Review: I Should Have Quit This Morning: Adventures in Minor League Baseball

I Should Have Quit This Morning: Adventures in Minor League Baseball by Kathy Diekroeger
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I have enjoyed a number of books on the minor leagues of baseball over the years. I find the hopes and promise of lightly tested players matched against each other to learn while competing for limited openings at a higher level leads to many compelling stories. I also appreciate that the minors often are played in towns and villages that are not your well-known metropolises, but are often held in third tier towns, the ones people have heard of, but might not know where they are on a map. Minor league teams have an outsized importance to their towns, compared to the majors where there are plenty of entertainment offerings on a typical summer day or night. I found “I Should Have Quit This Morning” to be an excellent review of the first perspective I mentioned, but not so much on the second.

The book is an edited compilation of interviews of a number of (former) minor league players. The author has gathered together interview snippets based on topics, but loosely based on a baseball season. The book begins with players telling of how they are drafted and came to be on their team. There is a lot of variety here, with highly ranked players as well as “just barely made it” players who tell their stories and explain how this process works. I found this a very interesting beginning. The book then focuses on spring training, and continues the a minor league season and, in some cases, the call up or the letting go. There is a lot of anecdotal detail here. You understand the things that are important to the players after you read this, including things you might not have thought players would spend much time thinking about. For me, learning about the differences in food between the minors and majors was interesting, as was the constant issue of short-term apartment leases and revolving roommate issues. You really get a feel for what a modern minor leaguer deals with on a day to day basis in this book. Well done.

Given that this book was focused on players, you don’t get much about the teams. There’s not really much baseball action, and you don’t hear from the managers (although you hear about them and other staff, especially the stadium attendants). And you don’t hear about the fans or the towns, much, outside of some glowing description of host families. I missed this, mostly because a number of the players played for the team of my hometown, the Quad Cities River Bandits, and I enjoy reading about the area. But given how detailed the player stories are, I can’t complain. I found this a very good book on the player’s perspective on a minor league team, and I would look favorably to more books on the topic by this author.


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