* Bits and Pieces

Fell way behind, so here’s catching up. The nice things about this overall topic is that you can be a little late and the information is still valid (for the most part).

• From the Deseert News, this review of ‘78: The Boston Red Sox, a Historic Game, and a Divided City, by Bill Reynolds
• The Asbury Park Press ran this feature on newsman Jim Lehrer whose latest novel, Oh, Johnny, considers a promising young ballplayer prior to, during, and post-World War II.
• BaseballDigest.com ran this review of Greg Prince’s Faith and Fear in Flushing. Look for my interview with Prince soon.
• Wickedlocal.com, a New England based website, profiled Amy Whorf McGuiggan, author of Take Me Out to the Ball Game/The Story of the Sensational Baseball Song, which she claims “is not a baseball book….Rather, it’s about an idea.” I’m glad she realizes that. Her essay on the song and how it became a seventh-inning tradion apeared in National Review Online.
• BleedingCubBlue, a site about the Tigers (duh), posted this review of The Ten Commandments of Baseball. by J.D. Thorne.
• HuggingHaroldReynolds published this Q&A with Jeff Pearlman, author of The Rocket That Fell to Earth.
• The Baseball Years on The Hardball Times
• StarNewsOnline (Wilmongton, NC), ran this review on Chasing Moonlight: The True Story of the ‘Field of Dreams” Doc Graham
• The Columbus Ledger-Enquirer ran this piece the inspiration for Jane Heller’s Confessions of a She-Fan.
• Jim Preller, kid’s fiction author (Six Innings), offers his list of top 10 baseball books.
• Since Roger Clemens pitched for the Toronto Blue Jays, should Canada take some “pride” in his accomplishments as well? This item comes from The Sarnia (Ontario) Observer. Here’s another one from the weekly Boston Phoenix.
• Lots of items about Alyssa Milano’s book, but there are ust as many about her celebrity babe status — if not more — than about the merits of her project (which are almost universally negative). They tend to run in the range of what an entrepreneurial woman she is (with her clothing line), and who knew she loved baseball so much, and photo ops or book signings, yada yada yada. Let’s leave it at that. I like to think you guys are above that stuff. If not, you can always Google about it.

* Roundup review: Boston Globe

The Globe featured several titles in this roundup, including Bruce Weber’s As They See ‘Em, Charles Fountain’s Under the March Sky, and Peter Morris’ Catcher: How the Man Behind the Plate Became an American Folk Hero, as well as a few Sox-centric books.

* Round-up reviews: SFGate

In addition to Opening Day, this is the time of year when the media jumps on the baseball book review bandwagon.

Here’s a batch of the best, according to SFGate.com, including:

• As They See ‘Em: A Fan’s Travels in the Land of Umpires, by Bruce Weber (Simon and Schuster; 341 pages; $26)
• Under the March Sun: The Story of Spring Training, by Charles Fountain (Oxford University Press; 322 pages; $24.95)
• Bottom of the Ninth: Branch Rickey, Casey Stengel, and the Daring Scheme to Save Baseball From Itself, by Michael Shapiro (Henry Holt/Times Books; 320 pages; $26)
• The Corporal Was a Pitcher: The Courage of Lou Brissie, by Ira Berkow (Triumph Books; 253 pages; $24.95)
• The Complete Game: Reflections on Baseball, Pitching, and Life on the Mound, by Ron Darling (Alfred A. Knopf; 288 pages; $24.95)
• Baseball Prospectus 2009,, edited by Christina Kahrl and Steven Goldman (Plume Books; 628 pages; $21.95)

* Source: ReviewScout.com

This site offers dozens of reviews of baseball titles written by readers like ourselves (Scroll down to “sports”; there’s a link specifically for baseball titles).

Typically, the publisher’s press release tops the individual page, followed by reader reviews and ratings.
Think Amazon.com without all the ordering information and clutter.

Like most criticism, the reviews can be very subjective. For example, observe these two offerings on a book taken totally at random, Baseball Prospectus 2006:

Reviewer A

The Baseball Information Derby (Rating 5 av 5)

Simply, the best annual publication about major league baseball. Hardball Times would be #2. Somewhere in the dust is the rest of the field.

Reviewer B

Sophmoric [sic] nonsense (Rating 1 av 5)

This is a horrible example of sophmoric “witty” commentary paired with the idiocy of stat-based evaluation. If irrelevant asides were not enough, they are mostly wrong as regards players from the team I follow closely, the Oakland A’s. Take the notes on Houston Street (“never will be in the Lidge/Rivera class”), Zito (“overrated”), minor leaguer Travis Buck (stupid comments on his name, totally inappropriate), Ander Ethier (overmatached in the big leagues). Where their prognastications are reasonable, a simple extrapolation from previous years (anyone could do it in their head) would suffice, not some pseudo sophisticated computer program. I hate this book.

Read ReviewScout.com with a grain of salt.

* Mini-reviews from a neighbor to the North

From Hour.ca, a Canadian Website, these briefs on:

• Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Takes a Swing at Baseball
• Baseball’s Best 1,000: Rankings of the Skills, the Achievements and the Performance of the Greatest Players of All Time
• The Worst Call Ever! (not strictly a baseball book, but close enough for jazz)
• Smithsonian Baseball: Inside the World’s Finest Private Collections

* Sharing the Wealth

In my “travels,” I’ve come across a few other book review sites. In the interest of literary cooperation, I’m listing them here for your perusal:

• The Baseball Book Blog. Seems to be a frequently-updated list of baseball bestsellers according to Amazon.com, with some other book news.
• The Baseball Book Review. Just what it says: reviews by the host.

I’ll post others as I find them.

* Baseball book roundup: Indianapolis Star

This duet of mini-reviews includes:

• Benchclearing: Baseball’s Greatest Fights and Riots, by Spike Vrusho
• The Worst of Sports: Chumps, Cheats, and Chokers from the Games We Love, by Jesse Lamovsky, Matthew Rosetti and Charlie Demarco

Detect a theme here?

* Well of course Boston doesn’t think it was a great game

Surprise, surprise. The Boston Phoenix finds fault with Richard Bradley’s new book on the 1978 playoff game between the Yankees and Red Sox. Perhaps had it turned out differently…

“I don’t know about your reading habits,” writes George Kimball, “but when I come across an obvious factual error in a book, my initial inclination is to wince in sympathy for the soon-to-be-embarrassed author.

“Unless, that is, the mistake is infuriatingly egregious, in which case I’m more apt to throw the book up against the wall in disgust.”

Now I must admit, I haven’t thoroughly read the book yet, but by now readers of the Bookshelf know my feelings about any book labeled “great,” “best”, etc. The subject matter usually isn’t.

Bob Neyer recently sent an e-mail in answer to an issue I had with the indifference, if not inaccuracy, of another author’s project. Most publishers don’t care, as long as there isn’t anything for which they can get sued. Maybe Kimball and his brethren should start looking for representation. The former sports editor of the weekly alternative paper lists several errors of fact, the usual stuff like getting the “handedness” of the ballplayers wrong, or the date:

The dust jacket of Richard Bradley’s new book describes a game played on the “afternoon of October 4, 1978” as “the culmination of one of the most intense, emotionally wrought seasons ever, between baseball’s two most bitter rivals.”

The one-game playoff in which the Yankees defeated the Red Sox to advance to the ’78 ALCS had taken place two days earlier at Fenway Park — on October 2.

There was a baseball game played on October 4 of that year, all right, but it took place at Royals Stadium — in Kansas City. The Royals’ Larry Gura beat the Yankees’ Ed Figueroa to even the American League Championship Series at a game apiece.

(Heavy sigh).

Unlike newspaper columns, I’m guessing readers don’t often bother writing to authors or publishers to vent their frustration. If they’re luck the corrections are made for subsequent editions.

Not to be puny, but these books are less great than “grating.”

* Baseball book roundup: The Palm Springs (CA) Desert Sun

A set of mini-reviews, mostly of older titles, from the Desert Sun, including:

• Playing With The Enemy, A Baseball Prodigy, A World at War and a Field of Broken Dreams, by Gary Moore.
• Teammates, A Portrait of a Friendship, by David Halberstram.
• Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball’s Last Hero, by David Maraniss.
• The ERA, 1947-1957 When The Yankees, The Giants and The Dodgers Ruled The World, By Roger Kahn.
• Hank Greenberg, The Story of My Life, by Hank Greenberg.
• The Big Bam, The Life And Times of Babe Ruth, by Leigh Montville.
• Baseball Dynasties, The Greatest Teams of All-Time, by Rob Neyer and Eddie Epstein.

Is there any rhyme or reason to these selections? Hard to tell, the writer — Peter Donovan — offers no introductory note other than “some summer baseball reading.” Except for the Clemente and Ruth biographies, they seem to all consider baseball during and immediately after WW II. And sicne the folumn is dated May 22, it doesn’t seem to be in connection with Memorial Day.

Maybe I’m thinking too hard on this one.

* Class in session

[This piece appears in the May/June issue of ForeWord Magazine.]

Baseball books: Class is in session

The notion that baseball is a metaphor for life has been around since man first took bat to ball. In reality, it’s more appropriate to say that the national pastime is a metaphor for education; academic disciplines that baseball can teach include history, mathematics, science, journalism, and even philosophy, just to name a few. If one were to spend a semester at “baseball college,” a typical day of classes might consist of all the subjects needed for a general liberal arts degree. With the start of a new school year, a.k.a. Opening Day, here’s a list of suggestions to keep the studious fan up to date.

American History, Contemporary

If they serve no other function, titles that incorporate any kind of ranking or employ words like “best” and “greatest” act as a catalyst for discussion/argument. So does “forever,” as in Hammerin’ Hank, George Almighty and The Say Hey Kid: The Year That Changed Baseball Forever by John Rosengren (Sourcebooks). This volume focuses on the 1973 season, when Hank Aaron moved closer to Babe Ruth’s career home run record, a broken-down Willie Mays called it quits, and George Steinbrenner began his reign as lord and master of the New York Yankees. Readers may wonder what was the triggering event that made this a watershed season in the eyes of the authors.

Change Up: An Oral History of 8 Key Events That Shaped Modern Baseball, by Larry Burke and Peter Thomas Fornatale (Rodale) will no doubt kindle some arguments as well. The authors contend that their selections were meant to “focus on the external changes that have shaped the game we know and love” and that they “set aside…the discussion for the game on the field.” But at least a few of these “events” will leave some puzzled as to how they made such a major impact on the sport. Ball Four and its effect on how we read about sports is worthy of such magnification, as was the establishment of the players’ union, but other suggestions seem downright silly and contrary to the author’s “mission statement.” After all, the debut of the designated hitter and Cal Ripken’s consecutive game streaks took place on the field. Likewise, their assertion that the 1962 New York Mets heralded the age of expansion is erroneous, since the American League added two teams the year before.

American History, Older

Fans of baseball’s Pre-Golden Age will appreciate the scholarship that went into Chief Bender’s Burden, Tom Swift’s sad but sweet biography of the Native American pitcher who toiled for Connie Mack’s Philadelphia Athletics in the early 1900s from the University of Nebraska Press, a constant source of quality baseball literature. Another title in this genre is Ed Barrow: The Bulldog Who Built the Yankees First Dynasty, by Daniel Levitt (Nebraska). Prior to the Moneyball era of Billy Beane, Theo Epstein, et al., Barrow put together the first and perhaps mightiest of all ball clubs: the Bronx Bombers of Joe DiMaggio, Bill Dickey, Tommy Heinrich, and company. Barrow cut his teeth by managing minor league clubs and received a lifetime of experience just by dealing with a young and headstrong Babe Ruth who was with the Boston Red Sox.

Science: Biology

Rooting for a team can leave you elated or deflated, but before Your Brain on Cubs: Inside the Heads of Players and Fans, edited by Dan Gordon (Dana Press), there wasn’t much concrete material to explain why. The contributors to this slim collection of essays are mostly scientists and academics concerned with what goes through the brain of the participant (“Why Did Casey Strike Out: The Neuroscience of Hitting”) and the observer (“The Depths of Loyalty: Exploring the Brian of a Die-Hard Fan”). The unifying theme is that the sport, in one way or another, is a drug, releasing chemicals that have a positive or negative affect and, in many cases, are addictive. How else to explain sticking with a team that does nothing but disappoint year after year?

Civics

Cities love their teams, regardless of success or failure (although success is always more fun). Perhaps no two metropolises represent this ideal more than New York and Boston.

Bill Nowlin retains the title of expert par excellence when it comes to the Red Sox. Imagine collecting every bit of information on the team, churning it up, and spitting it out, and you have some of idea of Red Sox Threads: Odds and Ends from Red Sox History (Rounder). Of course there are the usual player profiles, anecdotes, and trivia, but Nowlin, who has made a cottage industry of writing about the Sox, goes above and beyond, breaking down the team history into hundreds of pages of minutiae not found anywhere else. The book includes lists of players by ethnicity, by place of birth, the best and worst opening day and Patriots Day games, players who were stabbed or shot or killed themselves, and who served in the military. No topic is too insignificant: “If Odell HALE had the ball bounce off his head and ricochet to CESAR Crispo, the scorer could have called it Hale-Cesar.”

Similar in concept, although different in delivery, is Mets by the Numbers: A Complete Team History of the Amazin’ Mets by Uniform Numbers by Jon Springer and Matthew Silverman (Skyhorse Press). The chapters highlight every player who wore every uniform number, with a larger profile of the most noteworthy athletes, as well as other bits of trivia. This is another fun title for Mets devotees who, like readers of Threads, will appreciate the authors’ efforts more than the average fan.

A much simpler approach is employed by David Green in 101 Reasons to Love the Mets (Stewart, Tabori, & Chang). Straightforward and simple, this slim photo album-like offering extends through the club’s history, from “Marvelous Marv” Thornberry’s fabulous flubs through Endy Chavez’s miraculous (if ultimately superfluous) catch in the 2006 National League Championship Series.

Mass Communications

Ever since baseball held the first World Series night game in 1971, sports pundits have complained that the late starting times dictated by avaricious television broadcasters would preclude kids with early bedtimes from becoming future fans. James R. Walker and Robert V. Bellamy Jr. take a deeper look at this sometimes-stormy marriage in Center Field Shot: A History of Baseball on Television (Nebraska). It’s hard to believe that there once was a time when team owners didn’t want their “product” shown on TV for fear it would keep fans from buying tickets. Little did they know how rich they would become from network and cable contracts.

Of course, a previous generation said the same thing about broadcasting on the radio. In Baseball Over the Air: The National Pastime on the Radio and In the Imagination (McFarland), Tony Silvia chronicles how that medium made countless fans out of those who heretofore had no way of accessing the game in “real time.” Radio, an aural enterprise, allowed listeners to use their imaginations, as the title suggests. Both books pay homage to the pioneers and personalities—such as Mel Allen, Red Barber, Harry Caray, and their broadcast descendants—who brought baseball into kitchens, living rooms, and cars, and helped extend the lineage of fans.

Economics

Going, Going, Gone: The Art of the Trade in Major League Baseball by Fran Zimniuch (Taylor Trade Publishing) actually deals with several ways by which teams transfer players in additional to swapping. The author does a nice, if somewhat been-there-before, treatment of enumerating some of the biggest—and worst—trades in history. The most important deal, however, may have been one that never actually came to pass. Curt Flood, a long-time fixture for the St. Louis Cardinals, refused to go to the Philadelphia in exchange for Dick Allen, a situation that led (for better or worse) to today’s free agency and multimillion-dollar contracts.

Foreign Studies

Latinos account for more than twenty-five percent of players on Major League rosters, and that number is growing. While Jackie Robinson and other early African-Americans had a tough go of it in the nascent days of the game’s post-War integration, Hispanic players had it even worse with the added burden of cultural and linguistic differences. In recent years, some teams have sought to make things easier for such players. Milton H. Jamail’s Venezuelan Bust, Baseball Boom: Andres Reiner and Scouting on the New Frontier (Bison Books/Nebraska) reports on how the Houston Astros, among others, scout and nurture young players from that country who hope to capture their dream to make their living playing ball in the United States.

Graphic Arts

Each year, fans can expect at least one gorgeous book of baseball art or photographs. This season the honor goes to Baseball 365 Days, a “perpetual calendar” with photos from the archives of Major League baseball and text by Joseph Wallace (Abrams). The reader will be hard-pressed not to jump ahead to sneak a peak at ensuing treasures as selected by the author from his own baseball memories from the 1970s to the present.

Journalism

“There is something irresistible about the sport that reaches across generations and though time,” writes Lee Guktind, co-editor with Andrew Blauner of The Anatomy of Baseball (Southern Methodist University Press). Their collection of twenty essays from a wide swath of writers on myriad aspects of baseball proves that “there are unlimited potential crevices and corners to mine for…material.” Contributors include the “usual suspects” of Roger Angell and George Plimpton, and cover topics such as Katherine A. Powers’ “My Glove,” John Thorn’s “Fan,” and Frank Deford’s “An Ode to Baseball Caps.”

Philosophy

It may seem bizarre to put Ted Williams in the same sentence with Albert Camus, or Mickey Mantle with St. Thomas Aquinas, but Raymond Angelo Belliotti, author of Watching Baseball, Seeing Philosophy: The Great Thinkers at Play on the Diamond (McFarland), makes some compelling connections. He matches nine players with a “philosopher-teammate” and explains why the two are compatible. These may seem a stretch at first, as he discusses each athlete in terms of the great thinkers’ teachings, but the patient reader will be rewarded. The most intriguing chapter links Jose Canseco with Immanuel Kant in a fascinating “dialogue” between those who advocate the use of steroids and those who see them as providing a detriment to fair play and sportsmanship. (See sidebar.)

Statistics

Statistics enhance the enjoyment of baseball more than any other sport. And no one has been more influential in that area than Bill James, the “alpha” of Sabremetrics. He first published his annual Baseball Abstract in the 1980s and since then has gone on to create a statistical empire. Although the Abstract is long gone, he returns to the field with The Bill James Gold Mine 2008 (ACTA Sports) where he combines his keen sense of numerical dissection with amusing essays on topics no one else can seem to envision. The only complaint is that it’s too brief, even at 317 pages; James does not provide full details for every team and player, just enough to prove his points. Surely his loyal followers would pony up a few more dollars for an enhanced volume.

Every serious baseball fan can explain 56, 61, .406, 714.… These numbers represent, respectively, Joe DiMaggio’s consecutive game hitting streak, Rogers Maris’s home run total in 1961, Ted Williams’ accomplishment as the last major leaguer to bat over .400 in a season, and Babe Ruth’s career homer total. This is the premise of Major League Baseball: An Interactive Guide to the World of Sports, by Daniel J. Brush, David Horne, and Marc C.B. Maxwell (Savas Beatie). The book tries to note one exceptional feat for every numeral from one to one thousand. It’s a cute concept, but somewhat flawed. Some entries are legitimate, such as the aforementioned quartet; others are more esoteric and seem to be included to complete the theme (“The number of World Series titles [1] it takes to make your childhood dreams come true.” “The number of times [1,000] our brothers took us yard on our own field of dreams”). As a bonus feature, the “secret codes” embedded in the text allow readers to log on to the publisher’s Web site for exclusive material.