Bill White remembers the good (Bart Giamatti), the bad (Fay Vincent), and the ugly (Howard Cosell)

Uppity, Bill White’s memoir of his times as a player, the first black broadcaster in Major League Baseball, and the first black league president is a fast read (in the best sense) and overall a good one. The stories about legendary player and loopy broadcaster Phil Rizzuto, double-dealing Commissioner Fay Vincent, and complicated bigot and female team-owner Marge Schott among many others, including White’s early dealings with racists as a ballplayer (and the more subterranean, insidious racism he encountered as a baseball executive years later) make this memoir, well, memorable. At seventy-seven at this writing, White is definitely no youngster, and there is an understandable elegiac quality to his book. For many years, Bill White has had my (Evander) support for a place in Cooperstown, even as such likelihood recedes.