Day 25: 30 baseball books in 30 days of April
The book: "Hammerin' Hank, George Almighty and the Say Hey Kid"
The author: John Rosengren
How to find it: Sourcebooks, 332 pages, $16.95
Where we'd go looking for it: For excerpts, go to Rosengren's personal website, who has a link to the sale of the book on Amazon.com. You can also find it on Powell's.
The scoop: If Mike Shropshire is banking on the theme that 1975 was the "Last Real Season," then Rosengren will make a case for 1973 (if you had a collection of Topps baseball cards, the three on the cover would tip off the year).
Thirty-five years ago, Hank Aaron, George Steinbrenner and Willie Mays were baseball's headliners -- as was Reggie Jackson and his Swingin' A's, who were in the middle of their three-year run as world champs.
Rosengren says he was 9 years old living in Minneapolis when he experienced this year first hand -- bound to make an impression on any kid.
This was the first year of the designated hitter. It was Steinbrenner's take-over of the Yankees, and his immediate involvement in a scandalous coverup that traces back to the Watergate scandal going on at the time.
Dick Allen, the Chicago White Sox's MVP, just signed a deal for an unheard of $225,000 a season -- more than Aaron, who was closing in on Babe Ruth's all-time home-run record.
Mays was helping the Mets make it to the World Series -- including a National League playoff run highlighted by Bud Harrelson's brawl with Pete Rose -- but was left in that horrible pose, on his knees, pleading with the umpire.
Oh, and in '73, Nolan Ryan threw two no-hitters. And still didn't win the AL Cy Young Award.
Rosengreen makes a decent case for the year to be re-examined as a pivotal one during that 1970s span of change.
How it goes down in the scorebook: HR, Aaron.
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If you missed any of the 30 baseball books that came out this spring, here's one last link in a list:
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"
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Thanks for the happy recap of reviews!