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Comeback Season:
My Unlikely Story of Friendship with the Greatest Living
Negro League Baseball Players
by Cam Perron with Nick Chiles, foreword by Hank Aaron
c.2021, Gallery Books
$27.00 / $36.00 Canada
272 pages
By Terri Schlichenmeyer
The Truth Contributor
Your teeth got a good workout.
Yep, as a kid, you wanted those certain hard-to-find,
favorite-player baseball cards but you didn't want to be
wasteful. Because you'd do anything to get the cards, you
spent your change, hoped you'd be lucky, and you chewed a
lot of gum. In the new book Comeback Season by Cam
Perron (with Nick Chiles), though, the best things don't
come in a pack.
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It all started with coins.
When Cam Perron was a little boy, his grandfather introduced
him to coin collecting by taking young Perron to a local
Massachusetts flea market, where the boy learned that
collectible things had stories behind them. That got him
fired up about antiques, comic books, baseball cards, and
music memorabilia. Other kids his age might've thought his
hobbies were odd but Perron didn't care; since toddlerhood,
he was always more interested in what adults had to say than
what his peers thought.
Perron had a variety of interests throughout childhood. He
loved playing hockey and dabbled in Little League but he
says that adults ruined his fun in the games. At about the
time he entered middle school, Red Sox fever hit his
hometown just outside Boston and he talked his mom into
indulging his love of Red Sox memorabilia. One day, the
collector in Perron took notice of baseball cards for Negro
League players, and his curiosity led him to research the
stories behind the League; individual players caught his
fancy and, with the eagerness of the 12-year-old he was, the
white boy from Boston picked up the phone and called to talk
with Black players that were many decades years older than
he. Astoundingly, Perron became friends with those men, and
he began making a name for himself among Negro League
players for finding information they thought was lost
forever – information that brought recognition, reconnection
and, for some of baseball's most talented, financial refuge.
Comeback Season
is a good book that speaks to the heart of every former
little boy with a fist full of baseball cards and an eye on
a good deal. Hobbyists will completely understand what
author Cam Perron says about the "hunt" and why it's almost
the best part of collecting, and his tales of accumulation
will thrill anyone who's relished the nail-biting
anticipation of finding that one thing in a surprise
place.
The big appeal of this book, though, starts when Perron
quiets himself and lets Negro Leaguers talk. Readers who
come to this book to learn about Black baseball players in
the Jim Crow era are treated to remembrances from these men,
in their own words, and their stories and their heartfelt
appreciation just can't be missed. Perron includes a
brief-but-helpful history of Negro League ball early-on but
really, look for the players' personal tales.
This book reads faster than a one-two-three inning and,
aside from a couple of very minor profanities, it's
safe for a teen baseball fan. So find Comeback Season,
play ball, and you'll show a lot of teeth.
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