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 full-time-team 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 ugly bigotry as a ballplayer (and the subterranean-and-even-more-insidious racism he encountered as a baseball executive years later) make this memoir, well, memorable. At seventy-seven at this writing in 2011, 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.