* Baseball beach reading, via ESPN

An “annotated” list of several general sports titles from ESPN’s D.J. Gallo includes baseball books such as:

• Baseball Places to See Before You Strike Out” by Josh Pahigian. Hey, who says I’m going to strike out, jerk? I was a two-time Little League All-Star. Two times! Be a bit more complimentary with your title and perhaps I will consider getting your book. Not buying it, mind you, but borrowing a copy at my local library for free.
• Yankee for Life: My 40-Year Journey in Pinstripes by Bobby Murcer. Gross. This guy could probably use a shower and some clean laundry.
• Dugout Wisdom: Life Lesson from Baseball by Dan Migala. If how to spit tobacco or spot hot chicks in the stands are the life lessons you seek, this is the book for you.
• Get in the Game: 8 Elements of Perseverance That Make the Difference by Cal Ripken Jr. It’s a good thing Ripken wasn’t No. 54 or 99 or something. This would have been a ridiculously long book.
• Red Sox Rule: Terry Francona and Boston’s Rise to Dominance by Michael Holley. Finally! A book about the Boston Red Sox. You know what I would like to read? A book about Red Sox players who golf.
• We Would Have Played for Nothing: Baseball Stars of the 1950s and 1960s Talk About the Game They Loved by Fay Vincent. No doubt all the ex-players included in this book talk about how they donated all of their baseball income to charity.
• Facing Clemens: Hitters on Confronting Baseball’s Most Intimidating Pitcher by Jonathan Mayo with a foreword by Roger Clemens. Soon to be followed by the book: Facing Clemens: Congressmen on Confronting Baseball’s Most Awesome Hero,” by Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-NC
• Living on the Black: Two Pitchers, Two Teams, One Season to Remember by John Feinstein. This book follows the 2007 seasons of New York pitchers Mike Mussina and Tom Glavine. I can’t wait for the 2008 follow-up about Phil Hughes and Oliver Perez called Dying on the White: Two Pitchers, Countless Meatballs, One Season to Forget.
• The Last Real Season: A Hilarious Look Back at 1975 — When Major Leaguers Made Peanuts, the Umpires Wore Red, and Billy Martin Terrorized Everyone by Mike Shropshire. I wasn’t alive in 1975, but my dad says that back then in the good old days, book titles stayed under 130 words.
• Yankee Stadium: The Official Retrospective by Al Santasiere. Thankfully this is not a scratch-and-sniff book.
• The Greatest Game: The Yankees, the Red Sox, and the Playoff of ‘78 by Richard Bradley. Wait a minute … I thought the Giants-Colts game in 1958 was the best game ever? Author fight! Author fight! They’ll draw their laptops at dawn at Starbucks.
• The 33-Year-Old Rookie: How I Finally Made it to the Big Leagues After Eleven Years in the Minors” by Chris Coste. Coste’s name wasn’t in the Mitchell report, so this book might actually have a surprising and inspirational story to tell.
• The View from the Upper Deck by DJ Gallo. This book isn’t brand-new like the rest of these. But any book that has stayed entrenched in the top 350,000 of the bestsellers list for an entire year must be really, really good.

* More on the Joe Jackson Museum

from the Columbia (SC) State.

I’ve often thought what I should do with my baseball library. Maybe this is an idea:

The museum is a collection of Jackson memorabilia and personal items. The library contains books donated by baseball aficionados across nation.

* Announcement: Baseball author forum at Cleveland Public Library

The annual convention of the Society for American Baseball Research takes place in the organization’s “home town” of Cleveland, later this month.

On Friday, June 27, from noon to 1 p.m., the Cleveland Public Library will cohost a Baseball Authors’ Roundtable with SABR in the Louis Stokes Wing Auditorium, and it is free and open to the public.

Three baseball authors will be featured: Dr. Charles Alexander, Rob Neyer, and Tom Swift. After their presentations there will be an opportunity to meet and greet the authors.

For more information on the convention, visit SABR.org.

* Review/Excerpt: Walkoffs, Last Licks and Final Outs

From the pages of Sports Illustrated.

* Announcement: Baseball Night at Barnes and Noble in Orland Park, IL

This Friday, June 13.

Please join us for a chance to win 2 free Cubs tickets, as well as meet author Lew Freedman of the highly acclaimed book,  Then Ozzie Said to Harold: The Best Chicago White Sox Stories Ever Told. Tinley Park High School’s Baseball Team will conduct a treasure hunt in-store, as well as the team players hosting a baseball clinic for its supporters. Announcement of the Cubs’ tickets winners will be held at 6 p.m. Author signing by Lew Freedman will promptly follow at 7 p.m.

For more information, contact Elisabeth Eiermann, Community Relations Manager at 708-226-5773.

* Summer reading suggestions from the Denver Post…

include Tales from the Colorado Rockies, The Summer Game by Roger Angell, and three “must-haves” (according to the writer): “October 1964, by the late, great David Halberstam; Babe: The Legend Comes to Life, by Robert W. Creamer; and Clemente, by David Maraniss.”

* Curses, Gelf-ed again

Gelf magazine occasionally features well-written pieces on baseball, primarily with players and others associated with the game.

Here are four such articles, examing the craft of some baseball authors:

• Ira Berkow on his mentor and friend, Red Smith
• Spike Vrusho on his book, Benchclearing: Baseball’s Greatest Fights and Riots
• Cait Murphy, author of Crazy ‘08
• Jonathan Mayo, author of Facing Clemens: Hitters on Confronting Baseball’s Most Intimidating Pitcher

* Review: Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Takes a Swing at Baseball

From Orlandosentinel.com. Sorry, but are the majority of baseball books “bathroom reading?” Certainly the sports page is, so by extension…

Think about it: most baseball content is relatively short, full of numbers, and don’t require the deep thought that comes with more time to digest, so to speak.

* A bizarre feature in Acrobat Reader

I came upon this completely by accident.

When you open a document in Adobe Acrobat Reader (I use version 8.1.2 and don’t know if this feature appears in earlier versions) and click on “View,” the damn program reads the document to you! It’s not foolproof, doesn’t work with every document — it seems to be best suited to straightforward text — and sounds very computerish-creepy, but it’s there for you.

* Spring SABR Biblio Committee Newsletter

for those interested in such things.

Spring 2008 Newsletter

This issue’s reviews and features include:

• Dreaming Baseball, by James Farrell. Reviewed by Leverett T. Smith, Jr.
• Baseball Magic, by Jay Martin. Reviewed by Robert W. Hamblin.
• Rob Neyer’s Big Book of Baseball Legends: The Truth, The Lies, and Everything Else, by Rob Neyer. Reviewed by yours truly.
• A profile of sports photographer Neil Leifer.
• A look at books in the post(?)-steroids era.

* Bits and pieces

Catching up a bit:

• Bob Murcer’s autobiography as reviewed on MLB.com
• The Griddle on Baseballtoaster.com considers Peter Morris’ latest, But Didn’t We Have Fun?
• wickedlocal.com, a Massachusetts Web site, reports on an appearance by author Jim Collins at a Cape Cod high school. Collins is the author of The Last Best League: One Summer, One Season, One Dream about the Chatham A’s 2002 season.
• As a reminder that baseball is not justed written abut on the major league level, Al Ogletree, a veteran college coach, pens his autobio in Take Two, Hit to Right, Slide Against the Wind: A Lifetime of Memories of the Pinstripe Teams of Coach Al; A Story of My Life.
• The New York Observer reviews The Crowd Sounds Happy: A Story of Love, Madness and Baseball, Nicholas Dawidoff’s memoir of his “father’s mental illness with America’s favorite pastime.

* Athletes get the word out about reading

From the weekly White Bear Lake (MN) Press, this article about the Twins’ Justin Morneau’s appearance at a local public school. Morneau said he liked reading about baseball. Shocker.

* ForeWord sidebar: “And now a word from our druggist”

[This appears as a sidebar to the "Class in Session" article in the May/June 2008 issue of ForeWord Magazine.]

And now a word from our druggist

Raymond Angelo Belliotti’s Watching Baseball, Seeing Philosophy devotes a chapter to Jose Canseco and the questionable use of performance enhancing drugs. The December 2007 release of the Mitchell Report—the exhaustive study by Major League baseball into the use of such substances—has opened the door for several new books on the subject.

With all the hubbub, one would think the use of such pharmaceuticals is a late twentieth-century phenomenon. But according to The Dark Side of Baseball: Gambling, Violence, Drugs and Alcohol in the National Pastime by Roger I. Abrams (Rounder), better playing through chemistry is almost as old as the game itself. James “Pud” Galvin, a ninteenth-century Hall of Fame pitcher, is on record as having taken testosterone injections in 1889. Abrams, a law professor at Northeastern University whose previous books include Legal Bases: Baseball and The Law and The First World Series and the Baseball Fanatics of 1903, investigates some other dubious behavior, including recreational drug and alcohol abuse, violence on and off the field, and gambling, which pre-dates even the infamous 1919 Black Sox Scandal in which a group of eight players conspired to throw the 1919 World Series. The upshot of Dark Side is that everything old seems to be new again.

MLB.com senior writer Jonathan Mayo conceived of Facing Clemens: Hitters on Confronting Baseball’s Most Intimidating Pitcher (Lyons Press) well before the Mitchell Report. As a result, the thirteen batters he interviewed might want to revise their expressions of praise and awe. Mayo offers a variety of players, from stars like Cal Ripken Jr. and Ken Griffey Jr. to raw rookies, including Clemens’ son, Koby, who faced his dad in the minor leagues. Mayo uses just the right amount of statistics to bolster his thesis without turning his book into something only “statheads” would find palatable.

In a reversal of popular opinion, Asterisk: Home Runs, Steroids, and the Rush to Judgment by David Ezra (Triumph). Bonds, who became the all-time home run leader in 2007, may be a bad teammate and a jerk, the author concedes, but that shouldn’t tar him with the steroid brush. Ezra, an attorney by profession, goes about knocking down the arguments that Bonds “juiced.” Whether his arguments are convincing or not remains for the objective reader to decide; rightly or not, others have already made up their minds.

* Baseball book roundup: The Noblesville (IN) Daily Times

Some new stuff, some old in this mini-review.

* Baseball book roundup: The New York Times

But the story on these books — Anatomy of Baseball, Branch Rickey: Baseball’s Ferocious Gentleman, and Baseball’s Greatest Hit: The Story of Take Me Out to the Ball Game – did not appear in the Sunday Book Review section, but rather these Big Apple-centric titles appeared in “Reading New York” on May 11.