* Now hear this: Roy White

Roy White was an all-star outfielder for the New York Yankees from 1965-79, finishing with 160 home runs, 758 RBI, and a .271 batting average and appeared in three ALCS and three World Series. White ranks among the top 10 Yankees in several offensive categories including, second in sacrifice flies, fifth in stolen bases, sixth in walks and intentional walks, seventh in games played, ninth in at bats, and eighth in times on base.

White was considered one of the classiest Yankees to don pinstripes, always the team player, never complaining. He recently published Then Roy Said to Mickey…: The Best Yankees Stories Ever Told (Best Sports Stories Ever Told), another volume in a long line of team histories from Triumph Books.

I was fortunate enough to have White as one of the coaches for my team at Yankees Fantasy Camp earlier this month. Even so many years removed from the game, the competitive juices still flow, as he guided us to a 5-3 record.

He took a few minutes from the hectic schedule to talk about his latest project with the Bookshelf:

Hear it here:

(apologies for the obviously inebriated photographer)

* YFC swag

Any of which you can put on or near a bookshelf.

We came back after our first game to find a brand new of Nike shower shows (see Bull Durham). The administrators had spoken earlier that morning about wearing such items to prevent athlete’s foot, so I thought this was just an ounce of prevention.

So imagine our surprise when after each game a new gift was waiting on our locker chairs including:

• A pair of Nike/Yankee shorts
• A Nike/Yankee t-shirt
• A pair of Nike running shoes (sensing a theme here?)
• A baseball signed by all the Yankees vets at the session
• A photo of your team
• A caricature of the late Johnny Blanchard, a staple of YFC
• A Nike/Yankee duffel, in which to put everything.

I’m not complaining, but if they had told us they’d be giving out all this suff, I could have packed a little lighter. Similarly, if I’d know they’d be doing our laundry on a daily basis, I could have gotten away with a carry-on.

* Fantasy Camp, from another blogger’s perspective

Spent the week of Nov. 16 at Yankee Fantasy Camp (much more on that later). Ran into Bryan Hoch, who covers the Yankees for MLB.com. I first met Hoch in the press box at Shea Stadium more than a decade ago when he was an enterprising 19-year-old and I was part-timing for STATS Inc.

Hoch was a tough player, pitching and playing second (as a lefty) and adding some pop to a lineup that finished 1-7.

He blogged about his experience at YFC, which you can read here.

* New titles from UNP

While many people look forward to the holiday catalogs that have already been stuffing mailboxes, or the seed catalogs that start arriving shortly after the new year, I look forward to the book catalogs that come every few months.

The latest from the University of Nebraska Press contains the regular inclusion of baseball titles that should be sure to follow the publisher’s suit of strong, well-researched products.

They include:

• Joe Cronin: A Life in Baseball, by Mark Armour. Cronin was one of those baseball lifers, beginning his career as a player before becoming a team executive and finally president of the American League. I may be wrong, but I can’t immediately recall another major bio on him in recent years, although Robert Gorman published a book in 2007 through Baldwin Books, which, if I’m not mistaken, is a self-publishing outfit. Cronin, a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame,  spanned several generations of ballplayers, so I’m quite interested in seeing how he’s portrayed. (Due in April.)
• 1921: The Yankees, the Giants, and the Battle for Baseball Supremacy in New York, by Lyle Spatz and Steve Steinberg. Yet another in a seemingly endless universe of New York-centric baseball books. I’m always fascinated with the huge popularity of baseball during the years before other entertainments — TV, talking movies, football — began pulling fans away. (April, although this one might be better suited for an October release, a la The First Fall Classic, The Machine, and Game Six, which all did well around World Series time this year.)
• Final Innings: A Documentary History of Baseball, 1972-2008, Dean Sullivan. If you haven’t read the first three in this series, do so. Sullivan goes through the arduous process of picking through all the highlights of the eras to find the most interesting, not just in terms of the sports stories, but in pop culture and even American history. The editor includes not just portraits of players and events, but documents (and there are thousands of them floating along behind the scenes) that are just as important as box scores. Not quite a scrapbook, not quite a straight narrative, but always entertaining. (June)
• UNP is also publishing what basically amounts to two reprints: On a Clear Day They Could see Seventh Place: Baseball’s Worst Teams, by George Robinson and Charles Salzbeger, and The Imperfect Diamond: A History of Baseball’s Labor Wars, by Lee Lowenfish. Both feature new introductions, and the latter a new epilogue. Imperfect should include more, in my opinion, since it was first published more than 25 years ago. There’s so much more to consider that such a book deserves more than a quick overview in a postscript.

* Back again

My apologies to those who missed me. I was away, doing my best impersonation of George Plimpton, as an embed at Yankees Fantasy Camp, an experience I will be blogging about here in the near future.

For those unfamiliar with the concept, Fantasy Camp offers regular Joes the opportunity to be little boys again — squared. They get to live a week not just as big leaguers, but as New York Yankees, playing against some memorable name from the franchise’s history. As I menrtioned in a previous post, Roy White, Ron Blomberg, and Fritz Peterson have all published books and were nice enough to spend some time with me to chat about their projects; look for audio interview with them in the days to come.

* Tampa Bay, safe and sound

Just arrived at the Tampa Bay Sheraton Suites, where I will spend the next week as an embedded journalist at Yankee Fantasy Camp, specifically writing about the new Kosher component.

Ran into an old “colleague,” Bryan Hoch, who covers the Yankees for MLB.com. I met Bryan years ago when he was a 19-year-old covering the Mets for his own website. Nineteen. I’ve got (fill in the blank) older than that. Anyway the weather is great and looking forward to getting down to business tomorrow as a member of the Bombers. No really, that’s my particular teams name.

And by the way, if you’re a nervous flyer like I am, you probably won’t want to pick Marty Appel’s biography about Thurman Munson as your in-flight reading material. Just a thought.

* This week (Nov. 16) in Sports Illustrated

Surprise, surprise: The Yankees. NOT.

Although Tom Verducci did write the story about the Yankees’ latest championship, as well as this sidebar on the upcoming hot stove league.

And in a case of raining on the Yankees’ parade, this week’s “Sign of the Apocalypse”:

New York City office workers who ran out of confetti during the Yankees’ World Series parade instead threw confidential financial documents, including pay stubs and bank statements.

* Bits and pieces: World Championship edition

• Dropped by the local Barnes and Noble at lunch today. Almost shocked to see only one “quicky” publication about the Yankees’ latest championship. The New York Post published The Best, a paperback volume. I never liked this type of publication. It seems like a money grab since the stuff for the most part is just culled from the newspaper archives. [Update: USA Today and Sports Illustrated are among a few others that have published similar publications.]
• There have been numerous references to the Yankees in places where you might not expect to see them. The Wall Street Journal posted this article about “Japanese Baseball’s Best Day Ever.” I always get a kick when the sports pages refer to an athlete as “Mr.” So bloody polite. Meanwhile, former George W. Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer contributed this “horns of a dilemma” piece for Sunday’s Week in Review section. (Somewhere in the recesses of my mind I faintly recall an economic indicator that predicts the stock market goes one way if an American League team wins the World Series and the other if its a National League team, but I forget which is which. A little help?)
• In the heat of the celebration on Friday, The Brian Lehrer Show featured this segment on the Yankees and the Series MVP, Hideki Matsui. “The ticker tape parade for the Bronx Bombers is today, and the star of the show is World Series MVP Hideki Matsui, who exemplifies a particular brand of baseball that’s different from the rest of his team. WNYC’s own baseball fanatic (and softball team co-captain) Rex Doane with Andrew Jenks, director and producer of the documentary “The Zen of Bobby V,” talk about the differences between the American and Japanese baseball.”

* As Steve Martin used to say…

“But the most amazing thing of all: I get paid for doing this” (the closing lines for one of the comedian’s songs during his heyday in the late 1970s).

I bring it up because, once again, it goes to the folly of using sports pundits as a source of reliable information. At least when it comes to betting on games.

One of these days, I’m going to host a website that annotates Pardon the Interruption, to fill in the missing gaps and explain the references that might escape the casual viewer. Don’t get me wrong, I love the show, but people like Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon come across as so adamant in their pronouncements that it’s almost funny to deconstruct. Of course this comes after the fact, but even so. (Fill-in host Bob Ryan of the Boston Globe will frequently end a prediction by calling it the “lock di tuti locks,” which is kind of funny since I presume he’s Irish.)

So I’m listening to the podcast of yesterday’s PTI in which the lead story is about Game Six of the World Series (Congrats to the Yankees, by the way).

Here’s the transcript, with my footnotes for ease of reading:

TK: Game Six starts in just a little bit from Yankee Stadium. Andy Pettitte is pitching on three days’ rest, the great Pedro Martinez,¹ pitching on five days’ rest. Wilbon, you don’t like pitchers on short rest, so I assume you’re going to take my boy, Pedro.

MW: Yes, Tony, yes I am. Pettitte’s 37 years old, right? Thirty-seven?

TK: Well, Pedro’s got to be 37¹ also…

MW: Okay, fine, but Pedro’s not pitching on three days’ rest. My point is, if you’re 37 years old and you’re going through whatever Pettitte’s career — I mean a distinguished career of 15, 16 years…

TK: Fabulous post-season record… ²

MW: …you don’t do this thing, okay? You are not a hulking left tackle of a man like CC Sabathia, who seems to be able to, initially, pitch on three days’ rest. Why are you doing this?

TK: Pedro is much smaller than Pettitte. ³

MW: Pedro once again: not pitching on three days’ rest, pitching on five days’ rest.

TK: I think the critical factor is not so much the amount of rest, although that’s part of it. The weather is going to be in the 40s and these guys are almost in their 40s. I don’t think either pitcher will go five full [innings].

MW: Wow.

TK: I think this is going to be one of those 9-8 sorts of games⁴ and I think the bullpens will be in early and the bullpens on both sides aren’t very good until you get to Mariano Rivera⁵, and I don’t know that the Yankees will be able to get to [him].⁶

MW: That scenario makes sense, given the weather. But, Tony, if Pedro Martinez, having talked all the smack he’s talked and … to have been as great a pitcher as he’s been, I expect Pedro to go out there and get a quality start of seven innings, two or three earned runs… ⁷

TK: Seven innings!

MW: Yes.

TK: He’s like 90!

MW: Five days’ rest, Tony.

TK: I’m telling you, I don’t think either guy gets out of the fifth.⁸

MW: Pedro has been selling woof tickets {editor’s note: ?] for a week.

TK: I like him, but I don’t think he gets out of the fifth.

MW: Let’s see him pitch.

Later in the show, Kornheiser and Wilbon repeat their predictions to guests Tim McCarver and Joe Buck, the announcers for the broadcast on FOX, who have their own opinions, which I won’t go into here (you can listen to the podcast on iTunes).

So can we take away from this? Basically, in the majority of instances, these guys can’t forecast the outcome any better than you or I. Except they get on the air and are often paid handsomely for getting it wrong.

---

¹ 38, actually.

 

² 18-9 with a 3.90 ERA in 40 games. Pettitte appeared in one National League Divisional series, 11 ALDS, seven AL Championship Series, 1 NLCS, and eight World Series. Not too shabby.

³ Pettitte: 6′5″, 235. Martinez: 5′11″, 170.

⁴ The Yankees broke out to leads of 2-0, 4-1, and 7-1 before winning 7-3.

⁵ After Martinez and Durbin allowed the seven runs, four Phillies relievers combine for no runs (which, although statistically correct, is misleading since Happ was not penalized for the two inherited runners he allowed to score). Meanwhile, the two relievers preceding Rivera allowed just one hit.

⁶ Yes, they did, even bringing him in in the eighth inning, to record the final five outs. While the four run lead, however, he did not earn a save.

⁷ Martinez did not have a quality start, which is six innings or more allowing three earned runs or less. He was gone, as Kornheiser predicted, by the fifth.

⁸ Pettitte didn’t get a quality start either, but he did pitch into the sixth inning.

* A nice distraction

Sorry I’ve been away and neglectful. I’m a bit excited about going to Yankees Fantasy Camp in November. I’ll be writing about the experience for my other blog as well as the NJ Jewish News and a few other outlets because of the new kosher component, which offers kosher food and special programming for Jewish Sabbath observers.

This all came about relatively quickly. I just got permission from the Camp administrators last week. The packet they sent included a 12-week training program designed to lead up to the first day, so I’m already nine weeks behind. Fortunately I think I’m in fairly good enough baseball shape that I can catch up.

Scheduled to appear at the camp (that I know of ) are authors Reggie Jackson (Sixty Feet, Six Inches) and Marty Appel (Munson) so I hope to be able to grab a few minutes with them.

The itinerary indictaes a couple of autograph sessions. I must admit, I’ve never been that excited about getting some celebrity to sign a piece of paper (unless it’s really personalzied, not just a pro forma “Dear Ron, Good Luck, M. Mantle”). I prefer to have a picture taken with people as “proof”  that I met them.

That’s it for now. Off to take a few swings.