Key Details
- Narration: A former color commentator reading his own memoir, so the microphone is not new territory even where the material is raw.
- Themes: A career cut short, lost command on the mound, the cost at home, life after the game
- Mood: Conversational and warm, with an undertow of loss
- Verdict: Honest, unpolished baseball memoir that earns its second half more than its first.
Erik Sherman's name appears in no field on this audiobook record, though the book's fuller attribution turns up further down the page: A Pirate for Life, by Steve Blass with Erik Sherman. The byline credits a single man. Audible Studios issued the recording in March 2013 at seven hours and fifty-seven minutes, and the narrator field carries that same lone name, so the pitcher who won the seventh game of the 1971 World Series for Pittsburgh is also the voice reading the book about it.
Where This One Lands
Collaboration is the norm in sports memoir, and the credit for it usually turns up somewhere on the page. Here it does not. A five-star from May 2013, written by somebody attending the University of Pittsburgh during that championship season, supplies the book's full attribution while recommending it, which is how the omission surfaces at all. Nothing on the record contradicts that reading. A buyer curious about the collaborator's other work has no route in from this page.
Author and narrator are the same person, and the record offers no statement to that effect beyond the repeated field. No entry in the written column mentions the reading at all, so two matching names are the entire evidence for author narration, and a sample is the only way to settle how it plays. What can be said is what the arrangement asks for: a man describing the collapse of his own control on a pitcher's mound, in his own voice, four decades afterward.
The career itself has a strange shape and the book is built around it. A complete-game win over Don Drysdale in 1964 at one end. Two World Series victories in 1971, the seventh game among them. Then an inexplicable loss of command that ended a pitching life early and left his own name attached to the condition. Most sports memoirs are constructed on a peak. This one is constructed on the drop that came after.
Why Listen to A Pirate for Life
Resilience is the word a five-star from February 2025 reaches for, and it is earned rather than decorative. That entry credits the book with laying out a major league life in plain conversational terms, then going into genuine detail about how the pitching went wrong for reasons nobody could name, and about what followed. The move into the broadcast booth is treated as material in its own right, not as an epilogue tacked on at the end.
Nineteen seventies baseball is the other draw, and a four-star filed from Canada in August 2014 argues the case from outside the fanbase: not a Pirates supporter at all, and still delighted by the account of that team knocking off an Orioles staff carrying four twenty-game winners. That entry singles out the details, which is the right thing to single out. Team history from a participant keeps everything a summary throws away.
Anecdote is the unit of construction, and it suits a recording. Seven hours and fifty-seven minutes of stories out of a clubhouse and a broadcast booth breaks naturally into short sessions, and drifting off costs little, because the thread is chronological rather than argumentative. Anyone who has followed a season on the radio already knows the rhythm this book is written in.
What Gives Us Pause
A four-star headlined Well done and straightforward sets expectations properly. It reports a book that meets the control problem directly instead of skirting it, and that also takes on how the author's off-field behavior during and after his playing years damaged his family. Honesty is what gets the credit in that entry, not artistry. Anyone expecting a literary memoir should recalibrate, because this is a ballplayer telling it plainly with the rough parts left in.
Filed under travel and tourism alongside sports, which no reader of this book would predict. Nothing in the description concerns travel beyond the road life any major league season involves. The consequence is small but real: browsers working through the travel category will meet a baseball memoir, and only the sports classification is doing any useful work on this record.
Familiarity gets assumed throughout. The description drops Don Drysdale in without explanation, and the written responses assume you can place teams and playoff series from half a century back. Listeners who did not grow up with that era will still follow the human story, but a fair share of the pleasure on offer is recognition, and recognition is not something the book can supply on your behalf.
Should You Listen to A Pirate for Life?
Pittsburgh followers of a certain vintage are the obvious buyer, and a five-star from August 2013, written by somebody who was in tenth grade during that playoff run, describes the appeal exactly: not simply the highlights and lowlights of a famous pitcher, but a record of getting through adversity. Baseball readers generally, broadcasters, and anyone who has watched a skill vanish without explanation will find more here than the cover promises.
Skip it if you want tactical analysis of pitching mechanics, or a book that stays on the field. Blass gives real space to the years afterward and to the damage done at home, which is the braver half and the less marketable one. Eight hours buys a career told without much varnish by the person it happened to, which is rarer on this shelf than the category would suggest.
Who narrates the audiobook?
The narrator field carries the same name as the byline, so the record presents this as author narration. The copy itself never states the arrangement, which leaves the repeated field as the whole of the evidence. A former color commentator reading his own story is at least a plausible fit for a microphone.
How long is the audiobook, and how does it break up?
Seven hours and fifty-seven minutes, assembled from anecdotes rather than from argument. That structure makes it easy to take in short sessions, since the chronology carries you along and nothing depends on holding a thesis in your head. Listeners used to following a game on the radio will find the pacing familiar.
What exactly ended his pitching career?
The copy calls it a baffling condition that would eventually carry his own name: a World Series winner who could no longer control where the ball went. The book confronts it directly rather than glancing past it, and that collapse, rather than the championship before it, is what the memoir is organized around.
