Tom Friend. The Chicken Runs at Midnight. Zondervan, 2019.
Read this book.
Most books we review here we share so readers can make up their minds. In popular fiction, for example, we are fans of Tom Clancy, Alexander McCall Smith, and Gordon Korman. We also understand that not everyone likes technothrillers or detective stories, nor are all readers going to pick up books meant for fifth through ninth graders.
The Chicken Runs at Midnight is for everyone. The reading level is direct and clear. Anyone from sixth grade on up should have no trouble understanding it. Yes, it is about the career of a professional baseball player. But it goes well beyond that.
As I have noted in other entries, I enjoy baseball and am a fan of the Pittsburgh Pirates and Boston Red Sox. From about 1990 to 2004 one of those teams or the other seemed to bring more pain than joy. But we cannot dispense with childhood loyalty for trivial matters.
One of the more heartbreaking moments for Pirates fans was the National League Championship Series of 1992. The Pirates were leading going into the last inning of the last game (ninth inning, game seven, three outs to go), and they let it slip away. And just as the Yankees are the Evil Empire to Red Sox fans, so the winning Atlanta Braves stood for evil things in 1992 (not so much any more since Ted Turner sold the team). It hurt.
One of the men on the Pirates that year was third base coach Rich Donnelly. This is his story. It really is his life story, but one of the climactic moments happens in tandem with that sad loss. I cannot say any more.
I have to admit that I was also intrigued because the author’s last name is Friend. Bob Friend was a pitcher for the Pirates through most of the 1950s and 1960s. He started two games in the 1960 World Series which the Pirates won in a manner that to a Yankee fan might also have been tragic, except for the fact that the Yankees had been winning so many other World Series. I have tried to find out if the two men were related, but have found nothing yet.
Donnelly grew up in Steubenville, Ohio, about thirty miles from Pittsburgh and in the fifties and sixties as much a steel town as Pittsburgh was. Being a native of Pittsburgh myself, I could identify with much of Donnelly’s upbringing.
In Donnelly’s case, though, his father pushed Donnelly and two brothers to be athletes. The father was strict and distant, not unlike a lot of fathers who were world War II veterans. Mr. Donnelly, though, may have been rougher than most. Today he would be considered abusive.
Donnelly himself seemed to find solace in the Catholic Church as he grew up. He married right out of college and, for example, it was a point of pride that he was a virgin on his wedding day.
Much of the book tells of his career in professional baseball. He played for different minor league teams as catcher. The catcher probably has to be more aware of what is going on than any other player, so it is a natural step to a coaching or managing position. Once when still a teenager, Donnelly prayed that he would some day be a third base coach for the Pirates, his favorite team.
In the early nineties, his prayer was answered, and he spent a few years doing precisely that. Through his minor league career he had become friends with Jim Leyland who became the manager of the Pirates during those few years of near greatness.
He would eventually follow Leyland to the Miami Marlins where he was third base coach the first year that the Marlins won the World Series in 1997.
That is the rough background. But Donnelly does not sugarcoat anything. As he got caught up in the macho culture of professional male athletes, he made some bad decisions that eventually broke up his marriage. Clearly, he was not living the life of a Christian, someone who had even once thought of becoming a priest. Unlike most people who rationalize shortcomings and sin, Donnelly is honest and direct. We can all learn from his experiences. That is especially true of those caught up in an alpha-type culture whether it is an athletic team, the brokers of Liar’s Poker, the military, politics, academia, etc.
Of course, during the baseball season, he was traveling much of the time so he was apart from his family, but he apparently does try to keep in touch with his four kids.
I once knew a man who was a career Navy chief and the son of Marine. He admitted that he had no idea how to relate to his daughter when she was growing up. That is pretty much the case with Donnelly. It is not that he was indifferent, he simply did not know how to relate to girls. Much of the story is how he comes to terms with this important relationship.
Without going into too much detail, this is more than just a book about a jock like many biographies or about a professional sports culture like Ball Four. No, this ultimately is the story of a miracle. I can say no more. Stick with it. The title is important. The chicken runs at midnight. It sounds like nonsense, like the kind of thing a random sentence generator would come up with. But it is not.
Read it to find out. You will be glad you did. You will probably get misty as you do.