There are lots of books about great athletes and championship teams. This is not one of them.
All G.O.D.'S Children is the fictional account of how the worst team in major league baseball, The Hollywood B's, overcame the bureaucratic meddling of their new owner and their own incompetence to march all the way to the World Series.
Edsel Ames, the B's starting third baseman, is commissioned to write a book about life as a sports loser, a work for which he is imminently qualified. Ames has never hit over .200 in his life, and regularly leads the league in errors. He is also surrounded by a collection of characters that are as colorful as they are incompetent. There's the superstitious Pepe Peppio at second, who won't play on days with the number three in them, and Buddha Beggs who lugged 20 or so extra pounds behind the plate every day as the team catcher. Then there's rookie Foam Phelan, a hot-shot relief pitcher with a knuckleball and the innocence of a choirboy. And topping it off is manager Luke Morton, maybe the worst bench-boss in the game.
The B's enter the season with new ownership, the enigmatic Gomer O. Dudley who made his fortune with a chain of Chinese food restaurants. Gomer, who signs all memos with his initials, believes he can turn the franchise around using the sound business practices that made The Great Wall drive-ins such a success.
All G.O.D.'S Children is a lively, bone-jarringly funny read. Narrated by Edsel Ames, the plot follows the evolution of this misfit band of ball players from the laughing stock of the league to cohesive group united in their hatred of the new ownership. Along the way, the team battles internal squabbles and requests from ownership to avoid hitting homeruns in an effort to reduce the costs. Author John Craig captures the essence of the major league locker room in all its profane glory: swearing, drinking, womanizing -- it's all there, detailed in some of the funniest baseball prose ever written.
Fans of the 1989 film Major League with Charlie Sheen and Tom Berenger will love All G.O.D.'S Children, as will any baseball fan.
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