Day 23: 30 baseball books in 30 days of April
The book: "Tim McCarver's Diamond Gems"
The author: Tim McCarver, with Jim Moskovitz and Danny Peary
How to find it: McGraw Hill, $24.95, 270 pages
Where we'd go looking for it: At the publisher's website, at the website for McCarver's TV show, and over at Powell's online bookstore.
The scoop: The Fox MLB analyst has this TV show, in its ninth season now, where he gabs with those who've played who are playing the game. And he sometimes comes across some nuggets.
So after a while, they got to thinking: Why not transcribe the interviews into a book?
The words may not jump off the page the way the interviews did on the screen, but at least there's some documentation of some goofy circumstances, nuggets of information about things that happened in baseball history, and insights into some people you may not have heard before.
"(This book) is the modern version of 'The Glory Of Their Times' ... It's fun and engaging and instructive and even sweet now and then." That's what Frank Deford had to say about it on the review blurb on the back. We won't go that far with the comparison.
Moskovitz, the creator and producer of “The Tim McCarver Show," and Peary, the show's writer and author of several baseball books, give this more structure as McCarver quizzes folks such as Tommy Lasorda, Sandy Koufax, Willie Mays, Stan Musial, Don Mattingly, Cal Ripken, Johnny Bench and Yogi Berra.
From the Koufax interview:
"For me, Roberto Clemente was the easiest guy in baseball to get two strikes on. The game would start, and I could get him to foul two balls over his team's dugout as easy as anybody. And then it got tough. At least I always knew what I was trying to do against him, although I might not have been successful. It was the opposite with Hank Aaron. When I went out to pitch against him when the game started, I had no idea what I was going to do. He was the only hitter I never figured out, especially in the days before his home runs mounted up. In the early days he was particularly hard to pitch to because he hit the ball to the opposite field. In Milwaukee, a lot of his home runs were to right and right-center. Later in his career, when he started pulling the ball to hit more homers, he gave up a little bit. But for me he was still the toughest batter. I may have gotten him out but he hit the ball hard and my third baseman had bruises on his chest and legs from balls hitting him. Tommy Davis particularly got beat up one day -- he claims he still has a mark on his chest!"
Oh, baby.
How it goes down in the scorebook: A solid ground-ball single up the middle.
Other McCarver books: You've probably stumbled across these:
==2003: "Few and Chosen: Defining Cardinal Greatness Across the Eras"
==1999: "The Perfect Season: Why 1998 Was Baseball's Greatest Year", with Peary.
==1987: "Oh Baby, I Love It"
Comments
Great service you're providing here, but would it be possible to include a list at the bottom of each new entry listing the previous books you've featured to date? Saves the trouble back-tracking page by page.
Thanks.
Ron Kaplan
Posted by: RonKaplanNJ
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April 24, 2008 6:46 AM