Jim Brosnan

Who is Jim Brosnan?

James Patrick Brosnan was a Major League Baseball player from 1954 and 1956 through 1963. He was a pitcher for the Chicago Cubs, St. Louis Cardinals, Cincinnati Reds and Chicago White Sox. Coincidentally, he was born on Black Thursday, the beginning stage of the Stock Market Crash.

While known as a moderately effective pitcher, both as a starter and a reliever, he gained additional fame by becoming one of the first athletes to publish a candid personal diary. Generally speaking, up to that point such books were "sanitized" for the general public and used a ghost writer. Brosnan was known as an intellectual, relatively speaking, for keeping books in his locker to read; and the authorship of the books he wrote listed only himself as the writer. Wearing glasses also contributed to his "Professor" persona.

The first of his books was about his 1959 season, a season which found him being traded from St. Louis to Cincinnati around the halfway point, and was titled The Long Season. It garnered some degree of criticism by those who felt Brosnan had violated the "sanctity" of the clubhouse. In that way it anticipated, by ten years, the firestorm of opinion that would come in the wake of Jim Bouton's book, Ball Four. However, Brosnan's book focused more on feelings and less on the kind of salacious details that Bouton's book would contain. Regardless, its critics included Joe Garagiola, whose own autobiography, Baseball Is a Funny Game, was entertaining but was of the traditional variety. He characterized Brosnan as a "a loner; a rebel".