Review: I Paid to Play the Game by Russell Rosen

Tracing the unexpected journey of an aspiring baseball star, I Paid to Play the Game by Russell Rosen is a touchingly honest memoir, reflecting on growing up, following your dreams, and embracing even the hardest truths.

As a child, the author loved every facet of America’s pastime, following the local teams’ exploits in the newspaper and eagerly awaiting the next time his family would catch a game. Playing on an organized team wasn’t an option until his late teens – well past the typical age for a serious pursuit at going pro.

Even so, Rosen dedicated himself to the dream, attending notable baseball camps and sharpening his skills after graduating from high school, while overcoming injuries and setbacks every step along the way. From being the most improved player at the Gaines camp to hanging with the semi-pros and gradually earning the respect of his once-skeptical coaches, readers are brought into the trenches with this determined young man.

For many lay readers, baseball camps may be a new concept, but in the same way that science and summer camps are often a seminal experience of youth and development, so too are Rosen’s tales from his many years of rigorous training. He offers colorful and energetic depictions of hungry young players from all over the country, competing, connecting, and reveling in the boisterous camaraderie of boastful athletes. These are some of the richest scenes in the narrative – the crowded lunch lines and playful ribbing between players, the quirks of coaches and locker room superstitions, all acting as reminders that baseball, at its very heart, is still very much a game.

Unlike so many sports memoirs, where the narrative inevitably culminates in winning the big game, or reaching the pinnacle of one’s career, this is a modest and unadulterated view of many athletes’ journey toward the big leagues, offering a wise portrait of success, sacrifice, disappointment, and resilience. Tens of thousands of young men and women spend years of their lives on bus trips and weekend jaunts to minor league towns to keep their hopes of playing in the pros alive, and we know that only a select few actually make it, giving this memoir a sense of compelling realism, rather than being an unattainable fairy tale of success. The result is more immediately engaging than many mainstream sports stories, as it is so seldom told, and more closely mirrors most readers’ own lives.

From a technical standpoint, the prose is short and declarative, but starkly vivid in its descriptions, particularly in nostalgic moments from baseball stadiums and the exhilarating recollections of playing the game, as well as the trips to games, which at times gives the book a sense of a travel memoir. The author’s love for sports and travel shines brightly through the straightforward prose, with bursts of subtle profundity peppered on these pages. Like Steinbeck, Hemingway, or Kerouac, there is a youthful passion and energy in these anecdotes that transcends the unadorned prose, with a potent mixture of American dreaming and the humility of raw experience that makes for a viscerally relatable tale.

With unpretentious charm and unfettered honesty, Rosen shows a different side of athletic ambition, and redefines what success truly means.