Television: Sox Appeal

The New England Sports Network (NESN) launches, Sox Appeal, a reality show that seeks to help baseball fans find like minded loves.
An article in the July 31 New York Times describes it as

One part “Fever Pitch,” the other part “The Bachelor,” “Sox Appeal” takes a citizen — or hero, in the show’s vernacular — of that “ultimate manic-depressive fan base,” as the NESN analyst and former star Red Sox pitcher Dennis Eckersley has put it, known as Red Sox Nation and matches him (or her; there are women heroes) with three blind dates for two innings each.At the seventh-inning stretch the hero chooses the person he would like to spend the rest of the game with and then announces his decision by holding up a sign that is broadcast on
the stadium’s giant video screen. Afterward the hero and his potential love match are shown walking into the sunset, albeit with none of the gooey follow-up common to other dating shows.

The program also features “advice” from such unlikekly sources as NESN commentators Don Orsillo and Jerry Remy to dating advice offered by players like the knuckleball pitcher Tim Wakefield.

Sox Appeal debuts August 1, after the Red Sox-Orioles game.

 

Baseball on the Tube

The July 23 issue of TV Guide  highlights the ESPN miniseries, The Bronx is Burning.

The piece also pays homage to the TV baseball events that came before including:

• 61*  — A 2001 HBO film starring Barry Pepper as Roger Maris  in pursuit of the single season home run record held by the beloved Babe Ruth. Pepper does a nice job portraying the increasing frustration over the course of the season, as Maris faced opposition from pitchers, fans, and baseball hierarchy as he approached the mark.
• Jason Alexander’s slacker character, George Costanza, managed to snare a position with the New York Yankees, but one of the best shows featured a 1992 guest shot by Keith Hernandez as the object of Jerry’s “man crush.” A priceless gag was the Kramer-Newman “loogie” conspiracy theory, with Roger McDowell.
• Ball Four – In 1976, CBS tried to take advantage of the popularity of Jim Bouton’s watershed behind-the-scenes look at his profession. Bouton starred as himself and didn’t do too terrible a job, but this became the first in a short line of failed baseball-themed series.
• Clubhouse (2004) was probably doomed from the start. If you can’t get people to watch about baseball player, it’s not surprising that they wouldn’t warm to a show about a batboy.
• Bay City Blues – a short-lived series featured an impressive cast, including Ken Olin, Sharon Stone, Michael Nouri, Kevin (Invasion of the Body Snatchers) McCarthy, Sheree North, Dennis Franz, and Bernie Casey, among others, from the mind of Steve Bochco.

Baseball players have made appearances on dozens of shows through the years. For example:

• Leo Durocher appeared on The Munsters
• Don Drysdale, The Donna Reed Show (Willie Mays, too, although on a separate episode)
• Jim Lefebvre and Wes Parker as cannibals on Gilligan’s Island (!)

Review: The Last Best League

This review appeared on the Sports Literature Association Web site in August, 2004.

The Last Best League: One Summer, One Season, One Dream, by Jim Collins. Da Capo, 2004. 288pp. $24.00 (cloth), ISBN 0738209015.

Reviewed by Ron Kaplan

The ballplayers on the Chatham As of the Cape Cod League are on the cusp. All of them, up to this point, have enjoyed great success, whether in high school, college or other amateur leagues. But this is “the last best league” and it is an honor just to be invited. For many, this is the final season to fine-tune their skills before hopefully moving to the professional ranks. Few are called, fewer are chosen.

The parallels between The Last Best League and the 2002 movie Summer Catch are undeniable, although the author claims his concept came first. These are young men barely out of high school, testing themselves against a higher class of pitchers or batters. They must also be content with the almost inevitable drop-off that converting to wooden bats brings, since most, if not all, are used to the power and confidence metal bats offer. They are in for a rude awakening.

The concept of focusing on one team for a single season is not new, but Collins, a former editor of Yankee Magazine, seems to humanize his subjects more than most. The reader sees the players as Jekylls and Hydes, on and off the field, dealing with matters some would consider mundane, but for whom such issues as balancing a checkbook and buying food is a new experience.

The Last Best League also considers the people behind the scenes, the men and women who open up their homes to these strangers, who give them jobs, who run the leagues, all out of a love for the game, since financial remuneration is practically nonexistent.
As the summer comes to a close, TLBL serves as a reminder of old-tyme America: small towns, Fourth of July parades, Mom and pop stores, and apple-pie.

Lucid Culture review of Big Papi

A fairly uncomplimentary review of David Ortiz’s book appears on the Lucid Cultre blog.

It seems unfair to hold such books up to standards of other biographical titles. After all these are increasingly written by and about younger people whose accomplishments , for all the glitz and attention, are relatively unimportant on the grand scale of things. (And this is coming from a fan!)

Briefly…

Two items on Playing America’s Game: Baseball, Latinos and the Color Line, by Adrian Burgos Jr. ( University of California Press).

The San Francisco Giants had several distinguihsed Latinos on the roster since they arrived in California in 1957, including Juan Maricahl, Orlando Cepeda, Jose Pagan, and the Alou Brothers, so it is fitting that the San Francisco Chronicle notes the city’s place in history in this “superb and, in many ways, pathbreaking history of Latinos in professional baseball,” crediting the success of the franchise to Alejandro “Alex” Pompez, a Cuban-American scout and former Negro League executive.

Newreads.blogspot.com has a brief item, based on a press release from the publisher.

Take a blook at this…

According to Wikipedia:

A blook can refer to either an object manufactured to imitate a bound book, an online book published via a blog, or a printed book that contains or is based on content from a blog.

The term “blook” has been actively used since the 1990s, by librarian/ collector, Mindell Dubansky, to describe unique or manufactured objects and ephemera that are made in imitation of a bound book or several bound books standing together. A blook is replica of a book and has no text. The term “blook” is a shortening of “looks like a book.”

Blooking.blogspot.com takes a look at this phenominon as it applies to the Cardinals (A Redbirds Nation Reader, by Brian Gunn), Red Sox (Bleeding Red: A Red Sox Fan’s Diary of the 2004 Season by Derek Catsam); Padres (Ducksnorts 2007 Baseball Annual, by Geoff Young), and Dodgers (The Best of Dodger Thoughts, by Jon Weisman), as well as The Hardball Times annuals.

Cheryl Hagedorn, who hosts the Blooking blog, is more interested in the whys and wherefores of turning the blogs into books than the actual content. Not necessarily great baseball, but interesting as far as the way the publishing industry works.

Shag Crawford, 1916-2007

Henry Charles “Shag” Crawford, an NL umpire from 1956-75, died on July 11. He was 90.

Crawford, whose brother, Joey, was an NBA official, called more than 3,000 games, worked in three World Series three times, two NL championship series, and three All-Star games. He became an iconic figure in photographs of San Francisco Giants’ pitcher Juan Marichal going after Los Angeles Dodgers catcher Johnny Roseboro with a bat. In this picture, Sandy Koufax risks injury as he steps in to play peacemaker.

HBO Real Sports did a segment in its February 12, 2007 edition on Shag Crawford and his sons, Jerry and Joe. Shag didn’t look well at all at that point, but the pride he had in his boys was evident.

Larry R. Gerlach includes Crawford in his oral history The Men in Blue: Conversations with Umpires (Viking, 1980; reprinted by the University of Nebraska Press, 1994). Crawford tells a story of happenstance, of being in the right place at the right time when he was picked to move to the majors after being on the verge of giving up his dream.

In addition to the Giants-Dodgers contre-temps, Crawford was involved in another controversial game in the 1969 World Series between the Baltimore Orioles and the NY Mets in which he ejected O’s manager Earl Weaver for arguing balls and strikes. A rule is a rule, said Crawford, while admitting his concern about following the letter of the law in such a high-profile situation.

Crawford was also a leader in the umpires’ union and his career may have suffered for it, perhaps playing a role in his exit from the game.

Briefly…

Some quick thoughts from Ron Brown of the Bangor Daily News on Big Papi.

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Deadspin, among other blogs, offers a lengthy inter-office memo to ESPN employees.  It’s always interesting to get a “behind-the-scenes” peek at what goes on, especially in environments we think we would love to be privy to. For me, like many enamoured with sports, the realization (finally) set in that a career on the playing field was not in the cards (people of a ceratin age root for aging players like Julio Franco, Jesse Orosco, and Hoyt Wilhelm: as long as there was someone still playing at their age, there was still hope. Yeh, right.) But then to learn that the grass isn’t always greener in these high-profile, all-access vocations…what a downer.

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From Cincinnati.com, a story about Tom Brucato, local author of Baseball Skippers and Their Crews. The History of Every Major League Manager and Coach, 1871-2007 (St. Johann Press).

 

Now hear this: Audible.com’s “All Star” podcast

This is Audible, an annoyingly double-entendred podcast, devoted its July 10 episode to several baseball audio books,including:

• The Big Bam, an unabridged version of Leigh Montville’s 2006 biography on Babe Ruth. After an excerpt from narrator Scott Brick, the podcast’s host, Josephine Reed, conducts a telephone interview with the author that sounds as if it was heavily edited, as if she reworded her questions to fit in with his remarks. For an entity that counts so much on sounds, the presentation is very forced. (You can hear a sample here.)

• The Glory of Their Times: The Story of the Early Days of Baseball Told by the Men Who Played It, by Lawrence Ritter. Ritter is the granddaddy of audio/oral histories, setting the stage for those who came later, including Ken Burns. The excerpt includes his interview with Fred Snodgrass, a member of the New York Giants in the early part of the 20th century. (One thing I’ll say about TIA: they don’t skimp on the excerpts, as do some other audiobook sources.) Ritter, who schlepped around a large reel-to-reel tape recorder for his interviews, gets Snodgrass to tell an amusing story about Charles Victory Faust. Ritter’s other subjects are similarly charming, belying the image of ignorant, ill-spoken athletes. (Hear a sample here.)

• Bums, by Peter Golenbock. Golenbock, who came under scrutiny earlier this year for his salacious novel about Mickey Mantle, produced massive oral histories about several ball clubs, including the Cubs, Red Sox, Yankees, and Mets. In Bums, which originally came out shortly after Roger Kahn’s The Boys of Summer, he analyzes the Brooklyn Dodgers. Raymond Todd serves as narrator of this unabridged audiobook and, judging by the excerpt, does a good job in providing numerous “voices” representative of the people interviewed by the author. (Hear a sample here.)

• Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball’s Last Hero, by David Maraniss. This audiobook is narrated by the author in an abridged version. While writers might not be professional performers, they lend a certain credibility to the project. Having written the words, they no doubt know how the aural portion should sound. Reed conducts an in-person interview with him, and it comes off much better, more natural than the one with Montville. (Hear a sample here.)

This special All-Star program is downloadable via iTunes and should be available soon at audible.com.

Briefly

Minor Leaguers spend quality time with young fans: Two members of the Harrisonburg (Va.) Turks took time out to read to their young followers.

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As Barry Bonds approaches the all-time home run Mark, there seems to be more press about Hank Aaron, as if to compare the two: one genial and genuine, the other surly and steroid-assisted.
The Borders chain has released  The Hammer: The Best of Hank Aaron from the Pages of Sports Illustrated, a store-exclusive.
Over the past several years, SI has used its archives to produce timely coverage of major events, such as World Series and other championship winners. They have also marked the passing of such icons as Ted Williams and Mickey Mantle. Hank Aaron is a cute little book, containing reprints of stories about him beginning in 1957 and ending in 1994. I would have preferred a glossy, magazine-size collection of the orignal articles. I’m just saying…

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This story from the Brookline (Mass.) Tab about a female Red Sox fan working on a book about female Red Sox fans.

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