* “Sarge” turns author

Another former player turns (co)author in Phillies Confidential: The Untold Story of the 2008 Championship Season. (How anything of importance remains untold in this day and age is a mystery.)

Matthews — not to be confused with teammate Gary “The Secretary of State” Maddox — was with the team from 1981-83, thereby missing the last time the Phils won the world championship. Yet he gets title billing over Scott Lauber, who you just know did the heavy lifting.

* At the risk of tooting my own horn…

Thirteen years in the making.

In 1995, I delivered my first “scholarly paper.” It was at Hoftsra University’s centennial celebration of Babe Ruth’s birth and it was a hoot. I spent three days there, listening to all sorts of presentations, visiting exhibits and finally — nervously — making my own. My topic was “The Books on The Babe: The Later Biographies of George Herman Ruth.” The titles I analyzed included Robert Creamer’s Babe: The Legend Comes to Life; Marshall Smesler’s The Life That Ruth Built: A Biography; Babe Ruth and The American Dream, by Ken Sobel; and Babe Ruth: His Life and Legend, by Kal Waggenheim. I recall how nice everyone was to me, even though I certainly did not have their academic credentials.

One of the perks was that the conference organizers were going to take all the papers and publish them as a compendium.

Baseball and The “Sultan of Swat”: Babe Ruth at 100, edited by Robert N. Keane and published by AMS Press, arrived on my doorstep today.

I feel honored to be in such company. Among the names I recognize from the publishing world and the Society for American Baseball Research who also presented during the conference were Ron Briley, William Cahill, Victor Debs, Jr., Steven Gietschier; Stan Isaacs, Ray Robinson, Ken Shouler, Lyle Spatz, George Vecsey, and Peter Williams.

But better late than never? Perhaps not. Several other books on the Babe have been published since then, most notably Leigh Montville’s The Big Bam. Much of what I wrote back then is still applicable, but it just seems a bit outdated by newer material so it seems anti-climactic so long after the fact.

Still, after so many magazine articles, it’s kinda nice to see my work within a hard cover.

* Stocking stuffer: Gandhi at the Bat

If Neil Leifer’s new football book is out of your league, consider Gandhi at the Bat. The short “mockumentary” by Stephanie Argy and Alec Boehm, based on an original short story by Chet Williamson, won the Award for Excellence in Filmmaking at the Baseball Hall of Fame Film Festival in September for excellence “in direction, production, script writing, stylistic techniques, use of music, special effects, cinematography and/or editing.”

The film is available through the Gandhi website for $9.95. Such a deal.

* Well, that can’t be good.

“…Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has asked its editors to stop buying books.”

Look for other publishers to follow suit. And we all know where baseball/sports books fall on the foot chain.

* RK Review: Dingers!

A Short History of the Long by, by Peter Keating (ESPN, 2006)

Dingers is to literature what ESPN is to journalism. You can’t count on it to be serious, but it sure is fun.

Keating’s work has appeared in a well-rounded series of publication. That is, he’s not just a sports guy, so he’s not shackled by the label of sportswriter. His presentation falls into the general category of trivia: everything you wanted to know about the home run but didn’t feel like looking up.

There are bombers by decade, record-setters, fun facts, cute illustrations and charts, and a few profiles of famous hit men, but with no rhyme of reason behind their selection. Barry Bonds, no argument. Alex Rodriguez? Why not. But Jimmy Wynn and Rocky Colavito? (There are also pieces on Hank Greenberg and Jim Rice, who I wonder what the requirements for inclusion were.)

The problems with books like this is that they’re almost always out of date within a year. Some slugger will come along, add a few homers, set a new record, and poof, there you go.

Dingers strikes me as a nice gift book: a stocking stuffer or birthday present with no “heavy lifting” required.

Rating: ◊◊◊ (out of five diamonds)

* RK Review: The Bill James Handbook 2009

Joe Posnanski’s great column on SI.com about which statistics are the best indicators of baseball talent reminded me that I was going to do a review of the 2009 Bill James Handbook.

I must admit, I don’t make a habit of reading books of this type. I always enjoyed the Total Baseball books or the annual Baseball Encyclopedia when they came out. The former included a register of players with several thoughtful essays on eclectic themes; the latter offered a briefly yearly recap, season-by-season stats, and a line account of each player separated by time periods. In more recent years I’ve read the Baseball Prospectuses and Hardball Times, but more for the witty commentary than the numbers, especially with the new generation of stats on which Murray Chass opined. (And as much of a progressive thinker as I am, i think the treatment of Chass has been pretty harsh; the name-calling is unwarranted in this great country of ours where everyone is entitled to an opinion, even if you disagree with it.)

But I digress.

The new James book was quite interesting. I pretty much blurred over the register part of the book (which is the majority). That kind of information is readily available elsewhere.

My favorite parts were the too-few essays that discussed minute aspects of the game: “The Baserunners,” “Manufactured Runs,” and especially “The 21st Century Bullpen.” Mets fans know all too well how the bullpen let them down for the second straight season, but to see the numbers and categories puts the deconstruction in a whole new light: James brings up several points as he offers possible explanations. And those numbers don’t always tell the story. It depends, he writes in the situation: were there men on base? how many consecutive days had he pitched? How many pitches did he throw? Did he have a “clean” outing? Were the circumstances “tough” or “easy?” Add up all these variables, and you get a better picture than a standard box score or a commenator’s description of events could yield.

(By the way, I have a vision that sometime in the not-too-distant future, managers will call up a kid pitcher from the minors to start one game and send him back down. The opposition will have no scouting report and succumb to the surprise. I’m guessing each team would have enough pitchers in its system to pull off this hare-brain scheme.)

The “leaders sections” can build your case in politicking for your favorite superstar. So many categories for him to dominate…

Now I’m obviously not a mathematician; heck, if you read this blog regularly, you know I’m not even much of a speller, so James’ glossary is helpful to me only to a degree. For example, his definition for “Percentage of Triples…is calculated by taking the percentage of triples out of the number of balls put into play.”

The formula is 3B/AB-HR-SO. I get the strikeout component, but what about an inside-the-park round-tripper? Isn’t such a hit still in play? Maybe I’m just to math challenged to understand. Maybe I’m actually on to something. In which case, maybe there are other “faulty” formulas.

Overall, however, I’m glad I read the handbook. But I miss the old Abstracts, which were heavier on the text than we find these days.

Rating: ◊◊◊◊ (out of five diamonds)

* “The best baseball book you have probably never read…”

according to Michael Weinreb on ESPN.com’s Page 2 is Veeck: As In Wreck, the autobio of the game’s most maverick front office man (What, you thought the McCain/Palin campaign invented the word?)

If there was ever a guy who didn’t take life too seriously, it was Bill Veeck, who made even the St. Louis Browns semi-enoyable (midget pinch-hitters, fans with cue-cards as managers, etc.). He was also a pioneer, signing Larry Doby, the first African American in the American League, to play for the Cleveland Indians in 1948. Veeck doesn’t get nearly the credit he deserves.

“We will not see his kind again.”

The Amazon Report on (and by) Bill Veeck:

Veeck–As In Wreck: The Autobiography of Bill Veeck

The Hustler’s Handbook

Peter Schilling presents a fictional Veeck in his new The End of Baseball: A Novel

* “Five minutes ’til curtain, Mr. Canseco.”

What took so long? From The New York Times, this review of Back, Back, Back, an off-Broadway play about steroids in baseball.

No even a walk-on part for Jose? After all, he was in that reality TV show.

Upshot:

Mr. [Itamar} Moses’ disappointingly drama-free drama does little more than skim the surface of the protracted controversy over the use of suspicious substances by star players in the major leagues.

* Source of the week: Life photo archives

I miss Life magazine. None of its descendants match the mix of news and photos and even social impact that the legendary publication enjoyed during its heyday.

Now, thanks to Google, you can view some 200 baseball images. It’s a nice mix, but after looking over the available shots, there’s obviously a lot missing. Not everything is Major League content and there are no cover photos at all. Still, it’s a nice look at Americana.

* In the name of the father

Julia Stevens, the daughter of Babe Ruth, recently appeared at a Las Vegas book store to promote her new book, Babe Ruth: Remembering The Bambino in Stories, Photos, and Memorabilia.

It was only seven years ago that she and her co-author, Bill Gilbert, published Major League Dad: A Daughter’s Cherished Memories. (Not to be confused with former MLB pitcher Tim Burke’s 1994 book, Major League Dad.)

One wonders what prompts a 92-year-old to produced a second book so relatively soon after the first. At the risk of coming across as cynical (who, me?) I continue to have a tough time with those whose only claim to fame is that they are the offspring of famous parents and seek to make buck off it.

I’m just sayin’.