An unexpected source: The Atlantic

I was listening to a Leonard Lopate interview with Greg Proops, a comic featured on the popular TV show Whose Line Is It Anyway, host of The Smartest Man in the World podcast, and, most recently, author of The Smartest Book in the World: A Lexicon of Literacy, A Rancorous Reportage, A Concise Curriculum of Coolwhich devotes probably a disproportionate amount of space to baseball.

Proops is a major and knowledgeable fan. The latter is an important distinction. A lot of celebrities say their fans, but Proops walks the walk. I offer to you his “Walkers” episode from 2012 in which he describes how raucous and filthy the game was as played in the late 19th century (warning; LOTS of NSFW language). You can find it within this entry I posted after hearing that podcast.

This is a long-winded way of getting to my point: During the interview, Lopate mentioned an article he had read in the February issue of The Atlantic titled “Making Baseball Less Boring.” When I went to the magazine’s website and typed “baseball” in the search box, I was presented with over 16,000 hits. Granted many of them refer to baseball only tangentially, but there’s a lot of good stuff in there if you have the patience to sift through it. For example, three articles I printed for later reading include “Moneyball 2.0: The New Team-Oriented Study of Baseball” (2014); “A Cultural History of the Baseball Card” (2014); and “Battering the Batter” (2015).

You can find similar thoroughness on the websites of other major magazines. Happy hunting.

In case you were wondering, “The Last of the Pure Baseball Men” the cover story for the August 1981 issue, refers to Calvin Griffith, the late owner of Washington Senators/Minn. Twins.

 

An unexpected source: The Atlantic

A 30-in-30 review

(As opposed to ESPN’s 30 for 30 series).

Once again, Tom Hoffarth of the LA Daily News has done a great service to the baseball reading community with his annual 30-books-in-30-days series on his “Farther off the Wall” blog. I advise going deep into each piece because Hoffarth offers interesting links among his DVD-type “extras.” Did I say extras? This would be considered the special bonus edition.

The only knock — and this is obviously an East Coast bias — is that he leans heavy on Dodgers/California-based books.

Here’s the rundown:

• Day 1:Tommy Lasorda: My Way


• Day 2: Out At Home: The True Story of Glenn Burke, Baseball’s First Openly Gay Player


• Day 3:Perfect: The Rise and Fall of John Paciorek, Baseball’s Greatest One-Game Wonder


• Day 4: The Joy of Ballpark Food: From Hot Dogs to Haute Cusine


• Day 5: 101 Baseball Places To See Before You Strike Out: Second Edition


• Day 6:100 Years of Who’s Who in Baseball


• Day 7: The Matheny Manifesto: A Young Manager’s Old-School Views on Success in Sports and Life


• Day 8: Bats, Balls, and Hollywood Stars: Hollywood’s Love Affair with Baseball, by Joe Siegman


• Day 9: A Game of Their Own: Voices of Contemporary Women in Baseball,by Jennifer Ring


• Day 10: The Hidden Game of Baseball: A New Edition of the Baseball Classic that Ignited the Sabermetric Revolution, by John Thorn and Pete Palmer


• Day 11: Knuckleball: The History of the Unhittable Pitch, by Lew Freedman


• Day 12: Picker’s Pocket Guide – Baseball Memorabilia: How to Pick Antiques Like a Pro, by Jeff Figler


• Day 13: Joe Black: More Than a Dodger, by Martha Jo Black and Chuck Schoffner


• Day 14: Gil Hodges: A Hall of Fame Life, by Mort Zachter


• Day 15: I Am Jackie Robinson, from the series “Ordinary People Change the World by Brad Meltzer


• Day 16: Throw Like A Woman , by Susan Petrone


• Day 17: The Game Must Go On: Hank Greenberg, Pete Gray, and the Great Days of Baseball on the Home Front in WWII, by John Klima


• Day 18: In Pursuit of Pennants: Baseball Operations from Deadball to Moneyball, by Mark Armour and Daniel Levitt


• Day 19: Tony Gwynn: He Left His Heart in San Diego, by Rich Wolfe


• Day 20: A History of Baseball in 100 Objects: A Tour through the Bats, Balls, Uniforms, Awards, Documents and Other Artifacts that Tell the Story of the National Pastime, by Josh Leventhal


• Day 21: Mystery Ball ’58: A Season-Long Whodunit, by Jeff Polman


• Day 22: Mashi: The Unfulfilled Baseball Dreams of Masanori Murakami, the First Japanese Major Leaguer, by Robert K. Fitts


• Day 23: Handy Andy: The Andy Pafko Story, by Joe Niese


• Day 24: Marvin Miller, Baseball Revolutionary, by Robert F. Burk


• Day 25: I Don’t Care if We Never Get Back: 30 Games in 30 Days on the Best Worst Baseball Road Trip Ever, by Ben Blatt and Eric Brewster


• Day 26: The Pine Tar Game: The Kansas City Royals, the New York Yankees, and Baseball’s Most Absurd and Entertaining Controversy, by Filip Bondy


• Day 27: Billy Martin: Baseball’s Flawed Genius, by Bill Pennington


• Day 28: Seeing Home: The Ed Lucas Story: A Blind Broadcaster’s Story of Overcoming Life’s Greatest Obstacles, by Ed Lucas with Christopher Lucas


• Day 29: A Scout’s Report: My 70 Years in Baseball, by George Genovese, with Dan Taylor


• Day 30: The League of Outsider Baseball: An Illustrated History of Baseball’s Forgotten Heroes, by Gary Cieradkowski

A 30-in-30 review

Author appearance: Gelf's Varsity Letters

Wish I’d had more advance notice on this, but…

Varsity Letters returns to the Gallery at Le Poisson Rouge on Thursday, April 23, for a look at all things baseball.

Legendary broadcaster Ed Lucas and his son Chris will discuss their new memoir, Seeing Home: The Ed Lucas Story: A Blind Broadcaster’s Story of Overcoming Life’s Greatest Obstacles.

They’ll be joined by Matthew Silverman, a die-hard Mets fan and author of Baseball Miscellany: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Baseball.

The free event will take place at The Gallery at LPR in Manhattan’s West Village, 158 Bleecker St. (between Sullivan St. and Thompson St.), NYC. Attendees must be 21 or older, as per LPR rules. (E-mail michael@gelfmagazine.com if you are under 21 and would like to attend the events.)

Doors open at 7:00. Event starts at 7:30.

Author appearance: Gelf's Varsity Letters

Pursuant to the previous piece re: Paul Auster’s suggestions on how to shorten the games, I offer this reboot of the seventh-inning stretch “anthem”:

Take me out

Buy me some peanuts.

I don’t care.

Let us root root for the laundry;

If they don’t win, meh.

For it’s two strikes, you’re out.

The end.

(Time of game: 2:10)

Upcoming author events

The Yogi Berra Museum in Little Falls, NJ, will host an appearance by Steve Kettmann, author of Baseball Maverick, tomorrow (April 18) at 2 p.m. Joining Kettmann will be Sandy Alderson, the subject of the book. The program begins at 2 p.m. Cost is $30 and includes admission to the museum for you and one guest and a copy of the book. To RSVP, call 973-655-2378.

The Bergino Baseball Clubhouse (67 East 11 Street, NYC) features several writers in the weeks ahead. First up, Jennifer Ring, author of A Game of Their Own: Voices of Contemporary Women in Baseball) on Thursday, April 23. Jim Kaat, former Major League pitcher and current broadcaster will discuss If These Walls Could Talk: New York Yankees on Friday, May 8. The following Wednesday (May 13), Bill Pennington will talk about Billy Martin: Baseball’s Flawed Genius. A week later (May 20), Jeff Katz, the Mayor of Cooperstown, home to the Baseball Hall of Fame, will be on hand for Split Season: 1981. Steve Steinberg, co-author with Lyle Spatz on The Colonel and Hug, brings the busy month to a close on Thursday, May 28. Admission to all programs, which begin at 7 p.m., are free but reservations are required as the space if charming but limited. Call 212-226-7150 or email the Clubhouse to RSVP or for further information.

By the way, your Bergino host, Jay Goldberg, records all the author conversations and posts them as podcasts. You can find them here under “categories.”

 

 

Upcoming author events

The Bookshelf Conversation: Steve Kettmann

Books about the business and businesspeople of baseball are becoming more available these days; I devote a whole chapter on the topic in 501 Baseball Books.

I think fans tend to forget that the people who run baseball aren’t born to the position. Just like everybody, they grow into the job, based on years of experience. One of the more talked abut titles this year — for various reasons — is Steve Kettmann’s Baseball Maverick: How Sandy Alderson Revolutionized Baseball and Revived the Mets. Kettmann starts with Alderson’s military career as a major point in explaining the veteran executive’s philosophy, expectations, and strategies. Alderson was with the Oakland As and was Billy Beane’s mentor at the dawn of the Moneyball era.

Kettmann has written his own books; worked as a ghostwriter, notably for Jose Canseco’s memoir Juiced; and served as an editor for a Game Time: A Baseball Companion,  a compilation of Roger Angell’s New Yorker essays. I spoke with Kettmann last week about the varying degrees of difficulties in the disparate projects.

Kettman and Alderson will be at the Yogi Berra Museum in Little Falls, NJ, on Saturday, April 18 from 2 p.m.-3:30 p.m. Cost is $30 (includes book, admission and one guest). To RSVP call (973) 655-2378. Maybe I’ll see you there. For you west coasters who can’t make it to Jersey, he’ll be at Books Inc. in Alameda in the 22nd. More info on that one here.

Click here for more information about Baseball Maverick.

The Bookshelf Conversation: Steve Kettmann

NEW STUFF: I have been posting these things long enough now that a few have commented that the introductory section isn’t necessary anymore. But I’m leaving it in because, to paraphrase Joe DiMaggio when asked why he played so hard all the time, there may be people who’ve never read the best-seller entries before. So…

Note: Just like Chuck Lorre’s “vanity cards” at the end of The Big Bang Theory, you should read these list stories to their conclusion; the end is always changing, even though the theme is basically the same, finishing up with a self-promotional message.

So without further ado, here are the top ten baseball books as per Amazon.com, as of this posting.

Caveat 1: Print editions only (at least for now); because I’m old school.

Caveat 2: Since the rankings are updated every hour, these lists might not longer be 100 percent accurate by the time you read them. But it’ll be close enough for government work.

Caveat 3: Sometimes they’ll try to pull one over on you and include a book within a category that doesn’t belong. I’m using my discretion to eliminate such titles from my list. For example, for some reason a recent listing included Tarnished Heels: How Unethical Actions and Deliberate Deceit at the University of North Carolina Ended the “The Carolina Way”, which, far as I can tell, is not at all about baseball, at least not in the main. For the sake of brevity, I will be omitting the subtitles, which have become ridiculously long in in some cases in recent years, also at my discretion.

1. Billy Martin: Baseball’s Flawed Genius, by Bill Pennington


2. Giant Splash: Bondsian Blasts, World Series Parades, and Other Thrilling Moments by the Bay, by Andrew Baggarly


3. Baseball Prospectus 2015


4. The Real McCoy: My Half Century with the Cincinnati Reds, by Hal McCoy


5. Jeter Unfiltered, by Derek Jeter. (Bookshelf review here).


6. Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, by Michael Lewis


7. The Science of Hitting, by Ted Williams


8. 100 Years of Who’s Who in Baseball, by Douglas Lyons (Bookshelf review here)


9. Championship Blood: The 2014 World Series Champion San Francisco Giants, by Brian Murphy


10. Fantasy Baseball for Smart People: How to Profit Big During MLB Season, by Jonathan Bales

Here’s the April list of New York Times sports best-seller list (10 plus 10 more). Jeter Unfiltered rises to number six, while John Feinstein’s Where Nobody Knows Your Name: Life in the Minor Leagues of Baseball joins the fun at number 12. There’s no indication whether these are hardcover, paperbacks, or combined, but given that the Feinstein title has been out for a couple of years, I’m guessing “combined.” It’s also interesting to note that the books are not linked to a vendor site (Amazon, Barnes and Noble, other). Perhaps the Times thinks it unseemly to to try make a few cents via referrals. I obviously have no such qualms.

Now that the season is under way, there are fewer books that would be used as research material for fantasy teams. Populating the list are bios and memoirs about Billy Martin and veteran sports scribe Hal McCoy. I’ve had a chance to read the Martin book and found it excellent (look for my review as part of a larger baseball book feature on Bookreporter.com in the next couple of weeks).

Not on either list? 501 Baseball Books Fans Must Read before They Die. It made a brief surge last week to the 123,000 range but has dropped to 637,000-ish since.Ya’ll are gonna do something about that, right? Just one or two purchases can move a book up a couple hundred thousand spots. If you have read it, thanks, hope you enjoyed it, and please consider writing a review for the Amazon page. There haven’t been any in awhile. Doesn’t have to be long (or even complimentary, if you didn’t like it), but anything would be appreciated. And thanks to those who have.