematic book of the Paris Review crowd)

[crockpotcrosby · Rating 4 out of 5]

a light and entertaining book that's beautifully written and well observed.

[Barry Mann · Rating 1 out of 5]

tiresome and lacking much of the inside info i was hoping for

[RK Byers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Plimpton, in life, seemed like such a stuffed shirt that it’s astonishing to read him write about something like baseball with such insight & detail.

[Anthony · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely fantastic, very, very funny

[Jamie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Plimpton is a very good writer, but the book is woefully dated. I can see how it was really informative and slightly funny back in the day.

[Robert Zverina · Rating 1 out of 5]

Like an idiot I believed the back cover blurb from the totally (and possibly rightly) defunct New York Herald Tribune: "...one of the best [baseball books] ever."

Actually, it is probably the worst baseball book I've read.

How hard is it to write a book about baseball? Who reads books about baseball? Hint: people who love baseball. The bar is pretty low--an anecdote, a stat, two-outs-bottom-of-the-ninth and you're crossing the plate to wild cheers!

Instead, there is this steaming pile of rancid jockstrap. Ugh. Where to begin?

Leading off: Privilege.

Plimpton knows an editor at Sports Illustrated, is buddies with savvy restaurateur Toots Shor, and hey bingo George arranges to pitch glorified batting practice (modified for points with a little bit of money on the line) at a post-season all-star exhibition game at Yankee Stadium in 1961.

But privilege is more than having an in; it's about abusing power and taking one's advantages for granted. Because even if you mess it up, you'll get another chance, and that's the attitude George exhibits throughout. It's all a laugh, nothing to take seriously. He's not invested in the dream; he knows he can screw the pooch and still earn a living and fame from it. It's a sick mentality and he flaunts it.

He does not train for the event. Instead, he rhapsodizes about a drunken game of softball played with French royalty at a chateau. He buys a crappy mitt and has it stolen out of his unlocked car. He's a pasty-faced alcoholic who smokes cigarettes and doesn't eat breakfast or lunch on the day of the event. Compounding the idiocy, there is no umpire (by his design), so batters are free to stand back and laugh as he exhausts himself throwing fastball strikes. Instead of toning down his delivery, he hurls himself into the ground and can't finish even half of what he started.

What is admirable in any of this? He spends pages describing his inept quest for a mitt, dispenses with what's it's like to pitch to Willie Mays in about three paragraphs. What a pompous ass! Oh, and to prove this last point, he pitches under a very literary pseudonym: George Prufrock. As if.

He's also a lazy reporter, keeping to himself instead of engaging the living legends around him. Instead of the immersive gonzo approach he was sort of emulating (an idea he stole from a fella named Gallico, who did it first and, by all accounts, better), we get eloquently phrased creampuffs of nothingness. Lost in his own verbosity, he fails to connect with the game or the people around him.

This book is a travesty and a waste of time. I might literally take a bat to my copy as there is no need for anyone else to squander their precious life with it. Instead, I'll just re-read something that actually exhibits some feeling for the game--maybe Ball Four, or Moneyball, or, best of the best, The Glory of Their Times: The Story of the Early Days of Baseball Told by the Men Who Played It.

[Joe Kraus · Rating 3 out of 5]

I saw George Plimpton talk at Denison University in the middle 1970s when I was only about ten or eleven.

And I loved it. He was funny and cultured – I can still picture him grinning as he held up a t-shirt that said “I survived a Denison basketball practice” – and I recognized that he was grappling with big ideas at the same time as he was talking about things I understood, like sports and stories.

I can’t quite call it formative, but I absolutely loved it, and I think it’s a recognizable piece of that childhood idea-mulch that turned me into a writer and reader.

That said, I am revisiting this book, his ground-zero foray into participatory sports journalism…and I am disappointed.

There’s a lot of strong prose here, and I love hearing that voice of his, but this is dated in a couple of key ways.

First, there’s just the role of sports in our culture. He talks here of various baseball players as if they’re peripheral figures to the important work of literature and politics. I think he’d be stunned to see that sports is not just big business but a significant part of American culture. If ping-pong diplomacy was a striking feature five decades ago, it’s now central to the American cultural hegemon – as central as Hollywood ever was.

Second, there’s the matter of tone. Plimpton writes with a graceful hauteur that makes him sound like a more (much more) likeable William F. Buckley. Even likable, though, there’s a condescension that I suspect I won’t see in the later sports participatory books. (I do want to read Paper Lion, which I understand is the best of these.)

That shows itself most emphatically when, on the mound, he imagines a voice inside himself entering into conversation with his usual self. That voice, though, is a Southern ‘cracker,’ a drawling, uncultured figure who lives as a kind of lesser-self in the elite Plimpton.

I’m not sure the device ever really worked, and I suspect it grew old through over-use here even if it did.

There’s some good baseball lore here, and I think this has a time-capsule interest for when sports were a different part of our culture.

As a finished work, though, it’s simply too dated to recommend, even for someone who admires Plimpton as much as I do.

[Malachi]

Malachi Sieh
Mrs.Schemenauer
English 11A
28 September 2023

The book I read was Out Of My League By: George Plimpton. I really enjoyed this book because I enjoy pretty much anything that involves baseball and sports. The book offers an interesting look at how professional sports are run, but it also reflects on George's goals and how he pursued them . Plimpton's determination to leave his comfort zone and pursue shows the readers that Plimpton really wants his readers to realize that if they Brandt to do something it takes will and determination to do those things. The book shows us inside the life of professional players' lifestyles and the challenges that they have faced . Plimpton gives us a view on the commitment, friendship, and pressure that come with playing for a major league team. With hall of fame athletes, Ted Williams and Carl Yastrzemski provide readers an inside view of their characters and the struggles they encounter both on and off the field. I will definitely be reading this book again sometime in the future. I enjoyed it a lot and George Plimpton really kept me hooked on the whole book. Plimpton does a fantastic job of giving details about how his baseball career was and I enjoyed hearing about his teammates' life during this book. In conclusion, George Plimpton's book provides a great look into the world of professional baseball. Sports fans and everyone who enjoys baseball should read this book. . It gives a look into the baseball field, about the strength of perseverance and the pursuit of the players, demonstrating that we can complete our goals if we really want to. I would recommend this book to anybody that enjoys baseball.

[John Johnson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was George Plimpton's first attempt at participatory journalism. For this book, Plimpton arranged with Sports Illustrated Magazine to hold a contest between American League and National League All Stars before an exhibition game at the end of their 1958 season. He was to go out and pitch to eight batters from each team and they would score points based on the hits they got off of him. There would be no called strikes or balls, so each batter would be at the plate until he struck out swinging or hit fairly (none struck out). The challenge turned out to be much harder for Plimpton than he expected and he was relieved after facing only seven batters. But while facing those batters, he threw over 80 pitches, which would be tiring for even a professional baseball pitcher.

I found the beginning of the book a little disappointing. There was not much build up to the event at all. Basically he went to Sports Illustrated with the idea. They liked it, so they set it up for him. The most information you get before the actual game is the challenge he faced when his glove was stolen from his car the day before. I found Plimpton's description of game day, however, very interesting, from his arrival at the stadium and seeing all the kids seeking autographs, to the way the players and managers treated him at the park, and finally to the way he described facing those batters, most of whom are now in the Hall of Fame.

I enjoyed the book, but maybe not as much as I did Paper Lion, about his tryout with the Detroit Lions football team.