Burial at Home Plate by Bob Fulton

Burial at Home Plate
An Oddball History of the Pittsburgh Pirates
by Bob Fulton
Dorrance Publishing Co., 336 pp., paperback $23

Bob Fulton has a long and very personal connection to his hometown baseball team — both as a sportswriter and a fan. Like many, he found himself bitten by the baseball bug as a young boy, attending his first game at Forbes Field with his dad. He brought home a souvenir that day, a foul ball, but also what would become a fascination with all baseball has to offer. It seemed destined to be — Fulton’s father spent 40 years as an usher at both Forbes Field and Three Rivers; his son has spent that and more as a student and lover of the game.

This is not your usual baseball history — telling the story of a particular team, player or season. Rather, it is a set of bite-size offerings that feature what the author describes as “the offbeat, the colorful, the humorous, even the bizarre.” The stories range from the better-known pieces of Pirates history, like the lopsided scoring differential that favored the Yankees in the 1960 World Series, to the arcane, such as spring training in frigid Muncie, Indiana, during World War II. All the major players and characters appear, from the founding of the team through the Honus Wagner years, to the Clemente and Maz era and right up to present day. Fulton’s work covering the team for regional and national publications, his personal interest in and love of the game, and his membership in the Society for American Baseball Research have exposed him to both the everyday events of baseball and the behind-the-scenes occurrences that make for good storytelling.

If you love baseball and the Pirates, you will enjoy dipping into this book, reading a few entries, searching out new takes on team history. But the book would benefit from some organization. Although I enjoyed most singular entries, I struggled to find a larger message. There is no obvious order to the stories and perhaps that is what the author intended — that each serve as a stand-alone piece. But for the uninitiated or casual fan of the game, the book fails to provide an overarching chronology or obvious take away on the almost 150-year history of the Pirates.

Anne Madarasz
Western Pennsylvania Sports Museum at the Heinz History Center