The Benchwarmer's Encyclopedia: A Father's Story of Usually Trying his Best for the Team by Josh Wilker

The Benchwarmer's Encyclopedia: A Father's Story of Usually Trying his Best for the Team Reviews

• 
  Michael Malone

  It's somewhere between a 3 and a 4, but I'll round up due to the halo effect of Wilker's brilliant baseball-cards-as-touchstones memoir "Cardboard Gods." Wilker depicts the first year of his son's life, and the effect his newborn son has on the author and the author's relationship with his wife, against the backdrop of a sports encyclopedia. It's a tricky concept, with pro athletes, teams and games of the past 40 years--the heroes and the goats--serving as metaphors for Wilker's thoughts and emotions. At times the landings are not quite stuck, and books about the cluelessness of a new dad is hardly fresh territory. But Wilker's sly wit and stark emotional honesty make The Benchwarmer's Encyclopedia a solid performer, and a clever Father's Day gift for husbands whose wives truly get them.
• 
  Alex

  I was enjoying the book quite a lot before I got to the scene at the Cubs game a little over halfway through (Matt Murton was at the plate). You’ve got to be kidding me, right? You sit there, watch that kind of horrific scene taking place right in front of you, describe it for the reader in graphic, nauseating detail, and your only reaction is to call your wife on the payphone and say that the game “might go on forever” and that you wished it would? Are you kidding me??
  
  Words can not possibly do justice to the shock and outrage I feel, so I will just say this: in my entire lifetime of reading, I don’t think I have ever had a book where a single scene so quickly and utterly destroyed every ounce of respect I had for an author. The Cubs scene was the last section of the book that I read; I did not care to read another word. What’s more, I no longer cared about Mr. Wilker’s worldview, his parenting insights, or anything else he might have had to say.
  
  Disgraceful.
• 
  Davy

  Oof, this book is awfully down on itself. But I guess that's kind of baked into the concept of a losers' encyclopedia. Really fascinating concept, looking at the full spectrum of failure through the lens of professional sports -- then contrasting all those tales of loss and woe with the emotional roller coaster that is parenting a newborn. This could've been a multi-volume saga, no doubt, but it would've been hard to get through it. Here, in this concise book, it's doable, and worth the psychological price of admission. Josh Wilker is a deeply generous and unflinchingly honest writer, and while The Benchwarmer's Encyclopedia is not quite as impactful (or as fun, frankly) as his previous book -- the glorious Cardboard Gods -- you get the sense that it was a book he needed to write. And therein lies its power.
• 
  Chris Witt

  Author Josh Wilker was first known for "Cardboard Gods", a blog he wrote in which each post was themed around a baseball card. Each post had some connection to the player's career, their life, or the way the photograph appeared on the player's card.
  
  I resonated with that idea. In a former life, I did some musical composition. I often found that doing something like that really helped to stir up the creative juices. You limit your toolbox, box yourself into a corner a little bit by setting up some parameters that you're going to play with, and off you go.
  
  Led by the title "The Benchwarmer's Encyclopedia", Wilker's latest offering assigns each of his 26 chapters to a letter of the alphabet, working up from A to Z. Each chapter is further subdivided into separate short essays under a heading that belongs within that letter.
  
  Wilker's book starts off as a treatise on what it's like to be a new father, baring his soul about all the stress that comes with it. As a father to a 6- and 4-year old, I get it. I've seen some negative reviews that seemed focused on admitting that they (the reviewer) were not parents and they just didn't "get it".
  
  To which I will admit to the following:
  
  1. If you are not an adult in your upper 30s/early 40s who has younger children who were born in the modern era, you may not relate much to "Benchwarmer's Encyclopedia".
  
  2. If you are not somebody who is riddled with anxiety and self-doubt, you may not relate much to "Benchwarmer's Encyclopedia".
  
  3. If you are not into sports, and tend to bind moments of your life with sporting events ("I remember my nephew's birthday; that was the day Joe Carter hit the home run off of Mitch Williams to give the Toronto Blue Jays the 1993 World Series victory over the Philadelphia Phillies!") then - again - you may not relate much to "Benchwarmer's Encylopedia".
  
  Lucky for me, I fall neatly into all three of those categories.
  
  And, perhaps because of those three things, I enjoyed the book.
  
  To a point...
  
  At some point, things started to feel a little bit drawn out. Those who know me are aware that I am all about the anxiety thing. But I also get tired of myself feeling that way and, while I'm not "over it", I'm a lot more relaxed than I was, say, 15 or 20 years ago. But reading a few hundred pages of somebody questioning themselves starts to feel like being pulled under the waves again. It was a not-so-pretty flashback to where I was in my early 20s and I didn't particularly care for re-visiting that part of my psyche.
  
  Feeling overwhelmed is second nature. It comes very naturally to me. Reading about others feeling overwhelmed doesn't give me that "oh thank goodness I'm not alone" feeling. Rather, it starts to make me feel even more anxious.
  
  Additionally, things start to take a rather political turn in the latter half of the book.
  
  This is a review of Wilker's book, not my life. But I still have to point out that there are some areas surrounding breast-feeding where I get a little anxious. It's not that I'm opposed to it and don't think women should be free to do so wherever they want because it's natural. It's because my wife and I had our own personal issues where we struggled with it and the lactation consultants couldn't possibly have done a better job at making my wife feel like a total and utter failure as a new mother.
  
  Thanks La Leche League for getting us off to a completely crap-tastic start as parents! Much appreciated! (end sarcasm)
  
  Indeed, the belief that there is a large conspiracy where "Big Pharma" is making all of the calls purely in the interest of making a buck at the expense of American health starts to rear its conspiratorial head in the latter half of the book.
  
  Including statements that formula is a ruse put upon you by evil corporations is a pretty horrible weight to put upon any new mother. Sometimes there are difficulties and it's nice to know that there are alternatives out there.
  
  Let's be nice to mothers, okay? It's a difficult enough job as it is.
  
  The research on giving subluxation shows that it is, at best, a placebo effect. But the research on giving it to infants is that it can be damaging at worst.
  
  While Wilker doesn't tackle vaccines directly, it would seem safe to assume that he is in the camp that believes in a parent's right to decide whether or not their children should receive them, ignoring how herd immunity works and subjecting other people's children to diseases that had been pretty much eradicated in the United States.
  
  Ignoring science is too sore of a subject for me to just gloss over these elements in "Benchwarmer's Encylopedia".
  
  All parents do what they think is best for their children. (I say "all", but of course there are some outliers. I'm only pointing out that Wilker is most likely a very fine parent; probably 200% better than he gives himself credit for.) While I doubt very much that anybody is reading this book as a new parent who is seeking medical advise, Wilker's opinions are still in there and leave me feeling disappointed at the misinformation he is presenting.
  
  With a dose of editing - limiting the passages that deal with self-loathing, removing the attacks on medical practitioners - I may have really enjoyed the book more.
  
  It started out well enough, but things took a weird turn at some point. The initial focus on the intersection of sports-related failures with the anxiety surrounding being a new father meanders away into the ramblings of a conspiracy theorist, finally crashing into an assault on the scientific method.
  
  The book, and this reader, got lost along the way.
• 
  Herbie

  3.5 stars.
  A heavy dose of Eeyore Syndrome. Too much at times, though the writing was decent throughout.
• 
  Zach Koenig

  What initially intrigued me about this book was that it looked to be a hilarious romp describing the first year of fatherhood using sports situations/metaphors. While some portions of the text did indeed bring a smile to my face, the overall bleak outlook of the text made it a rather depressing read on the whole. I needed a glimmer of hope in order to laugh/feel with the author.
  
  Basically, "Benchwarmer" is a book about a man's first year as a father...just in sports almanac format! It proceeds as a serious of vignettes relating some sporting situation to what Wilker was going through in his personal life at that time. Some of the scenarios are spot-on and hilarious, while some are a bit of a reach. Your previous knowledge of the sports events he is describing will go a long way in gauging your enjoyment of each little jaunt.
  
  However, despite that interesting/inventive format, I couldn't ever bring myself to really enjoy this book because it was so bleak on the prospect of parenting (especially a first child). I will fully admit that, having no children of my own, I can't directly identify with Wilker's experiences, but he almost seems depressed at times and really struggling to cope. Instead of "laughing along with him", which is what the book tries to get the reader to do, I more just felt sorry for him. At first, I thought that Wilker was just using a lot of self-deprecating humor, but as the book continued on the same tone I realized that this was not the case. He seemed to literally be struggling that much, and that made me more sad than anything.
  
  Thus, although I did appreciate some of the humor in this book, there were too many times when I almost didn't want to pick it up because it got so depressing for me. I just didn't want to read anymore about a man struggling with heavy, heavy issues...and then trying to comically relate that to sports scenarios. Maybe I'm just taking the text too seriously or mis-reading the tone, but I wanted a "message of hope" at least somewhere in the text. I never got it, and thus I didn't enjoy the overall experience.
• 
  Jay French

  “Benchwarmer’s Encyclopedia” interested me initially because the author had previously written a book about baseball cards, and I expected a baseball-focus in this book dealing with the author being a new Dad. It really wasn’t that. Instead, Wilker describes his play in a college basketball team as a benchwarmer. He then talked about “benchwarmers” in a wide variety of sports, but very few of the examples matched that concept. Instead, most examples were about what are now called “fails”, often by sports stars. I don’t see the relationship to “benchwarmers” here, as benchwarmers are typically just not very skilled, and not banished to the bench for one-time failures. His extension of the thought here just didn’t work well.
  
  The book is mostly a chronological journal with sports related digressions about the author as he becomes a father, through the first year of his son’s life. When describing fatherhood, or his life in general, the writing consisted almost entirely of the author belittling himself. I can understand if a book starts this way and shows growth by the end, but this didn’t really happen here – the author maintains the self-flagellation throughout. This is not what I would call a fun read, although I think it was intended to be funny. Wilker writes like he believes he is the first to become a clueless father, and doesn’t really grow from there. I’ve read other books by new Dads – this one seems weighted down by wallowing in angst. The book feels like the author used reflecting in a journal as a form of self-help and decided to extend it into a book with sports allusions.
  
  I also don’t understand the encyclopedia aspect of the book. While it is written in roughly chronological order, it is also broken down by sports-related topics in alphabetical order. This comes across as gimmicky, or maybe the results of a writing exercise. I think the book would have been better without having to watch the author try and relate a story about his son with the next alphabetical sports reference he came up with. At times it was obviously forced. In this case, the writing exercise is just an exercise, not the basis of a book.
  
  As an alphabetized list of topics relating to the author’s first year as a father, the encyclopedia conceit didn’t work for me. As a list of oddball sports topics, however, I found the author’s choice of subject matter interesting. He spends time going down ratholes of sports – the edges of statistics as well as the truly trivial but interesting. He talks about the baseball player with the most at bats without a hit, the Dayton Triangle football player nicknamed “Sneeze” Achieu, and pretty much touches on everything in between. As a journal of reflections on odd sports topics, this had the makings of a good book, and I would consider reading others of the author’s books in the hopes of getting more of that.
  
  I won a pre-release copy of this book in Goodreads First Reads program.
  
• 
  Michael

  I've followed along Josh Wilker's writing career since the early days of his Cardboard Gods blog, which turned out the great memoir of the same name. His follow up memoir captures the trials and tribulation that he experiences in the first year of his son's life. Though self deprecating, Wilker does a pretty good job giving a view into the self doubt that someone might experience as a new dad. He references is own athletic failures and the infamously epic failures in sports history along the journey. I think this book would be greatly received by fans of many sports(eg baseball,basketball,golf,football).
• 
  Gentle

  A good concept for a book that didn't quite reach it's full potential in my opinion. Relating fatherhood to baseball references seemed a bit forced at times and unrealistic.The stories about being a dad could have been funnier and that's what I was expecting.
• 
  Ben

  Parenting is fucking hard.