* UNP wins publishing award

The University of Nebraska Press, which puts out many wonderful baseball titles under its own and Bison Books imprints, was named Independent Publisher of 2008 by ForeWord Magazine at the Book Expo America convention this weekend.

During the ForeWord Book of the Year awards ceremony, ForeWord publisher Victoria Sutherland called the University of Nebraska Press “a publisher that excelled in its role of keeper of the cultural heritage, a university publisher that has deliberately made a place for itself in the world of trade as the curator of consistently wonderful books in several special markets.”

* Speaking of heroes…

Owen Canfield, a former full-time columnist and sports editor of The Hartford Courant, focuses his now-monthly columnon books about ballplayers whose accomplishments go beyond the ball park.

The first is Ira Berkow’s The Corporal Was a Pitcher, the Courage of Lou Brissie. The second is a book on five CDs, Clemente, the Passion and Grace of Baseball’s Last Hero, by David Maraniss. Berkow and Maraniss are top-echelon writers and researchers.

* Author profile: Jason Aronoff

The Buffalo News ran this profile on Aronoff, who recently published Going, Going . . . Caught! — a book about the greatest catches made by baseball outfielders in the years 1887-1964. That was before “Web Gems,” for you young’uns out there. Like other memories, stories about such plays seem to expand with the passing of time, as does the number of fans who claim to have been there in person to see the event.

* Review: Bottom of the Ninth

Jonathan Eig, author of Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinon’s First Season and Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig, does the honors for Michael Shapiro’s new book on the exit of the Brooklyn Dodgers and the ultimate entrance of the New York Mets.

* Sunday supplements

The Sunday papers are great for filling space with features that don’t get dap during the week. For example, the Arizona Republic published this interesting piece on the dearth of real superstars these days, while the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ran this reminisence on Harvey Haddix’s near-perfect game.

* Q&A with S.L. Price

The New York Times “Bats” blog recently ran this Q&A with the author of Heart of the Game: Life, Death, and Mercy in Minor League America (Ecco), which is the heartbreaking story of the on-field death of Mike Coolbaugh, the first base coach for the Tulsa Drillers who was hit by a foul line drive. There’s also a”30 Seconds with” piece from the Times today. Not really sure why there was a need for two separate pieces, rather than combining it into one.

* Hot dipity dog

Found this cool website: Dipity.com. It’s a site about memes, which, according to Wikipedia, are “postulated unit[s] or element[s] of cultural ideas, symbols or practices that gets transmitted from one mind to another through speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena.” But you knew that already, didn;t you.

Anyway, I added The Bookshelf to Diptiy. Might be a passing fancy, but in it “timeline” function, it makes for an interetesing graphical represenation. Check it out. Good luck trying to find me, though; I haven’t figured it out yet. But I’m included in a topic search for “baseball.”

* Lest we forget: Gerald W. Scully

For those of you who don’t know who he is (and I must admit I didn’t either), the late Dr. Scully

was the first to apply labor economics to sports, said former colleague Philip K. Porter, now professor of economics at the University of South Florida.

Sports economists refer to his groundbreaking work as “the Scully Equations…”

The theory is credited by many as underpinning the legal arguments that eventually would lead to the end of Major League Baseball’s “reserve clause,” which bound players to one team. The reserve clause was lifted, and player salaries began to rise, in 1975, the year after Dr. Scully published his work.

He  wrote or edited five books, including The Business of Major League Baseball, (The University of Chicago Press, 1989). A review of the book appeared in the Spring 1990 edition of Journal of Sport History. Read more about Scully here, from the Dallas Morning News website.

* Review: You Know Me, Al

Love finding reviews of baseball books from non-baseball sources. In this case, the Ring Lardner classic from Pundit and Pundette.

* Lest we forget: Moe Berg

who died this day in 1972.

Also see My Time with the Catcher Spy Morris Moe Berg, by Neil Farkas.