* Bits and pieces

• The Daily Reflector ran this piece on Chasing Moonlight. Moonlight Graham was a North Carolina product.
• Bronx Banter ran a Q&A with Arnold Hano, author of the acclaimed A Day in the Bleachers, his account of the first game of the 1954 World Series.
• BaseballDigest.com’s review of Satchel, by Larry Tye. Upshot: “Before I read one page, I was impressed. Thoroughly researched, I thought this book might be the answer to so many poorly written biographies of baseball players. I thought Satchel would be the page-turner my summer reading list was missing. Alas, it was not.”
• The Washington Examiner’s review of Lew Paper’s Perfect. Upshot: “Baseball purists and non-fans alike will find a lot to enjoy in “Perfect,” a home run of a look back at Larsen’s gem, the golden age of baseball and the men who made the game great.”
• Will the madness never end? They’re still talking about the guilt or innocence of Shoeless Joe Jackson, as per Chicago Lawyer magazine.
• Will the madness never end, part II. “Alcor sues ex-employee to block Ted Williams cryonic expose,” in which said author, Larry Johnson, supposedly writes about the Splendid Splinter in Frozen: My Journey into the World of Cryonics, Deception, and Death. And more from John Kass of the Chicago Tribune.
• BostonRedThoughts reviews Mike Vaccaro’s compelling The First Fall Classic. Upshot: “Extremely well researched and written, The First Fall Classic is perfect book for a student of the game, or anyone looking for a great TRUE baseball story….” Jeff Frier’s interview with Vaccaro appear’s on BleacerReport.com.
• Here’s an interesting way to preview the post season: via baseball cards (which can be kept on a bookshelf).
• All Things Considered recently considered the best time for post-season games. Interesting thought processes that go into the decisions, which are made by the television gods with little concern for how the fans might be inconvenienced. The gentleman who was interviewed commented that his 10-year-old son has never seen a single pitch of a World Series game.  Most first pitches begin before nine o’clock; what time does that kid go to bed? You can hear the feature on the Oct. 18 podcast of Pop Culture, available on iTunes.

* Neo-classics?

Several new titles consider World Series past. Two — by Joe Posnanski and Mark Frost — deal with the 1975 Red Sox-Reds contest, which was highlighted by Carlton Fisk’s game-winner in the sixth game, the closest to that point Boston had come to winning a title since 1918.  The next most recent is Perfect, by Lew Paper, which examines the participants in Don Larsen’s 1956 no-hitter. Then we go all the back to that 1918 match-up between the Red Sox and the Cubs in Sean Deveney’s The Original Curse, which ponders whether Chicago threw those games, setting up the Black Sox scandal the following year. And finally, we have Mike Vaccaro’s The First Fall Classic, another Red Sox feature, this time against the New York Giants.

All that was a long way to get around to the fact that former NY Times sportswriter and author Gerald Eskenazi reviews the titles by Vaccaro, Posnanski, and Paper in this Wall Street Journal piece.

* Gut yom tov

Jewish for “Happy Holiday,”

As Jews around the world gather tonight to mark the holiest day on the calendar, George Vecsey offered this column in today’s Sunday Times.

Instead of putting the game at 8 p.m. — prime time, as the networks call it — ESPN and Major League Baseball are accommodating thousands of fans who at sundown will be observing Yom Kippur, the most solemn day in the Jewish calendar.

What Vecsey leaves out is that according to the schedule in the Red Sox media guide issued at the beginning of the season, the games was originally scheduled for one o’clock. But that’s just the cynic in me talking.

He notes,

Baseball cannot avoid conflicts. Games are played on Good Friday, the most solemn day on the Christian calendar. On Oct. 2, 1978, they played on Rosh Hashana, and Bucky Dent hit one into the screen at Fenway Park. Supply your own moral.

One year, baseball did get a message from on high. In 1986, the geniuses scheduled two Mets-Astros postseason games, for the night and next afternoon of Yom Kippur. Yours truly predicted a downpour of Biblical proportions, which in fact occurred, postponing the afternoon game. They got what they deserved.

Vecsey also pointed out that last year’s world Series featured a team led by Jewish ownership.

Last year, the Tampa Bay Rays made it into the postseason for the first time, but a potential fifth and deciding game was scheduled for Yom Kippur.

“The way I run my life, there was no decision to be made,” the team owner, Stuart Sternberg, said the other day. He was prepared to attend services, but the Rays won in four games, on their sweet run to the World Series.

“We’re not going to be able to do this all the time,” Sternberg said the other day, acknowledging that baseball may accommodate Jewish fans in the Northeast but not Jewish fans in Chicago or Los Angeles.

For fans who may have to miss a game because of religious conflicts, Sternberg offered some advice, “It’s not the end of the world.”

There is only one word to add to that: Amen.

* Ask the “experts”

Headline from The Star-Ledger (Newark), Tuesday, Aug. 25 (from the New York Daily News syndicate):

“Wagner unlikely to go to Red Sox”

Headline from The Star-Ledger (Newark), Wednesday, Aug. 26 (from the New York Daily News syndicate):

“Wagner relents, okays deadline deal to Boston”

* RK reviews: Red Sox oldies but goodies

Wife and daughter are at the Sawx-Tigers game at the moment, so I thought it appropriate to haul these three reviews out of mothballs. All appeared in A Red Sox Journal, published by The Buffalo Head Society in the late 1990s.

* * *

Murder at Fenway Park, by Troy Soos. Kensington Publishing: NY. 1994

Imagine your first day as a member of the Boston Red Sox in 1912. You rush to Fenway, anxious to meet your new teammates and get back to the game you love after being released and written off the year before, a 19-year-old has been.

But your train arrives late. You’ve missed the game. Everyone is gone and there’s no one there to welcome you. No one, that is, but a bloody corpse. There’s been a Murder at Fenway Park and now you have to not only prove to the authorities that you’re not the murderer, but also keep from becoming the next victim.

Murder is the first in Troy Soos’ series of “historical murder mysteries” featuring Mickey Rawlings, journeyman ballplayer.

Off to this inauspicious start, Rawlings must contend with cops who want to arrest him, a team official who thinks news of the death would be bad for attendance, and teammates resentful of any new young player. He must also learn the art of investigation on the fly, as it were, if he’s to clear his name. Poor Mickey; all he wants from life is to bat .250 and play in a World Series.

While trying to find the real culprit, Rawlings discovers the murder is connected with the seamy world of gamblers and corruption, stemming from the 1910 batting crown race between Ty Cobb and Nap Lajoie. The victim had been a pawn in that suspicious contest, which saw Lajoie win the title (and the trophy car that went with it) under questionable circumstances. Mickey’s crude investigations turn up a plethora of suspects, including Cobb himself. But when a second killing takes place, the evidence once again points at Rawlings and his time is running out.

Through all these distractions, Rawlings is nevertheless a ballplayer. 500s’ renderings of the games are a treat. The former research physicist at MIT painstakingly depicts Rawlings’ thought processes in his alert play in the field and as he takes his at bats against the likes of Walter Johnson and Jack Warhop. Soos’ eye for detail would make Ted Williams proud, not only in his depiction of the games, but of life in 1912 Boston as well.

Soos seamlessly blends in the players of the era and has no qualms about giving major roles to stars like Cobb and Hal Chase, another baseball bad boy of the day. He incorporates real events among the fictional, such as the sinking of the Titanic, a suffrage parade in New York, and Cobb’s suspension for beating a defenseless fan, which precipitated a one-day strike by his surprisingly supportive Tiger teammates.

Despite all his troubles, including finding some doctored evidence placed in his lodgings, Rawlings finds time to indulge in his favorite pastime, silent films. By attending the “flickers” he becomes reacquainted with a young lady who helps in his investigation and introduces him to Karl Landfors, a muckraking newspapem1an, who will become the Watson to Rawlings’ Holmes.

Subsequent installments in the Rawlings’ series include Murder at Ebbets Field, Murder at Wrigley Field (even though the Cubs’ ballpark wasn’t so named until years after the story setting), and, most recently Hunting a Detroit Tiger. Fans of both mystery and baseball will find all of these volumes entertaining. Soos’ fifth novel, The Cincinnati Red Stalkings, is due out next spring and the tireless author is already preparing the next adventure, which sees Rawlings in the uniform of the St. Louis Browns. Soos has also written a non-fiction book entitled Before the Curse: The Glory Days of New England Baseball, 1858-1918.

* RK author profile: Troy Soos

Apropos of the interview I did with Favorite PASTimes, here’s a profile on Troy Soos, author of the Mickey Rawlings series of historical baseball mysteries, I did for the Summer 1998 edition of The Mystery Review, a defunct Canadian publication.

* * *

The manicured grass of the baseball field doesn’t grow under Troy Soos’ feet. The Cincinnati Red Stalkings, the fifth in the Mickey Rawlings mystery series (Kensington Books), is due out this spring. And he’s already working on his next book. And the one after that.

Mixing well-researched fact with fiction, Soos depicts the travels and travails of Mickey Rawlings, a journeyman ballplayer in the early 20th century. Rawlings possesses a keen mind, if mediocre athletic skills. He must contend not only with the tenuous nature of the athlete’s career, with all its peculiarities and Runyonesque characters, but with becoming enmeshed in the murders that somehow crop up at each of his venues.

As a young man, Rawlings left home to pursue his dream to become a professional ballplayer. His journeys took him to factory towns where work was often secondary to playing for the company team. He caught the eyes of major league scouts and wound up on the Boston Braves of 1911, only to be released after the season. He hooked up with the crosstown Red Sox, where his exploits begin.

In his debut, Rawlings must deal with a Murder at Fenway Park. By the time his train arrives in Boston, he’s missed his first game with his new team. Except for the guard who lets him in, there’s no one left to greet him as he wanders the tunnels of the new stadium – no one except a bloody corpse. Now he has to prove to the authorities thathe’s not the murderer. Before long he will also need to be wary not to become the next victim.

During a recen t conversation with Soos from his home in Winter Park, Florida, the author discussed the complexities of the historical mystery novel.

Soos was born in New Jersey in 1957, two weeks after the Brooklyn Dodgers migrated to the West Coast. He attended his first major league game in 1963, primarily to see Duke Snider, a former Dodger winding down his career with the fledgling New York Mets. Watching his idol sparked a lifelong interest, not in modern baseball, but in the game’s history.

* Author Q&A: Bill Reynolds

Dugout Central conducted this interview with Reynolds, author of ‘78: The Boston Red Sox, A Historic Game, and a Divided City

* Alert: Redundancy in baseball books. Redundancy in baseball books.

The writer of this interesting piece by Clark Booth in the Dorchester Reporter brings up a good point: Why do we need so many books on the same subjects, such as the Boston Red Sox in 1978?

It’s been said lately that the strings are being pulled tightly in the publishing industry. Several factors are purportedly involved including the general decline of the printed word in our brave new internet driven world as well as the general malaise loosely termed global recession. Whatever, it’s said to be tough to get stuff published with titles already in the pipeline being dropped.

Maybe so, but you can’t prove it by the subjects of sports in general and baseball in particular. Not a week goes by without a feverish new tome on some subtle baseball footnote hitting the streets leaving us to wonder why anyone would want to read a whole book on such minor and irrelevant slices of reality let alone write or publish one.

Not that it’s all junk. Some is quite decently done and most of it is earnest. But there is too much of it and – above all – much too much of it is hopelessly redundant.

Booth also offers the two high-profile books about the Yankees as further evidence of what he considers unnecessary duplication: The Yankees Years, by Joe Torre and Tom Verducci, and Selena Roberts’ biography about Alex Rodriguez.

One point on which I disagree is the notion of just who should be eligible to write said books:

…why is it that anyone can write a book about baseball whereas on other topics you need to establish credentials and maybe even some authority, or at least a personal connection like ‘having been there’ or ‘done that’. Authors, especially those who have a little celebrity, are casually drawn to the task because it’s easy, harmless, and highly profitable. In the old days important writers would rip off a travel book to make quick bucks. Now they write about baseball.

It’s called research. What about all those books on Abraham Lincoln? Are those authors disqualified because they weren’t around when he delivered the Gettysburg Address?

* Author Q & A: Bill Reynolds

The author of ‘78: The Boston Red Sox, a Historic Game, and a Divided City, gets the treament from the good folks at HuggingHaroldReynolds (any relation?).

* But what have you done for me lately?

Ken Rosenthal of FOX Sports published this item on the latest struggles by David “Big Papi” Ortiz. Good thing he’s not a horse, or it would be “off to the glue factory with him.”

My first thought was that I was surprised to see he’s only 33; he’s one of these guys who seems like he’s been around forever.

Second, I was shocked that he has “only” 289 home runs (none this year, which is why the concern).

Finally, how long until we start hearing murmurs about PED? Isn’t it a sad state of affairs that this question will now automatically come up if a player with such a track record starts to show signs of a fall-off?

Ortiz was among the Boston Red Sox “idiots” who took advantage of their sudden popularity to publish their autobiographies a few seasons back.

You can read a good chunk of his book here.