This week (Nov. 5, 2007) in Sports Illustrated

As it should be expected, the World Series gets cover treatment in Tom Verducci’s “Party’s Just Beginning.”

The only other baseball item is the state of the Yankees now that Joe Torre has left the building.

Bits and pieces

From the Norwood, Mass. Daily News Transcript, this “expose” about the Red Sox’ theme song, “Dirty Water.”

Few know the song was written by a band from Los Angeles in the 1960s, and even fewer the incredible journey the song took before it was resurrected as the Red Sox victory anthem in 1998 following a walk-off home run by Mo Vaughn on opening day.

But fans now can get the whole story, thanks to two local authors.

Chuck Burgess of Norwood teamed up with Bill Nowlin of Cambridge to write Love That Dirty Water: The Standells and the Improbable Red Sox Victory Anthem.

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From Oneminutebookreview, this brief assessment of Philip Hoose’s Perfect Once Removed: When Baseball Was All the World to Me. Hoose is the cousin of Don Larsen, author of the only perfect game in World Series history.

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From the Aug. 20 edition of The new Yorker, Roger Angell weighs in on Bonds, A-Rod and numbers.

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From Bookcriticscircle, the blog of the National Book Critics board of directors, a suggested title for fall reading: Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story by LeAnne Howe. (Aunt Lute Books):

Howe is a Native American writer of aggressive politics and stylized prose. With this historical novel, she recounts the participation of the Native American league during the baseball fever of the late 1800s and early 1900s, and how the mythology constructed around the Miko Kings shaped Native American-White American relations into the Vietnam era. Howe’s narrative defies easy categorization but her mission is clear: to elevate this sports footnote into the position of prominence it deserves.

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Speaking of Rodriguez, here’s an article from New York magazine, on the dearly (probably) departed A-Rod.
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Blogger J.P. Freely (really?) offers a sneak preview of his manuscript, Bringin’ Gas and Dialin’ 9: 100 Years of Professional Baseball Development. This is an inteesting concept, as Mr. Freely (again, really?) goes in search of an editor/publisher.

Today’s audio selection: Opening Day

Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson’s First Season, by Jonathan Eig, narrated by Richard Allen (Unabridged)

I wasn’t too fond of this one, but maybe I didn’t give it enough of a chance. I found the narrator’s style too slow and overly dramatic.

Here’s a sample.

From post-season to book season?

From Dan Shaughnessy’s Oct. 30 column in The Boston Globe:

The baseball games are over for another season. For the next four months, it’s all about parades, trophy tours, Christmas collectibles, quickie books (maybe Stephen King will share his e-mails again), and the 24/7 roster tweaking that will consume Theo Epstein and his minions in their quest for “multiple championships.”

The columnist refers to Faithful: Two Diehard Boston Red Sox Fans Chronicle the Historic 2004 Season, which in which King and Stuart Onan traded comments.

In May, Variety reported “HBO Films and HBO Sports will give miniseries treatment” to the book.

A belated happy birthday, George Carlin

Hard to believe he turned 70 earlier this year.

Here he is in one of  his classics routines. Enjoy.

Word for Word

The current issue of Verbatim Magazine: The Language Quarterly (although dated Summer 2006!) has an unusual amount of baseball- and sports-related contributions. In addition to my humble offering — “Translating for the Old Ball Game,” an interview with Roger Kahlon, the interpreter for the Yankees’ Hideki Matsui) — the publication contains:

• “Baseball, Chicago-Style,” by Johnathan Caws-Elwitt, which reports on the Cubs’ adoption of the Chicago Manual of Style for their materials.
• “If Foul is Fair, What Next?”, by A.H. Block. These entomologies are done better and in much broader range in such books as The New Dickson Baseball Dictionary, by Paul Dickson.
• “Sportswriting,” by Gerald Eshkenazi, who does just that for The New York Times

Perhaps neither?

“Are the Rockies Really That Good, or Just Lucky?” This was the topic of The Numbers Guy column in the Oct. 23 Wall Street Journal.
The take, according to Prof. Alan Reifman, host of The Hot Hand in Sports blog, and in the wake of their 21 of 22 success story, gave them the credit, rather than Lady Luck.

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A call for sports journalism reform

From the Sept./Oct. 2007 edition of the Columbia Journalism Review, this piece by Robert Weintraub on the changing face of sports journalism in a new technological age. The writer complains about the increasing incidence on the part of leagues, club owners, and players to control what is reported about them.
Remember the movie Eight Men Out? There’s a scene in which Charles Comiskey, owner of the Chicago White Sox, lays out a banquet for “his writers” who fall all over themselves in their praise of his generosity. At the same time, the team, which has just won the American League pennant, is receiving a bonus of flat champagne.
The point is, team’s desires to control the press is nothing new. That’s why they have public relations departments. On the other hand, have an antagonistic press just for the sake of being antagonistic, isn’t the answer either. I have little patience or interest with sports programs that pretend to be bastions of journalistic integrity. (I wish I had a transcript for WFAN’s Mike and the Mad Dog program, just to illustrate how inane these broadcasters are.)

 

Off-season priority: How to speed up baseball

MLB has engaged an Italian consulting firm to deal with this ages-old problem.

And an all-star barnstorming team will be coming to a Springfield near you.

Baseball forever…or at least the next 13 years

In a turn-of-the-millennium article in Discover magazine, Brad Lemley offered “20 Things That Won’t Change” by the year 2020, including:

Baseball. Players will get bigger, 80-homer seasons may arrive,
and something— women’s soccer?— will eat a larger slice of
the sports viewership pie. But baseball will survive, predicts Joseph
Coates of the future-megatrends consulting firm Coates & Jarratt.
Only how we experience it will change. “Every little factory in the
South used to have its own team,” says Coates. “That kind of
participation won’t return.”

Other things that will hang around, according to the Oct. 2000 piece include death, sex, paper clips, shopping, zippers, religion, traffic congestion, and Dick Clark.

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