* Bits and pieces

Trying to play catch-up once again:

• From SlidingintoHome, a Yankees-centric blog, a couple of new titles about the Bronx Bombers.
• Boogiedownbaseball, another blog about the Yankees, is one of several outlets that profile the new Marty Appel biography on Thurman Munson. For more, check out BaseballHotCorner. The JorgeSayNo blog features an interview with the author Appel, who also gave this Q&A to USA Today’s Game On blog. And our friend, Jeff Pearlman, wrote this profile on Appel on SI.com. Read an excerpt of the book  here.
• And while we’re on about catchers, here’s a review of Peter Morris’ new book on the topic from City Pulse, a Lansing, MI-based website.
• Sorry, but I think it should be a law somewhere that — just like becoming a free agent — you can;t write a baseball book unless you;ve ben in the game for a minimum number of years. Take that, Dustin Pedroia!
• Thaks to Greg Spira for another review heads-up. This time, it’s Jonathan Eig doing a turn on Larry Tye’s Satchel, along with an excerpt of the book. Also from Spira, this lead to News OK (as in Oklahoma), which ran a review of a trio of baseball titles, including Baseball in the Cross Timbers: The Story of the Sooner State League by Peter G. Pierce and, from SABR, Going for the Fences: The Minor League Home Run Book, by Bob McConnell and The Emerald Guide to Baseball 2009, edited by Gary Gillette and Pete Palmer.
• Steven Roberts publishd this review of Michael Shapiro’s Bottom of the Ninth in the Washington Post of July 18.
• Another review of Tye’s book comes from Beyond Chron (Motto: “San Francisco’s Alternative Online Daily”).
• From MopUpDuty, a look back at a neo-classic, Joe Posananski’s The Soul of Baseball, a biography of Buck O’Neil.
• Creative Loafing offers this piece on Zev Chafets’ Cooperstown Confidential.
• And because baseball impacts on every other aspect of life, this piece linking it to Supreme Court nominee Sotomayor.

• And fnally, I knew I shouldn’t have had that pizza so close to bed time:

From the forthcoming graphic novel Sullivan’s Sluggers, a baseball horror book by Mark Smith and James Stoko.