Day 3: 30 baseball books in 30 days of April
The book: The ESPN Baseball Encyclopedia, fifth edition: The most comprehensive single-volume reference in print
The author: Edited by Gary Gillette and Pete Palmer, forward by Peter Gammons
How to find it: Barnes & Noble Publishing, 1,872 pages, $24.95
Where we'd go looking for it: Powell's book store online.
The scoop: Six pounds of information -- or the size of a new-born baby.
Lists of almost everything you'd ever want about the sport, going back to Negro Leagues, college, careers interrupted by war service, all-time leaders in 150 categories, every record ever set (probably), all-time rosters ... on really thin paper in a soft-bound edition. Imagine how many trees sacrificed themselves for this.
But, as renowned statman Bill James wrotes: "Sure, you can stumble across Cliff Dapper in cyberspace, but what are the odds/ if you don't have a print encyclopedia, what are your real chances of discovering that Milo Candini could actually hit? They deserve the cold, marble permance of black ink on white pages."
So we went to page 373, and couldn't find any Candini listed as a hitter between Casey Candaele or John Cangelosi. But on BaseballReference.com, we find that Candini, a pitcher with Washington and Philadelphia between 1943 and '51, hit .243 in eight seasons with one homer. Impressed? Uh, not really.
There was one customer review of this on the Barnes & Noble site: "Lots of stats and very interesting."
Don't get too excited there.
At least, as in most ESPN-produced publications, there's not any essay by Chris Berman on why baseball players have the best nicknames.
How it goes down in the scorebook: A stand-up double.