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6 baseball books to launch the 2014 season

For true aficionados, here are excerpts from six must-read baseball books.

6. “Up, Up, & Away: The Kid, the Hawk, Rock, Vladi, Pedro, le Grand Orange, Youppi!, the Crazy Business of Baseball, and the Ill-fated but Unforgettable Montreal Expos”

  • By Ross Atkin Staff writer

By Jonah Keri  

Random House Canada

408 pages

"Of all the beautiful people who showed up at Olympic Stadium ... none was more recognizable than Donald Sutherland. The New Brunswick-born actor grew up a huge Expos fan. In 1972, he married French-Canadian actress Francine Racette and lived a bicoastal existence, working out of Hollywood and spending ample time in and around Montreal. He was to the Expos what Jack Nicholson is to the Lakers – the celebrity superfan with primo seats. Expos fans growing up in the '70s and '80s remember seeing Sutherland behind home plate – in trench coat and hat, right in the center-field camera shot – as surely as they remember watching Staub, Rogers, Carter, Dawson, and Raines.

"Sutherland was a diehard fan, often driving three hours roundtrip from his home in the Eastern Townships outside Montreal to see home games.... He became an ambassador for the team, doing voiceovers on Expos documentaries. He arranged to have friends in Montreal set the phone down next to the radio so he could listen to games, whether he was in L.A. or on a movie set thousands of miles away in Europe or Asia."

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

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