Day 28: 30 baseball books in 30 days of April
The book: "Anatomy of Baseball"
The author: edited by Lee Gutkind and Andrew Blauner (foreword by Yogi Berra)
How to find it: Southern Methodist University Press, 192 pages, $22.50
Where we'd go looking for it: At the publisher's website, as well as Powells online bookstore and Amazon.
The scoop: One of our favorite baseball books in years gone by was "Nine Innings: The Anatomy of a Baseball Game" by Dan Okrent, which came out in 1985 and has since made its way to paperback. He takes a simple June game in 1982 between the Milwaukee Brewers and Baltimore Orioles and breaks down every element, explaining what went into all kinds of simple-looking decisions.
But the anatomy done here on the game of baseball cuts much deeper.
Or, as Yogi Berra says in his foreward: "Anatomy of Baseball is no medical book -- if it was, I'm certain I wouldn't have read it. It's a baseball book, and a good one. ... A good book makes you think about things you might not already think about. Or enjoy stories from writers you maybe don't know. Of course, I was never good with writer's names."
Some of these writer's names, you probably haven't heard of, so that's a good start. See baseball through some fresh eyes.
There's also the usual familiar scribes among the 20 who contributed essays -- George Plimpton, Frank Deford, John Thorn and Roger Angell. But the beauty is finding a fresh voice amongst the giants.
Like Stefan Fatsis writing about the biography of his leather glove, the Rawlings XPG6 from 1977. It leads into another essay by Christopher Buckley, a creative writing teacher at UC Riverside, and the pursuit of his old glove through an eBay auction. And yet another story about a glove, by Katherine A. Powers, a literary writer for the Boston Globe.
The last essay, by Angell, has the definitive look at a plain, old baseball.
"Any baseball is beautiful. No other small package comes as close to the ideal in design and utility. It is a perfect object for a man's hand."
How it goes down in the scorebook: A great running catch.
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