Day 14: 30 baseball books in 30 days of April
The book: "Baseball: A History of America's Favorite Game"
The author: George Vecsey
How to find it: Modern Library Chronicles, $14, 272 pages.
Where we'd go looking for it: Powell's online bookstore says they've got a couple in stock. Also at the Modern Library Chronicles website.
The scoop: It's a paperback version of a 2006 hardbound book from the New York Times columnist, a convient way to carry around a history of the game that you're not likely to find in any other printed word by some long-winded writer who is more interested in his pontificaions about the game.
Vecsey, who has covered the game since the early '60s (trivia note: He also wrote "Coal Miner's Daughter" about the life of Loretta Lynn, made into an Oscar-winning film), is a true Brooklyn Dodger fan who admired Stan Musial's approach to the game -- always smiling, playing consistent, somewhat overshadowed by all the stars in New York.
This is hardly a bunch of dusted-off columns -- it's a true baseball history book, written in a narrative that's easly to absorb, but researched enough so that there's 44 reference books cited in the back, along with 12 pages of notes, detailing where facts came for each of the 20 chapters.
In the first chapter on "Six Degrees," Vecsey embraces the fact that today's game can be traced to almost anything that's happened to it in the past, and fans easily make that connection.
"I could get mawkish," he writes, "and declare that the sport today has gone to hell because of a) money or b) television or c) the owners or d) the players, but the truth is, today's players are consistent and familiar to us -- our national sports theatre, our knights and louts and fallen angels, our saints and sinners, our samurai and shamans. We have known them a long, long time."
How do you not want to read more?
How it goes down in the scorebook: A grand slam, arching from pre-1800s base-ball all the way to today's Selig-strangled sport today.
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