Welcome to the Circus of Baseball

"A gloriously funny, nostalgic memoir of a popular ESPN reporter who, in the summer of 1994, was a fresh-out-of-college intern for a minor league baseball team. Madness ensues as Ryan McGee spends the season steeped in sweat, fertilizer, nacho cheese sauce and pure, unadulterated joy in North Carolina with the Asheville Tourists. In the spring of 1994, Ryan McGee (new college graduate) bombed his coveted interview with ESPN--the only place he ever wanted to work. But he did receive one job offer: to work for $100 a week for the Asheville Tourists, a proud minor league baseball team in the heart of North Carolina's Blue Ridge Mountains. McCormick Field, home to the Tourists, had once been graced by Ty Cobb, Lou Gehrig, Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson. What could go wrong? Welcome to the Circus of Baseball is McGee's hilarious, charming memoir of his first summer working in the sporting world. He has since risen the ESPN ranks to national TV, radio and internet host, but his time in Asheville still looms large. Among the many jewels of his experience ... McGee recounts one of the most entertaining on-field brawls you'll ever know (between the fourteen league mascots who had assembled for the all-star game--an eight-foot tall foam-costumed crustacean, a pudgy red fox, a giant skunk ... and they were really fighting), as well as the day he oversaw the game-day entertainer known as 'Captain Dynamite and His Exploding Coffin of Death'--let's just say, things went wrong. Most important, McGee details a magical summer of baseball, of learning the ropes, of working with players on their way up to the Majors or down to extinction, and of coming to understand how the pulse of a community can beat happily through a minor league ballclub"--