30 baseball books: The whole freakin' list
You think I really read all 30 books in the last 30 days? Enough, I will admit, to get a flavor of some of the books. I couple, I gladly made it all the way through. The first one -- "101 Baseball Places" -- was the first that held my interest from start to finish. The others, not as much, but that's more a function of the clock and this fast-paced review process than the content. They will be read.
The others I'm quite fond of, if you must know, are, in this particular order, the book on Chief Bender, Rob Neyer's latest effort, "Benchclearing," and George Vescey's paperback reissue of "Baseball."
Here's one last link to all 30 if somehow you dozed off during a week or so (and expect an occasional reference to other new baseball books as they drop in during the season, especially later toward World Series time) ==
April 1: "101 Baseball Places to See Before You Strike Out"
April 2: "Baseball's Greatest Quotations: An Illustrated Treasury of Baseball Quotations and Historical Lore"
April 3: "The ESPN Baseball Encyclopedia: Fifth Edition"
April 4: "My Bat Boy Days: Lessons I Learned from the Boys of Summer" by Steve Garvey
April 5: "Change Up: An Oral History of 8 Key Events That Shaped Baseball"
April 6: "Benchclearing: Baseball's Greatest Fights and Riots"
April 7: "The Code: Baseball's Unwritten Rules and Its Ignore-at-Your-Own-Risk Code of Conduct"
April 8: "Rob Neyer's Big Book of Baseball Legends: The Truth, the Lies and Everything Else"
April 9: "The 33-Year-Old Rookie: Chris Coste"
April 10: "The Rise and Fall of Dodgertown"
April 11: "Far From Home: Latino Baseball Players in America"
April 12: "We Would Have Played For Nothing: Baseball Stars of the 1950s and 1960s Talk About the Game They Love"
April 13: "Asterisk: Home Runs, Steroids, and the Rush to Judgment"
April 14: "Baseball: A History of America's Favorite Game"
April 15: "Yankee Stadium: The Official Retrospective"
April 16: "Yogi: The Life and Times of an American Original"
April 17: "The Greatest Game: The Yankees, the Red Sox, and the Playoff of '78"
April 18: "Ed Barrow: The Bulldog Who Built the Yankees' First Dynasty"
April 19: "Ballad of Billy and George: The Tempestuous Baseball Marriage of Billy Martin and George Steinbrenner"
April 20: "The Last Real Season: A Hilarious Look Back at 1975 -- When Major Leaguers Made Peanuts, the Umpires Wore Red, and Billy Martin Terrorized Everyone"
April 21: "An American Journey: My Life on the Field, in the Air, and on the Air" by Jerry Coleman
April 22: "Red Sox Rule: Terry Francona and Boston's Rise to Dominance"
April 23: "Tim McCarver's Diamond Gems"
April 24: "Chief Bender's Burden: The Silent Struggle of a Baseball Star"
April 25: "Hammerin' Hank, George Almighty and the Say Hey Kid: The Year The Changed Baseball Forever (1973)"
April 26: "Living on the Black: Two Pitchers, Two Teams, One Season to Remember"
April 27: "Going Going Gone: The Art of Trade in Major League Baseball"
April 28: "Anatomy of Baseball"
April 29: "But Didn't We Have Fun?: An Informal History of Baseball's Pioneer Era, 1843-1870"
April 30: "Baseball's Greatest Hit: The Story of 'Take Me Out to the Ball Game' "
==Also:
Looking for a good way to keep up on all baseball books, and even more of the others that came out this month, check out Ron Kaplan's blog here, which will also have his own reviews of some of these books listed above (too bad I didn't stumble upon this until recently).
Included on Ron's site today is a reference to a book that appears to have been released today called "Brooklyn Dodgers: The Last Great Pennant Drive, 1957" by John Nordell, Jr., which also has a link to a Brooklyn Dodgers site that has more details.
Thanks for that one.
==This also announced today:
Former baseball slugger Darryl Strawberry, whose achievements on the field often were overshadowed by his struggles with cancer and substance abuse, is writing a memoir, "Straw," that will come out in 2009, publisher Ecco announced Wednesday.
According to Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins, Strawberry's book "details his life growing up in Crenshaw High in L.A., his rise to baseball superstardom as a Met, Dodger, and Yankee, the high life and low life, his brushes with the law, his triumphant battle over cancer, his religious awakening, and his marriage to the love of his life."
John Strausbaugh, who helped write a book by John Leguizamo, will collaborate with Strawberry on his memoir.
In March, the Mets announced they had hired Strawberry as a special instructor and a traveling ambassador, visiting minor league teams and community organizations. He recently agreed to pay the Internal Revenue Service more than $430,000 in back taxes, penalties and interest.
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