What Baseball Books are You Reading Now?

I thought it would be fun to see if we could get this off the ground . . . stealing the idea from the What Are You Reading Now? group, a simple thread where people talk about the baseball books, either fiction or non-fiction they're currently reading (or, to start off, that they've recently read).

OK, so, so far this year I've read Baseball for British Youth, (see the Baseball in England thread) and Felipe Alou . . . My Life and Baseball, which was written in 1967 and gives a good picture of Alou's childhood in the Dominican Republic and his early career with the Giants and Braves, as well as his active religious life.

I'm also going through the New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract a little at a time.

What is everybody else reading?

I just read The Joy of Keeping Score, a short history of scorekeeping in baseball with lots of interesting photos of old scorecards. My next baseball related book will probably be Baseball Between the Numbers: Why Everything You Know About the Game Is Wrong.

Well, I'm waiting for the season to start before I pick up a baseball book. But I have Late Innings by Roger Angell and Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life by Richard Ben Cramer in mind.

> fleela, I have the Joy of Keeping Score but haven't read it yet. I've never heard of Baseball Between the Numbers. Who wrote that one?

> dhcaikin, I read the excerpts of the Creamer Dimaggio book in the New Yorker when the book first came out. It doesn't portray DiMaggio too flatteringly.

>4 rocketjk:
It's from The Baseball Prospectus.

I guess it is that time of year, need to pull out the Bill James and dust off the hardball books... I just picked up The Soul of Baseball about Buck O'Neil, and The Jackie Robinson Story usually get a spring-time read from me...

I'm usually reading 3-4 baseball books at any one time. Just finished Mets by the Numbers, The Harvard Boys, Willie Mays: Art in the Outfield, and Extra Innings (about amateur over-30 baseball). Right now I have Your Brain on Cubs, and Hammerin' Hank, George Almighty and the Say Hey Kid on my desk. FYI, I try to keep up with the most current baseball publishing info on my blog: rksbaseballbookshelf.wordpress.com.

Ron, I will check out your blog. Thanks!

btw, I see you're in Montclair. I grew up in Maplewood and my wife's from Caldwell (although we met here in San Francisco. Go figure!)

Just finished A Game of Brawl and Tris Speaker:The Rough And Tumble Life Of A Baseball Legend. And I am currently reading a biography of Jimmie Foxx The Pride of Sudlersville

Kevin

How was the Speaker book? The Foxx biography looks really interesting. I've got Hank Greenberg's autobiography on my short list.

The Speaker book was very good. He was a very good player that doesn't get a lot of mention.

I got the Foxx book because he has always been a favorite of mine. It goes into detail about his childhood, and progresses through his career, and life after baseball.

Both very good books.

Kevin

Over the weekend I began Frank Frisch: the Fordham Flash, an as-told-to autobiography (with J. Roy Stockton) published in 1962. It's engagingly written, if a little short, so far, in details. Still, some nice anecdotes and a great first-hand account of what it was like to play under John McGraw.

We (Cleveland, Ohio) just had the SABR conference. Looking from the outside has made renewed my reading of baseball books and all things baseball. I am starting with The Ultimate Baseball Book edited by Daniel Okrent and Harris Lewine. I can't wait to start reading it!!!

Well, I finished Frank Frisch: the Fordham Flash last night and must report that all of my earlier reservations about the book melted away as I read. Lots of great stories and lots of great observations about baseball in the 20s, 30s and 40s. A great read, highly recommended for baseball fans if you can find it.

I'm reading Jules Tygiel's Past Time: Baseball as History. It welds American cultural history and baseball together beautifully. It makes baseball accessible to those interested in history and it illuminates history for those interested in baseball. I'm considering it as a text for my course on baseball in American culture.

BaseballDiva, I'm going to have to go looking for that one! Do you mind if I ask where you teach? (I'll understand entirely if you'd prefer not to answer that in public.) From the looks of your tags, it would appear you're either in NYC or have some New York roots. (I'm in California, but I, too, have a "Yankees" tag!) My sister-in-law teaches current politics and sociology (I'm being general; I'm not sure of the exact topics) at Fordham, and I'm going to tell her about the Tygiel book, as well.

I'm now reading British Baseball and the West Ham Club, an interesting account of the attempts to get baseball started in England.

I'd like to suggest the baseball literary magazine Elysian Fields for anyone that loves to read baseball books. It's published in St. Paul and has been around for about 20 years. Great historical articles, literary fiction, essays, book reviews, etc.

I'll second stuart's recommendation. I don't subscribe to Elysian Fields, but I do have a few copies in my library. They're full of great stories and articles.

Right now I am reading Designated Hebrew: the Ron Blomberg Story. It's Blomberg's own "as told to" account of his time as the first Jewish Yankee since the 1930s and the attention he's received from the stroke of dumb luck that made him the first player to come to the plate as a designated hitter. Not a great book, but interesting and fairly entertaining.

I teach at a CNY community college. The course is a social science survey course that relates baseball to America's culture. Tygiel's book is wonderful at connecting what is happening in the US at a given time and how that is borne out in baseball. It does a better job that Ken Burns's documentary.

# 20> Thanks! By the way, as I said I was going to, I did go looking for the Tygiel book. And I found it. On my baseball shelf (as in, I already own it)! Onto the short TBR list it goes!

Over the weekend, I finished Charles C. Alexander's book, Breaking the Slump: Baseball in the Depression Era. Really enjoyed it.

This time of year, up til the start of the baseball season, is prime baseball reading time for me.

I'd be curious to hear what other baseball books you're all reading.

Because I had enjoyed it so much myself, I used the Alexander book for my first baseball history and research class (2005) in a community education series sponsored by our local college. The book and class were well-received and have led to five more baseball classes, with another planned for this fall (2009).

Right now I'm reading "Baseball and the Baby Boomer" by Talmadge Boston. I had enjoyed his "1939: Baseball's Pivotal Year," published about ten years ago. I just finished "Chief Bender's Burden" by Tom Swift--well done and informative.

For a different take on the 1919 Series, I suggest "Red Legs & Black Sox" by Susan Dellinger.

In baseball fiction, most are familiar with W. P. Kinsella's "Shoeless Joe," from which the movie Field of Dreams was adapted. Less-well-known is Kinsella's "Iowa Baseball Confederacy." I enjoyed it more than "Shoeless." "Hanging Curve" by Troy Soos is another lesser-known but excellent piece of baseball fiction.

Bill Werber, who at 100+ was the oldest-living major leaguer until his death on January 22, 2009, self-published two books: "Circling the Bases" and "Hunting is for the Birds." They're hard to find but great reads. Bill's SABR collaboration with C. Paul Rogers ("Memories of a Ballplayer") was a worthwhile must-read for me--thankfully it was done before Bill passed on.

jzerby, I'm also reading Baseball and the Baby Boomer, though I'm not too far into it. Just read the first chapter about Mantle and Piersall.

How are you liking it?

It's excellent--I'm considering using it for my next baseball history and research class in Ocrober. The regulars there are all in the right age group . . .A nice tribute chapter to Bart Giamatti . . .

I just rediscovered this site last evening after happening upon it and and entering three books a couple years ago. It's amazing what it will do and how well-designed it is. I opted quickly today for a lifetime membership and have close to a hundred of my books catalogued now.

The feature allowing a member to browse others' collections is especially useful, and I see that you and I have several books in common just out of the ones I've entered so far. I had never found a way to discuss baseball books in any depth outside SABR, but this site certainly provides it. I also collect other sports books and books in several other areas, so the site opens that up as well.

I'm glad to hear the Baseball and Baby Boomers is good. I've also got another, more scholarly baseball book going right now. It's about the Cubs, Wrigley Field etc called Northsiders.

Two others I expect to read soon are El Birdos (about the Cardinals) and also the one about the history of baseball telecasts.

I just read Josh Hamilton's Beyond Belief, an Early Reviewers book, posted my review here and at my blog.

I'm reading It Was Never About the Babe, which takes the Red Sox organization to task, blunders and stupidity from the start.

I did a course on Kinsella and agree that The Iowa Baseball Confederacy is superior to Shoeless Joe, which people who've only seen the movie will find it much different. Magic Time was another good Kinsella read.

Sort of a baseball book . . .

I just started "Strat-O-Matic Fanatics: the Unlikely Success Story of a Game that Became an American Passion" by Glenn Guzzo. (touchstones don't seem to be working for this one)

It's the story of the inventor (and the invention and development) of Strat-O-Matic Baseball, a great baseball dice game I played as a kid and that I still love to play to this day. Any other Strat players around here?

Just getting into The Wrong Season: memoir of a die-hard (Mets(ick)) fan living through a mediocre season; I can halfway relate.

I have just started Jane Heller's new book, Confessions of a She-Fan. Heller, a Yankees fan, announced, in the NY Times, her decision to divorce the Yankees on grounds of mental cruelty.

After the hubbub died down, in an attempt to figure out whether she was a bandwagon fan or a true fan, Heller and her husband travelled with the Yankees and went to every game during the rest of the 2007 season.

Well I've just begun Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend by Larry Tye to try and rescue me from the depressing reality of 2009 baseball. I trust Satchel's stuff...

I just finished Alyssa Milano's Safe at Home: Confessions of a Baseball Fanatic.
I really enjoyed it. If you're not familiar with Alyssa, she grew up on "Who's the Boss" and was a star of "Charmed". She's a HUGE baseball fan, VERY knowledgeable and writes a blog for MLB.
She really understands the game.

I highly recommend it to any new fans of the game, but even long-time fans will get something out of it.

I say we elect her Commissioner!

Last night I started The Kid from Tomkinsville by John R. Tunis. This is a reread from my junior high days. I guess the Tunis books are considered YA literature, but the first few pages are so well and evocatively written, there's no compromise in quality. A bonus is the fact that the book is written in 1940, so it gives a picture of the U.S and of baseball, on the eve of our involvement in World War II.

I just read If I Never Get Back, by Darryl Brock, about a guy who goes back to 1869 and hangs out with the original Cincinnati Red Stockings. If you have any interest in 19th-century baseball and/or enjoy time travel stories, it's a must-read.

I finished The Kid from Tomkinsville last week and, unusually for me, jumped immediately into another baseball book. I've just started Satchel: the Life and Times of an American Legend, the new biography of Satchel Paige written by Larry Tye. The first 50 pages are quite good, giving, in addition to a good, brief picture of Paige's childhood, also an overview of Jim Crow conditions in Mobile, Alabama, in the first decades of the 20th century and a quick history of the development of the Negro Leagues. Good stuff.

To rocketjk et al. :

The Kid from Tomkinsville and its sequel ",,,in the World Series" are perhaps the best sports books, fiction or non-fiction that I have read at any age. My age at that reading happened to be pre-high school, an age at which I had read many other sports novels (mostly baseball and football) and very little of introductions to "good" lliterature.

Tunis's books were so realistic that a very rare slip stood out. The only sllip I can think of, in fact, is that the Dodgers, the protagonist team, seemed to always have the same umpire in every game that was described. Whihc, of course is possible, but highly improbable, as teams of umpires were rotated then, as now. (usually with no 2nd base umpire --just 3 umpires altogether for games import ant in the standings, and 2 for less important ones.

Hey, Roland, Thanks for the comment. I never noticed the point about the umpire. Interesting! By the way, there's also a third Roy Tucker book, The Kid Comes Back. If I remember correctly from my junior high days, the place he "comes back" from is combat in Europe during World War II. Anyway, I'm going to be re-reading World Series and The Kid Comes Back sometime over the next few months, I think.

To Rocketjk:

The funny thing is that I do remember the umpire's (nick)name: "Old Stubblebeard" -- and the names of a few other characters. Eddie Davis was the 2b
that the Kid's brother replaced. Gene Miller (?) was the Indians pitcher, based on BobFeller. Carey Thomas was a relief pitcher, based on someone of that era,, probably not an Indian. (Managers ;just sent in whomever they thought was most needed at the time; there were no closers or set-up men.

just read Steve Garvey's childhood baseball memoir/life lessons book, My Bat Boy Days, and now I'd like to find a good book on Al Kaline -- any suggestions?

To Teacher Dad (#39)

I haven't read any book on Al Kaline, or even known that there were any until looking at this thread.

But I notice, as you may have, too, that Al Hershberg wrote a book on Kaline (as well as books on several others, mostly American Leaguers: Frank Howard, Jackie Jensen, and Frank Robinson.

When high school age, I read, or at least scanned his The (Boston) Braves: the Pick and the Shovel
and The Red Sox: the Bean and the Cod (terrible title!) The former picks up the story of the Braves about 1946 when new ownership under Lou Perini et al. made a contender out of a perennial "2nd division" team. Perini & Co. brought a NL pennant to Boston, but also, only 4 years later took the Braves away to Milwaukee.
A pretty good writer, as I remember it.

Just finished As They See 'Em: A Fan's Travels In The Land Of Umpires by Ny Times reporter Bruce Weber. I recommend it. It isn't quite what I'd expect in some ways -- the beginning is concerned with Weber's time as a student in umpire school (for the book) and the book seems to wander a bit from chapter to chapter. Nonetheless, it is engaging, and is rather amusingly sympathetic to the umpires (who it must be said have a tough lot, especially as so very few professional umpires make it to the majors) while never going too far overboard.

I just started the second book in John R. Tunis' Roy Tucker series, World Series. This is the sequal to The Kid from Tomkinsville (see above). So far it promises to be as good as the first book.

Well, I enjoyed the first two Tunis books so much that now I'm reading the third Roy Tucker book, The Kid Comes Back and enjoying that one, too.

I just read The Machine: A Hot Team, a Legendary Season, and a Heart-stopping World Series: The Story of the 1975 Cincinnati Reds and thought it was fantastic. I'm not a Reds fan (actually I follow the Red Sox who lost to the Reds that year in a classic World Series) but I just couldn't put it down.

"The Machine. . . the 1975 Cincinnati Reds..."
(#44)

The '75 WS was during my 2nd year in Hawai'i. My
brother-in-law knew I'm a Red Sox fan, and invited us to see TV for some of the games. I didn't see the whole series, but much more than I saw of the '74 Oakland A's: just heard the final result some hours after it ended. Disappointing result, the 1975--3rd of 4 20th c. WS losses by the Red Sox during my lifetime. They got off to a much better 21st c. start with sweeping the WS in '04 and '07 -- but I imagine a good book could be made of it.

I'm looking forward to reading The Machine.

My current baseball book is Chasing Moonlight: The True Story of Field of Dreams' Doc Graham by Brett Friedlander.

Field of Dreams is my favorite baseball movie and Moonlight Graham was the most intriguing character in it.

Last night I began The Incredible Mets by Maury Allen. This is the story of the Mets' 1969 Chamionship season, as told by Allen who was a beat writer following the team all season. The book came out only a month after the conclusion of the '69 Series, so the observations are first-hand and fresh. Happily, Allen is also a good writer.

@46

I hear Moonlight Graham only makes an appearance in half a page of Chasing Moonlight: The True Story of Field of Dreams' Doc Graham.

Huh? The whole book is about him.

A lot of the information is from other sources, though. Minor league baseball records. Remembrances from the town's newspaper editor who knew him personally. There are very few direct records from him. One or two letters. Maybe that's what they meant?

It's a fairly short bio. Less than 200 pages.

I love this time of year when I start hearing about the new crop of baseball books.

Three new ones I've heard about, so far, include:

Willie Mays: The Life, the Legend by James S. Hirsch.

A bio of Roger Maris called Roger Maris: Baseball's Reluctant Hero by Tom Clavin.

Also, Fifty-Nine in '84 by Edward Achorn, about Charles “Old Hoss” Radbourn's 1884 season when he won 59 games.

#31> Well I am quite surprised to find that I never came on this thread and posted when I read Satchel: the Life and Times of an American Legend by Larry Tye last year. I thought it one of the best books of any sort that I read in 2009, and certainly one of the very best sports biographies I've ever read. A well-written, fascinating book.

#50> Linda, I would definitely add the Paige bio to any list of good new baseball books.

51> Rocket, Satchel was wonderful and, as you say, deserves to be considered one of the best sports bios ever written.

I don't remember if I posted that I was reading Sixty Feet Six Inches by Bob Gibson and Reggie Jackson (with Lonnie Wheeler). Great insight and a fun read from two masters of the art.

#52> abealy, I heard Gibson and Jackson being interviewed together on NPR when Sixty Feet was first published. It does sound great.

I am reading Say Hey: the Autobiography of Willie Mays. This is not the current bio that Mays is now being interviewed about, but one written in 1988. I'm about a quarter of the way through and enjoying it a great deal.

I finished Say Hey a while back and my review remains the same as my initial impression. Good but not great. I'm assuming the more current Mays bio is better.

I just finished reading Top of the Heap: a Yankees Collection edited by Glenn Stout. This was a collection of newspaper articles and columns, presented chronologically, covering key moments in Yankees history, from the team's creation through their loss in the 2001 World Series (a touching article about Game 7 of that series being Paul O'Neill's final game).

Right now I'm reading Stump's Cobb and have been perusing the Literary Baseball Anthology, but I just ordered The Bullpen Gospels, which I'm excited to read once Amazon delivers it next week.

Wow, I just stayed up until 2 AM reading Cardboard Gods Just a fantastic read about a lonely kid growing up in the Seventies and the baseball cards that got him through.

Cardboard Gods def on my list; just picked up Honus and Me.

my all time fav baseball book is SLICK, my life in and around baseball by Whitey Ford, and when it comes to fiction there are none better the WP Kinsella, there is the obvious "Shoeless Joe", by my fav is "The Iowa Baseball Confederacy"

Slick is on my baseball shelf, awaiting my attention, along with a couple dozen other books, I'm afraid.

I just finished Baseball's All-Time Greats: The Top Fifty Players by Mac Davis. The top 50 players were as of 1970, when the book was first published. Short and sweet bios of some of the greatest stars from the late 1800s through the 1960s. It was fun reading through those bios and being reminded of the lives of some of the early heroes. Also, the edition I have was republished in 1984 and included an addendum featuring the history and highlights of the All-Star Game. A quick and fun trip through time.

I've finally gotten back to my baseball shelf, last night starting Diz: The Story of Dizzy Dean and Baseball During the Great Depression by Robert Gregory. The first 25 pages or so are very promising indeed, as the writing is very engaging.

I finished Diz: The Story of Dizzy Dean and Baseball During the Great Depression last night. It was good but not great. My review is on the book's main page.

Havenʻt gotten them yet--probably will be from the Public Library System, and thereʻs about a 50% chance it will have them-- but I have added to
my Wish List 2 Wes Singletary titles: Al Lopez
and The First Florida Big League baseball players.

Also Bill Jamesʻs compilation an big league managers.

fleeta, thanks for the info on The Joy of Keeping Score! I had no idea someone had written a book on that subject.

I learned to keep score many years ago, I must have been 10 or 11 and was and still am a LA Dodger fan. Kept it up for about 6 years or so then gave it up.

One of my treasures, now gone with my baseball card collection, was my scorecard of a Sandy Koufax no hitter in 1963. It was all the more special because it was my first time seeing a game in Dodger Stadium and we were playing the SF Giants... Juan Marichal was pitching for them.

Still a baseball fan today, and still a Dodger fan.... but don't think I'll ever see a pitcher as dominant as Sandy Koufax was in his short career.

Just finished 27 Men Out, Baseball's Perfect Games by Michael Coffey each chapter a nice story about the perfect games thrown by such pitchers like Sandy Koufax, Catfish Hunter, Don Larsen, Jim Bunning, etc. Not just a play by play of the game but describes how the pitcher got there and his teams season the year of that memorable game.
I'm now reading Shoeless Joe by W.P. Kinsella

Today I started The Empire Strikes Out: How Baseball Sold U.S. Foreign Policy and Promoted the American Way Abroad by Robert Elias.

Recently finished Satchel: the life and times of an American legend by Larry Tye.

Currently reading an Early Reviewer book, Summer of Shadows by Jonathan Knight, about the 1954 Cleveland Indians pennant drive, and the Dr. Sam Shepherd murder case which happened that same summer.

Also listening to the audio mystery novel, Murder at Wrigley Field by Troy Soos.

#67> I loved that Satchel Paige bio.

I have recently read Cardboard Gods by Josh Wilker, The Extra 2%: How Wall Street Took a Major League Baseball Team From Worst to First by Jonah Keri, and Nobody's Perfect by Armando Galarraga and Jim Joyce.

I have the Roy Campanella book, Campy, the recent book by John Thorn Baseball in the Garden of Eden and a book about the longest minor league game ever, Bottom of the 33rd, by Dan Barry.

How about baseball Stephen King style? Blockade Billy is a dark humor short story about a rookie of the year you've never heard of...

btw, I gave up on The Empire Strikes Out after about 50 pages or so. Too much ax grinding, too little scholarship.

I'm currently reading "Summerland" by Michael Chabon, not your typical baseball book, but baseball plays a huge role in this *adult/youth) fantasy novel

Several baseball books read recently:

For Love of the Game, Michael Shaara's last novel.
Worth the Wait: Tales of the 2008 Phillies by Jayson Stark -- loved it!
Women at Play: the story of Women in Baseball by Barbara Gregorich.

Over on the 75 Challenge group, there's been a very active "Spring Training" thread of baseball reading going this month. If you want to check out the titles discussed there:
http://www.librarything.com/topic/108172

Today I started A Whole Different Ball Game: the Sport and Business of Baseball by Marvin Miller. I'm very much looking forward to this.

I just came back from the used bookstore with Last Days of Summer by Steve Kluger and Sometimes You See It Coming by Kevin Baker. Any thoughts on either novel? I plan to read both, but which should I pick up first?

#75> Sorry I can't help. I'm not familiar with either of those books. Hope they're both good!

#75 I haven't read either of those, sorry.

Today, I started reading an ER book, Before the Machine by Mark Schmetzer, which is about the 1961 pennant-winning Cincinnati Reds. Pretty good so far.

The first baseball card I ever got was of Gordy Coleman (1965 Topps) and I'm happy, at long last, to learn more about his career.

I just finished Indian Summer: the forgotten story of Louis Sockalexis, the first Native American in Major League Baseball by Brian McDonald. I thought it was very good.

I've been wandering through Baseball in the Garden of Eden by John Thorn. A very convincing read about the early days of baseball and how we've gotten so much of that history wrong.

I also just bought for my kindle Bottom of the 33rd by Dan Barry — the story about the longest game ever played. Anyone read it yet?

I'm listening to the audio book of The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood.

(Don't know why I can't get the touchstone to work with the subtitle included in the brackets, since the subtitle is included in the touchstone. Go figure.)

It is truly remarkable how many great baseball books are out there. I just read "Playing with the Enemy", a truly amazing book about playing baseball overseas during WWII. It is one of those stories after reading that totally blows you away and makes you wonder how it took this long to tell. I highly recommend this book!

Ken Jacobi

Author of “Going with the Pitch: Adjusting to Baseball, School, and Life as a Division I College Athlete”

Read Iron Man McGinnity: A Baseball Biography by Don Doxsie a while ago. My review is here.

Continuing to work my way through Baseball in the Garden of Eden by John Thorn.

#79> abealy -- Reading Bottom of the 33rd right now (about two-thirds through......you're probably done by now). Very enjoyable read.......he spends more time on the back stories than the actual game, which keeps it interesting.

I'm reading an advance copy (due out in Oct) about the building of Fenway Park 100 years ago, along with that first season there. Fenway 1912 by Glenn Stout.

Very interesting, especially as to how the Red Sox had to adapt to the new dimensions/features of their new ballpark. Then, right before the World Series, they changed the park, adding a lot of new seats. It'll be interesting to see whether/how they adapted to the changes.

Just starting The Extra 2%: How Wall Street Strategies Took a Major League Baseball Team from Worst to First. So far it's a very entertaining read.

I'm reading Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero, by David Maraniss. It's one of the best baseball-related books I've read in a long time.

Waiting for Teddy Williams by Howard Frank Mosher, its a coming-of-age story about a Vermont boy that becomes a baseball player. Something a little different from the bios, etc. The best one before this was The Bottom of the 33rd by Dan Berry.

How did you like The Bottom of the 33rd? I've heard some good things about it.

I really enjoyed it. He ties in all the background with the actual game. My review is at librarything.com/work/10982137/book/75743877 It's one part of my review of two baseball books on my blog booksmoviesandgames.wordpress.com

Sorry, but I can't figure out how to do links in threads. But you can copy and paste if you want to see them.

Nice review!

Thanks! I wrote it first for our library's newsletter.

I'm about a third of the way through Real Grass, Real Heroes: Baseball's Historic 1941 Season by Dom DiMaggio. So far it's rather ho hum. Lots of rhapsodizing about the beauty of the game and the simplicity of life, etc., in that era, but precious few interesting "insiders" details about being on the Red Sox that year.

Just starting Diamond Ruby by Joseph Wallace.

Pitchers and catchers are reporting this week!

I'm starting Wait Till Next Year by Doris Kearns Goodwin. It's part of a "Spring Training" group read that's beginning over on the 75 Challenge group. All are welcome:

http://www.librarything.com/topic/132629

Last month, I read a couple of really good baseball novels: The Might Have Been and The Art of Fielding. Now, I'm on to some nonfiction stuff: Moneyball (finally) and The Extra 2%.

I'm always interested to see what people think of Moneyball. Hope you'll stop back to let us know.

I just started The Yankee Years by Joe Torre and Tom Verducci. The opening 75 pages or so provide an excellent description of the leadership qualities that Derek Jeter (which I knew) and David Cone (which I never realized) brought to those powerful Yankee teams of the late '90s. Also a not too flattering picture of David Wells.

>99 rocketjk: From what I understand "Boomer" Wells is one of those guys that never (had to? got to?) did grow up, in both good and not so good ways.

The Art of Fielding is on my tbr list, now enjoying Sixty Feet, Six Inches with Reggie and Bob Gibson. Even at their ages it's interesting to read into the competitiveness and confidence/cockiness that goes with being a great athlete.

I finished The Yankee Years. What a great and important (for baseball fans) book. The book is not just a description of the 12 seasons Joe Torre managed the Yankees, but also places those seasons strongly within the context of everything else that was happening in baseball over those years, including the effects of steroids, the "Moneyball" revolution in player evaluation and the effects of revenue sharing. This book is not just for Yankee fans, in other words, but for all baseball fans.

My January ER book and my March ER book arrived on the same day. The January book was The Greatest Minor League by Dennis Snelling and the March book was Lefty: An American Odyssey by Vernona Gomez. The first is a history of the Pacific Coast league and the second is the story of Lefty Gomez. I enjoyed the latter the most.

The Greatest Minor League was divided into chapters set by time periods, often 2 to 5 years. Then in each chapter were events by team, so there were a lot of people to keep track of in a non-linear way. It was the type of book you could read a chapter of, put it down for a few days, or a week, before picking it back up again.

Lefty I read straight through.

Now reading Stan Musial: An American Life by George Vecsey. As a lifelong Cardinal fan, I especially appreciate this one after the departure of Pujols, who I thought should have stayed in St Louis to be the "sequel" to Musial (although choosing who you work for is a personal choice I respect). I'm about 100 pages into it and enjoying it.

#103 I liked that one. I just finished the new John Grisham baseball novel, Calico Joe and really enjoyed that one, too. It's about a rookie phenom playing with the 1973 Cubs.

Next up, in terms of baseball books, for me probably will be the Roberto Clemente bio Clemente by David Maraniss.

I'm reading The Celebrant, by Eric Rolfe Greenberg, it's a classic fictionalized account of Christy Matthewson.

Seth, I haven't read The Celebrant. I'll be interested to know how you like it. Of interest to you might be a non-fiction book that I found to be terrific: The Old Ball Game: How John McGraw, Christy Mathewson, and the New York Giants Created Modern Baseball by Frank Deford. Cheers!

Finished up Brothers K a few weeks ago. Although fictional, it has a great baseball-ish underlying theme.

I read Brothers K several years ago and like it a lot.

Thank you for the tip rocketjk. I've seen The Old Ball Game at the store and it looks very interesting. I'll have to add it to my list.

I just started The Pride and the Pressure: a Season Inside the New York Yankee Fishbowl by Michael Morrissey. The book tells the story of the 2006 season.

Started on The Art of Fielding over the weekend.

I finished The Pride and the Pressure (see above). The first half was actually a bit tedious (for me), as it went over a lot of information I already knew. The second half got more interesting, as it gave a different perspective on the Jeter/A-Rod relationship, at least as it pertained to the 2006 season, when Rodriguez struggled through most of the year. This perspective is somewhat critical of both Joe Torre and Derek Jeter for not supporting Rodriguez more during that year.

Try "A Pitch for Justice," a book combining baseball and legal suspense. It's about a pitcher who goes to trial after one of his brushback pitches plunks an opposing player in the head and kills him. Raises a lot of questions about throwing at hitters from an ethical, legal, baseball perspective.

I just finished Last Days of Summer by Steve Kluger which was so wonderful I don't have the words to describe how wonderful it is. Mow I'm working on The Art of Fieldingby Chad Harbach which is very good

I read "Art of Fielding" this summer. Interesting characters. Good story. It might have been a tad long. I'd give it a big thumbs up.

I'll have to look up "Last Days of Summer" as I'm not familiar with it.

Spitball Magazine is a great guide for finding baseball books. Check out their list for 2012 books.

> 117......I just checked out the Spitball Magazine web-site....looks good....thanks for the recomendation.

#115 hi mreuther- I finished The Art of Fielding last week and really enjoyed it. I've recommended The Last Days of Summer to many friends including a member of Red Sox nation- I on the other hand am a card arrying member of the evil empire. Last days is just so wonderful it transcends all team loyalties and you just need a love of the game to enjoy it

Glad to help. I used to have a small website for selling baseball books. Now, I just write them.

Those are the kind of baseball books to read. But what the heck, I'll read any kind of book. Ever read any of Thomas Boswell or Roger Angell books?

#121 I haven't read anything by either of these authors. What do you recommend?

Boswell's "Why Time Begins on Opening Day" is a good start. Angell's "Five Seasons" is excellent. "Money Ball" is a good book as are the Bill James books. Also, try "Boys of Summer" by Roger Kahn, a paean to the Brooklyn Dodgers of the early 1950s. One book I haven't read, but for which I've heard nothing but praise is "Bottom of the 33rd." It's about the longest ball game ever played between two minor league teams. But the story goes well beyond that single game, taking the reader into the lives of players and many other figures associated with the game etc. Hope that helps.

#123 thanks mreuther!! Ill check them out-I'm just waiting for opening day!!

Yeah. Aren't we all. I almost forget. "A False Spring" by Pat Jordan is excellent.

Thanks!

Yes, 123/124, "Bottom of the 33rd" is excellent--lots of baseball, but a lot more, and very well written.

I just finished Bottom of the 33rd last night. The author doesn't let the story run out of steam. The stuff about Pawtucket first baseman Dave Koza makes you want to cry. I like that the author catches up with some of these players and other personalities many years after that historic marathon game. He certainly did his research.

Recently finished John Tortes "Chief" Meyers. While it was written in a rather detached manner, it was very readable and very informative. Lots of interesting baseball history.

I also agree on The Bottom of the 33rd. THE most enjoyable baseball book I have read in the past couple of years.

My wife threw a Willie Mays biography in my Christmas stocking this year. Rather than start at the beginning, I was delving into different sections of it last night. Did you know Willie earned $165,00 a year when he played for the Mets in his last two seasons? Apparently, his old team, the S.F. Giants, were dumping their high-salaried stars at the time. Willie was 41 when he got traded to the Mets in 1972 for pitcher Charlie Williams (good trivia question). In his first game for the Mets, he hit a game-winning home run. I remember watching that game on TV. The Mets made it to the World Series in '73, and the image many people have is of Willie falling down chasing that fly ball that he lost in the sun. I went to Shea Stadium in 1972 for a game, but Willie didn't play that day. Instead, I watched the Big Red Machine beat the Mets, 5-0. Johnny Bench hit a home run and Jack Billingham shut out the Metropolitians.

Another great who was dealt to New York(NL) (but Giants, not Mets) in his last year or two was Warren Spahn Boston Braves; then
Milwaukee Braves -- about a decade before Mays's last year.
In lifetime records,he turned out to be the winningest left-hander ever.
Hence the irony of a discussion I heard during 1947 between two fan/pundits, a Red Sox fan and a Braves fan: The Sox fan said "the Braves have no pitchers --except (Johnny) Sain". Sain, incidentally was finally dealt to New York (AL).)
The Braves fan said, "Well, I admit Sain is their best pitcher." The Red Sox fan insisted, "He's
not their "best" pitcher; he's their ONLY pitcher!" On the same staff was Warren Spahn, in his second full year with the Braves. Neither fan mentioned him.

#131> Wow! That fan wasn't paying attention much. I believe the common expression in those days regarding the Braves pitching was, "Spahn and Sain and pray for rain!"

"the Braves pitching was, "Spahn and Sain and pray for rain.
Right. . (A variant version was: Spahn, Sain and 2 days of rain.* That may have started the following year, 1948, when the Braves won their first pennant since 1914.

*Of course, it didn't usually rain, and (in 1948) the rest of the starting rotation (4-man in those days not 5)
was: the long forgotten Bill Voiselle obtained from the NY Giants; and Vernon Bickford. The /manager was the great Billy Southworth. Voiselle was
outstanding in an unenviable
way: he was "by his own admission, the worst hitter in the National League." Bickford probably had the longest minor league term of any pitcher then active, and probably deserved some kind of "Most Improved" Award. He was said to have been in a Class D minor league for 8 years!

The equivalent that I remember reading about for the Pirates of, I believe, a slightly later era was, "Friend and Law was all they saw" or "Law and Friend and that's the end."

"Friend and Law was all they saw" (134)

I remember the 1--2 combination of pitchers, but not the rhyme. Thanks.

If Friend and Law were Pirates today, the chances
are they -- wouldn't BE Pirates for long. I remember a long sequence of Pirates of later decades being scooped up by richer teams -- beginning with Bobby Bonilla and Barry Bonds.
Later a batting champion
named Sanchez was lost.
Back in the '40s, the Browns and the Senators (I)* were the "Pirates" of that era, with the Red Sox often being the piratical beneficiaries of the deals.
I just read in the NYT that
an all-star relief pitcher has
been dealt to the Red Sox.
Not good for baseball, but, oh well, if you must lose your players, ,lose them to us.

*The franchise that became the Minnesota Twins.

Buccos just traded Hanrahan, their ace reliever.

I just started The Year the Mets Lost Last Place by Paul Zimmerman and Dick Schaap.

Tales from a Cardinal Dugout........as told by Bob Forsch. A must for any Cardinal fan.

138> Bob Forsch . . . sounds very interesting.

I Was Right On Time by Buck O'Neil. He was the former player & manager that Ken Burns interviewed about Negro League baseball and the African-American experience of MLB as it was integrated.

Today I started Black and Blue: the Golden Arm, the Robinson Boys and the 1966 World Series that Stunned America by Tom Adelman.

I finished Black and Blue: the Golden Arm, the Robinson Boys and the 1966 World Series that Stunned America by Tom Adelman. An enjoyable and informative book. My review is on the book's work page and on my 50-Book Challenge thread.

Didn't get this from a book, but I learned
something about baseball stats today, from
the coverage* of Lonnie Chisenhall's
9 RBI of yesterday's Indians' game vs.
Texas:
I had never realized that the stat "RBI"
began to be kept only in 1920 --fairly
"recently" to someone of my age -- i.e.
only 21 years before I started
following baseball! It would leave out
the earlier years of Ty Cobb's career
and Babe Ruth's years as a hitting
pitcher. How, then do they know,
e.g., what was Ty Cobb's lifetime
RBI total? But I suppose there is a way,
on individual records, of going back
through the box scores of his games played
and picking the lifetime record out
of that. The same would apply to
the "Saves" stat for pitchers. (I don't remember
much ever being said about it before
the late 1950s.)
In number of hits, b t w, Chisenhall
had a perfect 5 for 5 night, with
3 of the 5 hits being home runs.
His exploit was compared with
a (1970s?) Red Sox game in which
Fred Lynn was the star.

*from the Honolulu Star-Advertiser.
They pick one game for a full write-up,
and give a short paragraph or so to all
the other games. Today';s full write-up,
of course, was the Indians/Rangers.

I think you're right about baseball historians going back through boxscores and looking for things like RBIs and saves. Interestingly, the "win" stat for pitchers wasn't codified into today's terms until, I think, the 1950s. The official scorer used to have much more latitude in deciding who was awarded the win. I remember a few years back going through all of Dizzy Dean's wins in his 30-win season (I had just read a biography of him) and finding that there were some wins in relief in which he would not have received the win today.

"The official scorer used to have much more latitude in ...award(ing) the win. ..." (143>144)

I remember a Red Sox win, ca. 1957, in which the original winning pitcher was Bob Chakales, who was the pitcher of record. But giving him the win
was protested by another reliever, Murray Wall* who discovered in the "small print" of the scorerʻs formula for deciding the pitcher of record that the scorer could deny the win to the pitcher of record if that pitcher had pitched "briefly or ineffectively" (and yet without the other teamʻs having taken over the lead.)
As reported in Boston, it
seemed to be an anomaly --
not at all a turning point in
the matter of scorerʻs discretion versus formula. I donʻt mean that the media
were partial to either Chakales or Wall. They werenʻt either complaining about the denial, or boasting that justice was done by citing the exception.. They seemed to be just explaining it for people familiar with the usual formula for deciding the pitcher of record -- why this award was an exception.
But the situation did imply that there was, at that time, an almost-always followed formula.
So, I was surprised to hear that the 1930s -- and todayʻs usage - - must have been different from the 50s, and have affected Dizzy Deanʻs lifetime record.

*Wall and Chakales were both new to the team. Neither was a Papelbon or an Uehara
of a later era, so they both
needed wins desperately. There was no such thing as a holding anyone back to be a "Closer" or "Set-up man": whatever reliever the manager thought most necessary at the moment was the one used at the moment. As I remember it the "Save" stat was just beginning to be emphasized about the same time.

Yes. In the old days, being a reliever just meant you were a washed up or injured reliever. There were very few relief specialists at all. Plus, often, starting pitchers would relieve between starts. That practice lasted up until about the mid-60s, I think.

> 143 & 144:
You can't really figure out who had the RBIs with a box score alone, because you need to know the play-by-play sequence of events. If Smith scored two runs, and behind him Jones went 2 for 4, and Johnson went 0 for 4, did Jones knock in 2, Johnson get 2 run-scoring grounders, or one each, or was one of the runs on a wild pitch, etc etc. For most sets of individual game stats, they could have been accrued several different ways. This unfortunate reality is why some bright folks started Project Scoresheet, which collects scoresheets going forward, and a spinoff, Retrosheet (http://retrosheet.org/), which tries to find old scoresheets. The earliest year for which there is a complete set of scoresheets is somewhere around 1952 if I recall correctly.

#147> Good point about RBI history. I'm well familiar with Retrosheet, which is a fascinating resource.

148> It really is. It's really great too that people are willing to dedicate themselves to it. When Joe Schmo scored Reds vs. Cubs on June 11, 1951, or whatever, I'm pretty sure he would never have guessed that he was creating an indispensable historical document!

#149> Yup. A few years back I did some research there to try to find the boxscore for the first baseball game I ever attended, which was at Yankee Stadium in 1961, with my father, when I was six years old. All I could remember about it was that the Yanks played the Tigers. I was pretty sure it was an early season game. I found several possibilities. I also used the site once to discover that some memories of mine about the 1970 season, something I'd actually included in a published article about a Yankees-Orioles game from that year, was wrong! (It was OK in terms of the piece, though, which was more of a memoir than anything else.)

150> Done the same thing! And ended up with several possibilities too. Also, learned that at least one memory is impossible, just as you did. I would have sworn that it was Paul Casanova who grounded out to end the loss to the Tigers, because I was mad at him for a week (I was small). But there is no such game. We think we couldn't possibly have such a vivid memory wrong, but we do. Probably more than we ever imagine.

Last year I used retrosheet to find the first games I ever attended. I remembered I was 8 years old (1969), it was 2 games on a summer weekend and the Cardinals won on Saturday with Ray Washburn pitching and lost on Sunday, ironically with Bob Gibson pitching. Of note.....Gibson lost 3-0 on an 8th-inning 3-run homer by none other than Roberto Clemente. That was a detail that was completely lost on me at the time......but I do remember eating lots of peanuts and popcorn!

152> Great to hear you found the games. Might have been easier if Retrosheet could track peanut and popcorn sales, but that will have to be Version 2.

"Might have been easier if Retrosheet could track peanut and popcorn sales . . . "

Seems on odd oversight, though, doesn't it?

The first major league baseball game I ever saw was on July 20, 1953, in Ebbets Field. I have been an avid Cubs fan since 1938 and had the good fortune to see them triumph agains the league-leading Dodgers on July 20, 1953. Is the box score for that game findable?

This Retrosheet is great. Thanks!!

I have figured out that the first game I ever saw was on July 21, 1966 at Wrigley Field. The Cubs beat Cincy. I knew that Curt Simmons was the winning pitcher and I remembered that the Cubs won, beating the Reds. Attendance of only 7,533. Of course, that was back in the days when Wrigley Field would often close off the upper deck due to lack of attendance. George Altman went 3 for 4 for the Cubs and Don Kessinger had 3 RBIs.

Wow, they played the game in 2 hours and 12 minutes. Yesterday's game I was at, at Wrigley, was double that, though it was a 12 inning game.

I don't recall much of the game myself (I was only 5) but my father used to talk about how I didn't understand what a stolen base was and how I said that the Cubs man didn't steal a base, he was just standing on it. That would've been Adolfo Phillips' stolen base.

>153 rtttt01: Yes, Retrosheet has a box score for that game.

"(Cubs) triumph(ed) against the league-leading Dodgers
on July 2o, 1953. . ." (155)

I also saw the Cubs beat the league leader* -- summer
of 1973, I think, in the only game
I have ever seen at Wrigley Field (also the only game
where the Cubs were the home team; I did see them
vs. the Boston Braves at the old Braves Field in
Boston.) I entered the park thinking I didn't care
who won, but found myself "rooting for the home team" ,
as the song says. Some 25 years earlier that I saw
an earlier (Santo-less) team, managed by Charley Grimm,
one of the few ML managers who was ever re-hired
by the team that let him go.
He was the manager of the last Cubs pennant winner
(1945), and later was hired for a brief stint as
the Braves' manager.
As for the box score of the 08/20/53 Ebbets field
game, if I were looking for it, I would ffrst of all try
to find a library which could provide the NY Times
of 08/21/53 -- microfilm, or would it be some
part of the Internet now? Without LT, I wouldn't
have known of Retrosheet, but am glad to hear
of it.

*The league leader was the visiting Cincinnati Reds
one of the "Big Red Machine" teams.

It's fun just hearing people discovering old games they saw, and filling in memories. I haven't thought of Adolfo Phillips in 30 years, probably.

July 20, 1953, was a Brooklyn victory, in Brooklyn.
http://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1953/B07200BRO1953.htm

But could it have been July 20, 1954? Cubs beat Dodgers 3-2 in 10 innings in Chicago, Gene Baker has 4 hits and the winning run on an error.
http://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1954/B07200CHN1954.htm

Oops! Checking my diary entry for July 20, 1953, I see I did not say that the Cubs won--only that i saw them play. Had they won I sure would have mentioned the score but since they did not, I only rejoiced in seeing them, for the first time in my life. But I did see them win at Wrigley Field, many years later I can count on one hand the major league games I have seen at the ball park--4 Cubs games, one other game

Back to the baseball books we are reading. Just started The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood by Jane Leavy. I enjoyed her book on Koufax and this one on Mantle has me hooked 50 pages in.

On a pub. lib. exchange table, I picked up Sports Illustratedʻs special issue
on the New York Yankees
1988 championship. If it had been the Red Sox, or even
the Dodgers, Angels or
Cincinnati Reds, I would have kept it.

If anybody wants it, send me a message, and, after browsing in it a little, Iʻll send it to you; you donʻt even have to re-imburse me for the postage.

I've started Murderers' Row, a collection of short stories with the dual themes of murder and baseball.

I'm reading John Feinstein's book about the minor leagues, Where Nobody Knows Your Name.

Does anyone have any suggestions for books to read and then review on my baseball book blog

http://greggsbaseballbookcase.mlblogs.com/

I am looking for some new books for the blog, so if anyone has anything they want to donate to the cause or make some room in your house for more books just send me a message.
Thanks for the suggestions

I'm now reading The Joy of Keeping Score by Paul Dickson. There's not much new here for the experienced baseball fan, but I am picking up some fun historical tidbits, such as the fact the Dwight Eisenhower was a dedicated scorebook keeper, as was Calvin Coolidge's wife.

". . .Eisenhower was a dedicated scorebook keeper
as was Calvin Coolidgeʻs wife. . ." (165)

I was age 21 -- 29 during the Eisenhower administrations and was a
being forcibly turned from Boston Braves fan* to Boston Red Sox fan, which I remain. I didnʻt think Presidents Eisenhower or Truman had any interest in baseball; I know that FDR did, or claimed to. So thanks for the info, rocketjk.
As for Coolidge, once a MA governor, one of the legends about him, you may already know: He and his wife attended a Braves Field N. L. game, which was tied at the end of nine innings. Cal stolidly rose to depart, while Grace remained seated and asked "Where are going?" Cal said. " that was the end of the ninth. A baseball game is nine innings, isnʻt it?"
Grace told him to sit down, and had to explain that they donʻt let it stay tied.

*Because of the franchiseʻs shift to Milwaukee in 1953

Roland, That anecdote about Coolidge and is wife is, indeed, reported in the book, which also sports a nice photo of Eisenhower peering down at his scorecard, pencil in hand, at a Washington Senators game.

I celebrated the beginning of baseball season by pulling Jimmy Breslin's wonderful Can't Anybody Here Play This Game? down off my shelf, where it had been waiting patiently for my attention for many years. This is Breslin's look at the very first season of the New York Mets. Those 1962 Mets set a record for futility, losing 120 of their 162 games. But in the process, they created a sensation, becoming much beloved in New York City, which had been starved for National League baseball since the Giants and Dodgers had left for California in 1957. Breslin has a breezy, Runyonesque writing style, and since the book was written and published in 1963, before the team even began their second season, it really is a time-piece.

And the Metsies are on top of the NL East, with the best record in the league! (I know, it won't last, but I have to mention it while the thrill is there. I'll always have my memories of 1986...)

I just finished the outstanding book about the fight between Juan Marichal and Johnny Roseboro (Marichal hit Roseboro over the head with a bat). The Fight of Their Lives by John Rosengren.

Next up, probably, is a book about the Kansas City A's. The Kansas City Athletics by John E. Peterson.

Thanks for the reference to the Rosengren book, which I hadn't heard of. I remember an article by Ron Fimrite in Sports Illustrated quite a few years ago that was very enlightening on that traumatic incident from my youth. I was a big SF Giants fan and loved Marichal but knew there was no excuse for assaulting opposing players with a bat.

I recently picked up an old used book by Tom Meany, Baseball's Greatest Teams from 1948. Sixteen chapters of the very best year for each of the franchises of the time listed in order from most wins to fewest. Yankees 1927 was the second chapter, after the Pirates' 1909 team. Good reminder of just how great Honus Wagner was.

I remember when the Rosengren book was published. I believe I heard him interviewed on the radio. Evidently, Roseboro and Marichal became very good friends eventually. Will have to keep an eye out for the book.

>172 rocketjk: Yes they did. Rosengren spent a lot of time leading up to the events, in both players' baseball careers and personal lives. I would've liked to see more information on the actual event but that was probably my only gripe. He also had quite a lot about the aftermath, including how their lives were intertwined forever after.

Besides the KC Athletics book, I'm hoping to read last year's big Pete Rose bio, as well as that book from last year about baseball during the bicentennial.

I just finished a fun collection of baseball murder mystery short stories called Murderers' Row, edited by Otto Penzler and including stories by mystery masters like Elmore Leonard, Ed McBain and John Connelly.

Currently reading The Summer of Beer and Whiskey, about the American Association of the 1880s, which is better than its rating on LT would indicate.

I read and enjoyed Before the Machine: the Story of the 1961 Pennant-Winning Cincinnati Reds by Mark J. Schmetzer

I've started Casey Stengel: Baseball's Greatest Character, a new biography by sportswriter by Marty Appel. The first 50 pages are quite good.

Keith Law's Smart Baseball is a great introduction into the current thought surrounding the game.

On one of my periodic Dodgers/Giants jags... Just started The Home Run Heard 'Round the World: The Dramatic Story of the 1951 Giants-Dodgers Pennant Race by Ray Robinson..very good so far.

Well, I don't know what inspired me, but I just read this thread through from beginning to end. It was a lot of fun to scroll through all the old posts and conversations about baseball books and baseball in general. Cheers!

5496. The Cubs Way The Zen of Building the Best Team in Baseball and Breaking the Curse, by Tom Verducci (read 27 Aug 2017)

My comment thereon:
5496. The Cubs Way The Zen of Building the Best Team in Baseball and Breaking the Curse, by Tom Verducci (read 27 Aug 2017) This book tells of the most joyful event in sports in my lifetime. I became in the spring of 1938 at age 9 a rabid Cubs fan and have been one ever since and this book tells of the 2016 Cubs. It has a lot of technical baseball language and lore but is a joy to read because of the great events it tells of. The account of Game 7 of the 2016 World SEries is so heart-poundingly exciting as to be unreadable if one didnot know that all comes out super good in the end. The third and second last sentneces: "It was a feeling that went far beyond Progressive Field. From the packed streets around Wrigley Field, where people had gathered all night around her sacred grounds, to the sons and daughters who watched with fathers and mothers in the biggest baseball television audience in a quarter of a century, to the many who wanted this night even more for the ones they loved and buried than for themselves, the faithful everywhere did not need the cool rain upon their skin to feel the change." (I admit that as I typed these words my eyes filled with tears of sheerest joy.) (five stars)
flagSchmerguls | Aug 27, 2017

I finished Fritz Peterson's memoir, When the Yankees Were on the Fritz: Revisiting the Horace Clarke Years. Sadly, this self-published book suffers badly from poor editing and also from Peterson's penchant for spending more time describing the (many) pranks he pulled on teammates over the years than on baseball. Peterson also provides an ongoing series of mini-bios on his teammates, but many are players who were only on the Yankees briefly and so whose stories, in a baseball context at least, are not particularly valuable. Still there is some interesting material here about those inter-dynasty Yankee years of the mid-60s to mid-70s, and Peterson's goofy personality and passion for baseball and the Yankees certainly comes through.

I rinsed away the disappointment of the Peterson memoir by reading the excellent autobiography, Hank Greenberg: the Story of My Life by Greenberg with Ira Berkow. I highly recommend this book.

I recently finished The Baby Bombers: The Inside Story of the Next Yankees Dynasty by Bryan Hoch. This very recent book provides some background into the development of the current Yankees team with a core of very young and talented players like Gary Sanchez, Aaron Judge and Luis Severino. The book tells about the work Yankees scouts and general manager Brian Cashman did finding these players and others, and the trades that have been made along the way, as some top prospects have been kept and some dealt away in order to bolster the team's recent playoff runs. Hoch also goes into the life stories of a few of these players, particularly those mentioned above. There's lots of interesting information about the ins and outs of the development of a major league baseball team in the current era.

Unfortunately, perhaps because Hoch is a Yankees beat writer and so reluctant to damage his relationship with the team and the players, the whole thing is pretty bland. Particularly in Judge's case, the book is filled with the sort of inoffensive quotes that players are taught to feed interviewers. In quote after quote, we're told things like, "Our job is to go out there and battle. We were just battling every game and good things happened." Also, at the end of the 2017, the team decided not to renew the contract of their longtime manager, Joe Girardi. The book mentions Girardi's inability to communicate with the younger players and his high-pressure approach, but there are essentially no examples given, no anecdotes told, of the sort of events or feelings that would lead team management to conclude that Girardi's ouster was required. So while the book was fun and basically well written (although evidently Diversion Books' editors don't know a dangling participial phrase when they see one), I was left wanting more. That said, I still recommend the book to, as noted up top, Yankees fans.

I've been making my way through K: A History of Baseball in Ten Pitches, the spectacular book on pitching from the insider view of the men who throw told by a gifted NY Times sportswriter, Tyler Kepner. I found it such a blessing as I moved through 36 innings of baseball in 72 hours across ballparks: Wrigley, Comerica, Progressive Field, and Great American Ballpark, all in Ohio, Michigan, or Illinois. Great Lakes baseball, to celebrate my own new book, Stealing Home.

If you ever wanted to know the difference between pitches -- something they now post with every pitch in three of those four parks — Kepner's book is the place to find it. Gets a little Inside Baseball, but that's why we read, isn't it?

>185 rseybold: That looks very good. Kepner is, indeed, a gifted writer. Thanks for posting.

You made me think of a book I finished earlier this year but which I didn't post on this thread because it's not exclusively about baseball. It's a collection of essays by longtime Detroit and Sporting News columnist Joe Falls called Joe Falls: 50 Years of Sports Writing (And I Still Can't Tell the Difference Between a Slider and a Curve).

By the way, unless you're Sheryl Woods, you've got the wrong touchstone on your own book, there.

I finished the 1963 Official Baseball Almanac by Bill Wise. For fans of baseball history, this is a fun and fascinating volume. Back in the day, Major League Baseball used to publish an annual pre-season round-up of the previous season and look-ahead to the coming year. With the internet and such, I'm not sure if these books still come out. This is a neat, pocketbook-sized book put out by Signet. The book includes a chapter for each of the 20 teams then in existence. Each chapter contains a chatty, light-hearted encapsulation of team's 1962 season and off-season (i.e. the trades they'd made and why) with a rundown of which players were likely to contribute in '63 and how each team was likely to do, plus full-page profiles of from one to three of the team's important players, and a full roster sheet for each team. It's fun to read these predictions with the knowledge of hindsight, some 57 years later! The back of the book contains stats and standings tables from the 1962, and a full listing of all-time baseball records as they stood at that time.

I finally read The Bronx Zoo, Sparky Lyle's entertaining memoir of life on the Yankees during the fabled 1978 season. It was lots of fun to revisit this season, which, as a Yankees fan, I remember well. I wish Lyle hadn't had so many gripes to include in his narrative, but still, the book was a fun and fascinating ride back in time.

For those who may not be aware, Justin McGuire has a great podcast, Baseball by the Book, where he interviews authors of baseball books past and present. Well worth checking out...

https://baseballbythebook.libsyn.com/

>189 ghr4: Thanks for posting that!

I just finished The Only Rule Is It Has to Work: Our Wild Experiment Building a New Kind of Baseball Team by Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller. In 2015, Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller, a pair of sportswriters, bloggers and podcast hosts got the owners of an 4-team independent baseball league to agree to allow them to apply sabermatrics to the team's in-game strategy and roster building.

The book is, basically, a co-memoir. The two men take turns writing chapters. Together, they describe their progress through the season with their team, the Sonoma Stompers. While they don't get to create the team's entire 22-man roster, they are able to add several players of their own choosing for which they study databases of players who had remained undrafted by major league organizations and whose stats indicate potential success based upon the "new" theories. The writers describe the coming together of the team, their struggles to gain the respect of the players and coaching staff for their roles in the team's performance, their growing understanding of the dynamics of clubhouse culture and the specific problems of players performing at such a low level of organized ball. As the season progresses, the two writers, together, weave together a very engaging story and they don't stint in self-examination, either. There's a lot of learning done.

There is also a very interesting section of the narrative about the coming out of one of their pitchers, Sean Conroy, to become the first openly gay ballplayer in American professional baseball. When Conroy starts on the mound for the team's Pride Night that June, the program for the game, signed by every team member, ends up in the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. The biggest part of the story, in a way, is Conroy's teammates' easy acceptance of his sexuality.

Lindbergh and Miller are both quite good writers, so the book flows very nicely and remains interesting throughout. It's a study of baseball, certainly, and as such is more or less of interest to baseball fans only. But this is also an interesting and acute study of human nature.

A personal note that the town of Sonoma is, you'll not be surprised to learn, in Sonoma County, California, just a touch south of where I live in Mendocino County. Yet I'd never even heard of the team, or the league, until I happened to notice an article online about their having fielded the first women players in organized baseball. (They did that the next year, after Miller and Lindbergh had ended their active participation in the organization.) That led me to the team's website, and to their "products" page, which features this book. I was looking forward to driving down to take in some games this summer. Oh, well.

I raced through The Lost Memoir by Lou Gehrig, edited by Alan D. Gaff



Toward the last months of the New York Yankees' famed 1927 season, Lou Gehrig's agent arranged for him to keep a diary to be published in segments, as he wrote them, in several newspapers across the country, primarily, somewhat surprisingly, the Oakland Tribune. The pieces began appearing in August, 1927. Gehrig's columns first covered his early life and career, and then, once he'd caught up, began talking about the season as it was unfolding. There was no drama, as that team, which became known as Murderers Row and featured Babe Ruth's 60-home run season (Gehrig hit 47 while driving in an astounding 173 runs and won the MVP award) and the team one the AL pennant by 19 games. So Gehrig settled for talking about his teammates and, especially, their strengths on the field and in the clubhouse. So these columns ran in three or four papers, including one for each of the four games of the World Series (the Yanks swept the Pirates in four), and then were forgotten by posterity. That's until historian Alan Gaff, doing research about something else among old newspaper clippings, came upon them and decided they needed a dusting off. That's this book.

The first 100 pages consist of the columns themselves, somewhat edited by Gaff. The second 100 pages bring us Gaff's biographical essay about Gehrig.

The columns give us a nice, if surface, insight into life in a Major League clubhouse during that era. These pieces were for public consumption during the season being described. Even if Gehrig was the kind of guy to dish the dirt on his teammates (he evidently wasn't), this wouldn't have been the venue to do that. And Gehrig was clearly most comfortable writing about his colleagues in glowing terms. But still, this is a fun reading experience, especially when Gehrig describes his early days on the Yankees, which he joined as the rawest of raw rookies. He talks about how much encouragement and help he got from Ruth, already a veteran and a star when Gehrig arrived. Gaff's essay adds some nice perspective, as well, and takes us through Gehrig's sad and much too early death of the disease that's now named after him. Gehrig was, evidently, a genuinely nice guy as long as he lived who worked very hard to become a good fielding first baseman and one of the all-time greats at the plate. Endearingly, he retained his Achilles heal on the field--he was a terrible base runner.

This is a fun volume for those interested in the game's history. It is a very recent publication, purchased for me as a birthday present by my wonderful wife.

>192 rocketjk: Thanks for your review of that one. I picked up a copy of that book and am eager to get to it soon.

I just finished reading though the Sport Magazine - November 1971 edition, the publication's 25th anniversary. There were some interesting and fun articles, including an entertaining essay, "My Life in the Great Soo League, by Eugene McCarthy (yes, the politician) about playing baseball in a local town league when he was a teenager. Sports-wise, I am primarily a baseball fan these days, so I was most interested in the feature about Catfish Hunter as well as Bill Mazeroski's piece, "My 16 Years With Roberto Clemente." This article is very insightful, with lots of first-hand observations about Clemente the player and the person. But a modern reader will be saddened by Mazeroski's closing observation that he believes Clemente still has several years of baseball greatness left in him. Baseball fans will know that Clemente died in a plane crash just a year later while bringing food to earthquake-hammered Managua, Nicaragua. Finally, Roger Kahn's piece on Preacher Roe, the last pitcher to throw a legal spitball in Major League Baseball, is terrific.

Other than baseball:

Instructive is the feature article on Tom Gatewood, "Notre Dame's New Style All-American." What made Gatewood a "new style" football player at Notre Dame in 1971 was the fact that he was black.

In the "Top Performers of the Past 25 Years" section, I enjoyed the short profiles of Doak Walker (College Football) and Lew Alcinder (College Basketball). Alcindor was of course soon to change his name to Kareem Abdul Jabbar. Also, the piece on Willie Shoemaker (Horse Racing) was interesting. Unfortunately, women athletes, you'll not be surprised to learn given the vintage of the magazine, are relegated to a photo essay.

I finished Bushville Wins!: The Wild Saga of the 1957 Milwaukee Braves and the Screwballs, Sluggers, and Beer Swiggers who Canned the New York Yankees and Changed Baseball by John Klima. This could have been such a fun and enjoyable baseball history to read. The story of the 1957 Milwaukee Braves is indeed an interesting tale, and the players who made up the team are a colorful lot. The story of the team's owner, Lou Perini, having the vision and the guts to move the team from Boston to Milwaukee, and thereby foreshadowing the move of the Giants and Dodgers from New York to California is a significant part of the tale, as well. Also, the city of Milwaukee's acceptance of the team and the town's desire to be considered "major league" rather than "bush" by the rest of the country rings true. The author, John Klima, does a good job of relating the growing tension as the team fights through and ultimately prevails in a tough, multi-team pennant race. And the defeat of the seemingly unbeatable New York Yankees in the World Series that season makes for an exciting finale. Hank Aaron's coming out party to the nation as a true superstar adds to the poignancy of the story.

And yet, I can't really recommend this book, even to avid baseball fans. Because, unfortunately, the book was in large part ruined for me by Klima's overwrought style and scattershot use of cliche and word-salad sentences. I began tripping over Klima's shoddy writing at about the one-quarter mark in the book and the pot holes began showing up four or five to the page thereafter. It's really too bad. With some attentive editing, this could have been an excellent baseball history.

Hello. I have starred this thread though I have never commented before. I think you might find this one interesting:

We are the Ship by Kadir Nelson. This author/illustrator first came onto my radar from a tv profile, possibly on 60 Minutes, or CBS Sunday Morning. He is an enormous talent. His illustrations have been not only in books but also in large murals. His style is very photographic, reminds me a bit of the style of Norman Rockwell, but his focus is African American and historic.

This book looks like it is a children's book but in truth, it isn't, necessarily. It is a large sized hardcover (I got it from the library). The text tells the story of the history of the Negro Leagues in baseball from its inception up to the time of Jackie Robinson's breaking that colour barrier into the major leagues, and is told as if from the perspective of one who was a player. I am a big baseball fan so this topic interests me anyhow, but I am truly blown away by his illustrations. They are stunningly beautiful, very emotional and lovingly rendered. Kadir Nelson has won many prizes and awards for his art and I can certainly see why. I think I will look for more work by him.

What jumped out at me, as I read this, even though none of it is new to me, is just how the more things change, the more things stay the same, especially when it comes to racial discrimination. Big sigh... Humans just never learn.

For further interest, here is his website. Nelson is pretty easy on the eyes, too, just sayin'...;-)

https://www.kadirnelson.com/about

I finished The Pittsburgh Pirates by Frederick G. Lieb. In the late 1940s, G.P. Putnam's Sons commissioned individual histories of 15 of the then existing 16 major league baseball teams (or maybe the commissioned 16, but at any rate, no history of the Philadelphia Athletics appeared). This history of the Pirates was first published in 1948. In 2002, the Southern Illinois University Press republished several of these team histories as part of their "Writing Baseball" series. Several of the authors hired to write these books eventually made it into the journalists' wing of the MLB Hall of Fame. Frederick G. Lieb is one of those.

At the time of his writing this history, Lieb was already a veteran Pittsburgh sports writer. He had covered the Pirates for many seasons and was friends with the team's long-time owner Barney Dreyfuss, who had died only a few years before the book was written. He knew many of the players and had attended many of the most famous games. He also did lots of good research, so that his accounts of the earliest years of professional Pittsburgh baseball, going back to the National League's 19th-century origins, is lively and, for a baseball fan, very interesting. Lieb was also able to provide perspectives on key events, trades and relationships from the owner's point of view, as well as often taking us into the dugout to see what players and managers had to say about things. Feuds, holdouts, trades good and bad, and in-game strategic decisions are illuminated along the way. The historic perspective is certainly interesting, given that, writing in 1948, to Lieb 1918 was only as distant in the past as 1990 is to us now.

>191 rocketjk: I thought that was a really fun book

>198 Capybara_99: Yes, me too! I can't wait for a normal summer to roll around so I can go see some of that team's games.

RIP Henry Aaron: https://www.cbc.ca/sports/baseball/mlb/hank-aaron-obit-dead-at86-1.5883841

One of the greats.

I recently read "The Ultimate Red Sox Time Machine Book" It was pretty good, with an updated history of recent Red Sox success.
Plus the author spoke about his book at a local library Zoom meeting, so that was pretty cool! https://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Boston-Time-Machine-Book/dp/1493045849

Just finished Scott Simon's Jackie Robinson and the Integration of Baseball the other day. Well written but just an overview of the subject.

I recently read The Ultimate Red Sox Time Machine Book It was pretty good, with an updated history of recent Red Sox success. Plus the author spoke about his book at a local library Zoom meeting, so that was pretty cool! https://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Boston-Time-Machine-Book/dp/1493045849

I finished Pennant Race by Jim Brosnan. In 1961, Jim Brosnan was a relief pitcher for the Cincinnati Reds, who surprised the baseball world by winning the National League pennant. This book is his diary of that season. In fact, this was Brosnan's second book. His first, The Long Season, was a first person account of the 1959 season, during which Brosnan was traded mid-year from the Cardinals to the Reds. That book was considered ground breaking, in that it was the first candid (sort of) look at life on a major league team. Oddly, I haven't read The Long Season, yet.

Anyway, Pennant Race is entertaining fare for baseball fans. This book was published several years before Jim Bouton's Ball Four, about the 1969 season, which was really the first baseball memoir to reveal baseball life warts and all. In Pennant Race, Brosnan depicts life in the bullpen, and on the team in general, as a series of wise cracks under which lie the players' real desire to win and to perform well, along with their not always successful attempts to shrug off their day to day failures. Racial issues are dealt with, but not too deeply or often. Personal animosities among teammates seem non-existent. Again, Brosnan's books were a step forward in terms of real life portrayals of the baseball life, but he doesn't bring us all the way there. The descriptions of some players' personalities are perfunctory. For others, even some relatively famous ones, those portrayals are non-existent. We get almost nothing, for example, about Frank Robinson, then a young star (now in the Hall of Fame). Still there is a feel for what the life was like. Brosnan was a good writer with a breezy, self-deprecating style. It helps that the 1961 season was one of Brosnan's best as a professional ballplayer.

For baseball fans interested in the game's history (or for those with long memories), this book is fun and worth reading, as long as you don't expect too much of it.

I finished The Corporal Was a Pitcher: The Courage of Lou Brissie by Ira Berkow. This is a fascinating, well-written book biography. Lou Brissie's story is quite something. A teenage pitching phenom in his native South Carolina in the late 1930s, Brissie interrupted his promising baseball career to enlist in the Army after Pearl Harbor. When he went off to war, he already had a commitment from Connie Mack, the longtime owner/manager of the Philadelphia A's. Mack was going to sign Brissie and then pay for him to go to college for three years, an arrangement that provides an idea of how much potential Brissie was seen to have.

But Brissie's leg was shattered during an artillery attack in Italy in 1944 and he had to beg the doctors not to amputate. Luckily for Brissie, he found one Army doctor willing to try to save the leg. Brissie went through multiple operations--his leg bone was essentially fused together from the fragments the exploding artillery shell had left behind--and he had to wear a cumbersome brace to walk, let along pitch in the major leagues. And yet pitch in the major leagues, he did, and quite effectively, despite that leg brace and the essentially constant pain he endured. In fact, Brissie was extremely well known during the post-war years as an inspiration for wounded veterans and kids with handicaps. It's surprising and more than a bit sad that his story has been largely forgotten.

Brissie was still alive when Berkow was working on the book (the book was published in 2009 and Brissie died in 2013) and sat for extensive interviewing. He comes across as an extremely thoughtful fellow. Berkow, a Pulitzer Prize winning jouralist, is a fine writer who clearly had a strong connection to his subject for this biography. I highly recommend this book for readers with an interest in American history and with even a passing interest in baseball.

I finished The Giants and Their City: Major League Baseball in San Francisco, 1976-1992 by Lincoln Abraham Mitchell. This is a mostly fun book that traces the history of the San Francisco Giants, and the history of the city itself, during the era when the team was owned by real estate tycoon Bob Lurie. Mitchell's account is book-ended nicely, as it begins in 1976 with Lurie stepping in the buy the Giants in a last-minute act that kept the team from purchased by folks in Toronto who were going to move the team there, and ends in 1992 with Lurie's almost consummated sale of the team to moneyed interests in Tampa, before grocery store magnate Peter Magowan stepped forward at, once again basically at the last second, to save the team once again for San Francisco. Mitchell deftly weaves the team's up and (mostly) down fortunes on the field with descriptions of the political climate and events in San Francisco that led to the defeat of four separate voter referendums aimed at providing public funding for a new stadium to replace the horrid from its opening Candlestick Park. There are times when Mitchell's writing seemed a bit less than professional, and he definitely needed a better copy editor. But all in all this was a well done history. I moved to SF in 1986, so a lot of the ground covered here was familiar to me. It was fun and interesting to revisit some of those events.

I've just finished the astounding memoir, The Boys of Summer, by Roger Kahn. My friend picked it as his selection for the monthly reading group we're both members of. I was a bit surprised to realize I'd never read the book, as it is of course considered a classic of the genre and was, in fact, a trailblazing book when first published. The writing is wonderful and the insights into the lives of ballplayers during the 1950s, and of so many other aspects of human nature in general and the ways in which our perspectives about our own youths change with the passage of time, are outstanding and compassionately rendered. If by some wild chance you're interested in my longer review, you can find it on my 50-Book Challenge thread.

Wondering if anyone has read Curveball about Toni Stone? (The First Woman to Play Professional Baseball in the Negro League.) I recently heard an interview with the author, Martha Ackmann. And with the reboot of A League of Their Own showing a more complete and diverse story of the women in baseball it seems like there may be more stories out there.

>208 LucindaLibri: I haven't read the book you mentioned, but it sounds interesting, indeed. Thanks for posting about it here.

I finished Ruling Over Monarchs, Giants & Stars: Umpiring in the Negro Leagues & Beyond by Bob Motley. Motley certainly led a fascinating life. Motley was a Black man born in the early 1920 in Jim Crow polluted Alabama. His dream was to be a ballplayer, but his talents couldn't keep up with those dreams. When World War II broke out, Motley became one of the first African Americans accepted into the Marines and saw combat, and a lot of it, in the Pacific theater. After the war, Motley decided to stick with his dream of making a living in baseball, but now as an umpire, for which he felt that his combination of Marine toughness and natural flamboyance made him suited. In fact, after many years of umpiring sandlot and semi-pro games, Motley made it to the top of the profession, at least as it existed for African Americans in the 1950s, a job umpiring in the Negro Leagues. By the 1950s, Major League Baseball had been somewhat integrated, as more and more Black players had joined the Major League ranks after Jackie Robinson, Larry Doby and several others had first integrated the game in 1947. Umpiring, however, was another story. I guess the difference was MLB's willingness to have Black players, in positions, despite their obvious talents, of relative subservience to management, but not, as umpires, in positions of relative authority. In other words, it was one thing for a Black man to be able to strike out a white player with fastballs and curves, another for a Black man to call a white man out on a borderline pitch or a close play at first base. And not only were the Major League umpiring ranks still segregated, but even the minor leagues as well. Motley kept pushing, however, and eventually was hired as the second African American to umpire in the Pacific Coast League, a very high minor league. Motley, all these years, had also had a full-time job at the General Motors plant. He gives the company high grades, in fact, for allowing him lots of leeway in terms of taking time off to go on the road to umpire during baseball season. By the late 50s, Motley had been promoted into GM's management ranks, and finally decided to give up umpiring in order to concentrate on enjoying life with his wife and two growing children. So he finished short of his dream of managing in the big leagues.

So the story that Motley has to tell is, obviously, fascinating. A constant thread throughout the memoir is the pervasiveness of Jim Crow, from his childhood days of having to duck down out of sight when the Klan came roaring through his family's poor Alabama small-town neighborhood to the dangers and humiliations the Black players experienced during their barnstorming journeys through the South, right into the 1950s. The memoir does have some flaws, though. For one thing, Motley was already in his 80s when he finally sat down and told all these stories to his son, Byron, who then produced this "as-told-to" narrative. As Motley says himself near the book's conclusion, many of the specifics of time and place had faded for him by then. So in the reading, there are times when recollections that you wish would be more detailed and specific remain general, and the narrative is often somewhat flat, with cliches relatively common. People are often "thrilled," and they "marvel" and so on. In addition, Motley umpired in the Negro Leagues at a time, post MLB integration, when the Negro Leagues were beginning to implode, with teams folding and investment waning for lack of interest. So I'm a bit dubious of Motley's claims that there was no diminishing of the quality of play over the seasons that the Negro Leagues gradually shrank from three full leagues to one four-team league. Nevertheless, many of the tales Motley does tell are fascinating. He doesn't add much to my knowledge in describing his impressions of Hank Aaron, Ernie Banks and Willie Mays, who as young players came through the late Negro Leagues, but his stories of umpiring behind the plate when the great Satchel Page was pitching are priceless. And many others of his recollections of events both on the field and off make this memoir well worth reading, particularly, though not necessarily exclusively, for baseball fans. This is, overall, an American story.

LucindaLibri: I thought the book was excellent; here's my review:
https://languagehat.com/gabby/

>211 languagehat: Great review. Thanks for posting that. I'm going to have to look for that book, now.

I finished No Cheering in the Press Box an anthology of oral histories from interviews with famous sportswriters (with a very strong emphasis on baseball) of the 1920s through 1960s from interviews conducted by editor (and sportswriter) Jerome Holtzman. Taken together, these oral histories present a fun and interesting picture of a fascinating time in American sports and sportswriting, and of the American newspaper world in general.

Just finished Tom Seaver: A Terrific Life by Bill Madden. The author is a sportswriter who had become particularly close to Seaver over the years. He had conducted several lengthy interviews with Seaver after the pitcher's retirement. I wouldn't say there's a whole lot of depth to this biography. It's essentially an (adoring) survey of Seaver's life and, especially, baseball career. Well, when a 70-year life is covered in only 285 pages, you are not going to get much in-depth probing. As such, though, I mostly enjoyed it. It's not the most sharply written book on the bookshelf, and there are some spots where an editor's hand might have been useful, and that recounting of Seaver's life was interesting enough for a baseball fan.

I did learn a few things that I either didn't know or had forgotten. One is that Seaver openly criticized the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. The other was that Seaver signed first by the Atlanta Braves, and he was looking forward to being teammates with the great Hank Aaron. But due to an entirely accidental breaking of the rule against signing college players while the collegiate season was in progress (two games that everybody thought had been pre-season exhibitions had turned out to be on the official season schedules of the team involved), Seaver ended up the prize in a lottery among any team that was willing to match the Braves' offer, and in that way ended up on the Mets. It was nice to learn that throughout his life, and even at the height of his fame and success, Seaver remained close friends with many of the guys he'd played Little League, high school and junior college baseball with in his home town of Fresno, CA. Seaver's battles with Mets general manager M. Donald Grant are well chronicled, here, as is his up-and-down relationship with his own fame, and certain individual games are highlighted in depth to good effect. Madden is, after all, a sportswriter first and foremost. All in all I'd say this is a good if not great biography, but absolutely for baseball fans only.

New here. Pocket bio: Retired humanities teacher, residing in Tlaxcala, Mexico, with two dogs and six indoor cats. Passionate about literature, history, philosophy, classical music and opera, jazz, cinema, and similar subjects. Nostalgic guy. Politically centrist. BA in American Studies from Yale; MAs in English and Education from Boston University. Born in northern New Jersey. Have lived and worked in San Francisco, Chicago, northern Nevada, northeast Wisconsin, South Korea

The last baseball book I read was Edward Achorn’s superb The Summer of Beer and Whiskey: How Brewers, Barkeeps, Rowdies, Immigrants, and a Wild Pennant Fight Made Baseball America's Game. Along with his earlier Fifty-Nine in '84: Old Hoss Radbourn, Barehanded Baseball, and the Greatest Season a Pitcher Ever Had, Achorn has staked out territory as one of the best chroniclers of 19th Century baseball.

Greetings, again! The two books you mentioned here sound great. I don't know enough about 18th century baseball yet.

^ It was a fun period because everything was up for grabs; even the rules changed frequently.

One of the favorite books of my boyhood was Furman Bisher’s Strange But True Baseball Stories (1966) - fascinating stories, engagingly told. It helped create my lifelong interest in baseball history, and I think it was a touchstone for a lot of us. Bisher was a legendary sportswriter and one of the best-known newspapermen ever in Atlanta.

Anyone interested in 19th-century baseball should follow Richard Hershberger on Facebook; his series “150 years ago today in baseball” is always enjoyable and educational. Recommended books: Peter Morris’s But Didn’t We Have Fun?: An Informal History of Baseball’s Pioneer Era, 1843-1870, Block’s magisterial Baseball before We Knew It: A Search for the Roots of the Game, and (if you're interested in the details of games, leagues, and competitions) Preston D. Orem’s Baseball 1845-1881 From the Newspaper Accounts.

A couple of days ago I finished The Teammates: A Portrait of a Friendship by David Halberstam. This one's really for baseball fans only. As the title lets on, The Teammates is a book about the friendship between Ted Williams, Bobby Doerr, Johnny Pesky and Dom DiMaggio, four members of the famed Boston Red Sox teams of the late 1930s through the end of the 1940s. All in all this is a well-written and affection portrait the the four players and their friendship over the decades. It's also a fun look back at a bygone era in baseball. You can find my longer review on my Club Read thread.