In my review of Ron Darling’s previous book, I wrote it would have been much, much better had he included more baseball stories like the one he told about finding himself drinking with Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford and Billy Martin. Well, apparently he took my advice because his new book, “108 Stitches” is all baseball stories. And it is a vast improvement on his prior disappointing literary effort.
The title refers to the number of stitches on a baseball, but it also meant to signify how baseball is one big tapestry, the threads stitched together by all of the stories that make the sport so great, and how each story leads to the next.