Wild and Outside
In the mid-1990s, at a time of despair about the national pastime, the Northern League of Professional Baseball offered a beacon of hope: an independent league, unaffiliated with the majors, where the games would be for the fans, not between the owners and players.
In this memorable debut book, Stefan Fatsis goes inside the Northern League, and in the process discovers how very much baseball still means to America. Revived in 1993 by a group of minor league executives fed up with the politics of their sport, the Northern League restored baseball to six communities in the upper Midwest and Canada, which embraced their teams with a fervor any major-league team would envy. The league also breathed new life into a sport that, at the major-league level, had lost its way and abandoned its fans. The Northern League's startling success inspired a movement that helped change the face of professional baseball, with other independent leagues forming rapidly in its wake.
Fatsis writes with the authority of a trusted insider, spending a summer on the road from St. Paul, Minnesota, to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, to Thunder Bay, Ontario, hanging out with the ex-big leaguers, rejected minor leaguers, and first-chance players hoping for a break who populate club rosters; with baseball-lifer managers and coaches clinging to the game; with the jaded business veterans and hopeful novices who populate the front offices; and with the league’s lifeblood, its grateful fans.
The result is a book as rich in insights into baseball's problems as it is full of indelible portraits of the people who make the Northern League—and by extension, baseball in a pure and uncorrupted state—inspiring, heartwarming, and fun.
Praise for Wild and Outside
“Nothing makes a sportswriter more nervous than an outside waltzing into our tight little world and capturing its essence in graceful prose. Is it that simple, or is Stefan Fatsis that good? Thank you for a great book.”
— Bob Ryan, Boston Globe
“This is an era in which many of us wish baseball could return to the human level, and this book shows up much of the way we wish it were.”
— Hall of Fame baseball writer Peter Gammons
“A must read for every baseball fan who loves the game but not the major league hype.”
— Pat Jordan, author of A False Spring
“Wild and Outside is a gem of a book. It creeps up on you and before you know it, you’re intrigued and enthralled. You find yourself rooting like crazy for a man named Miles Wolff and his merry band of baseball maniacs, and all of a sudden you care a hell of a lot more about the St. Paul Saints and the Thunder Bay Whiskey Jacls and the Duluth-Superior Dukes of the Northern League than you ever did about the Mets and Yankees and Red Sox.”
— Buzz Bissinger, author of Friday Night Lights