The book: “Summers at Shea: Tom Seaver Loses His Overcoat and Other Mets Stories”

The author: Ira Berkow

The vital stats: Triumph Books, 254 pages, $14.95

Find it: At Barnes & Noble, Powells, or the publisher’s website

The pitch: How, when and why did Seaver lose his overcoat?

We honestly have no compelling reason to find out more about the Dodger Stadium look-alike that was flushed away in Flushing, N.Y. (1964-2009).

Except when you have a Pulitzer Prize winner from the New York Times who has put 50 years of columns together that involved this stadium that somehow never got clipped by an airplane landing at LaGuardia, there’s some interest in spending some quality time with the product — again, as the Dodgers make their annual visit to New York to stir up memories again of the 1988 season and their time in Brooklyn.

The column that drew our attention most was on, of course, Jackie Robinson and his connection to Mets third baseman Ed Charles, who at 36 was the oldest member of the team’s 1969 championship roster.

Berkow admits his memory is still “haunted” of him days after Robinson’s death in 1972. Continue reading →

Orel Hershiser reflects on finishing off a shutout against the New York Mets in Game 7 of the NL Championship Series at Dodger Stadium on Oct. 12, 1988. (Associated Press photo)

The book: “Miracle Men: Hershiser, Gibson and the Improbable 1988 Dodgers”

The author: Josh Suchon
The vital stats: Triumph, 330 pages, $24.95

Find it: At Barnes & Noble, Powells, or publisher’s website

The pitch: The impulse was to get this review out ASAP after we tracked the book down, thanks to a heads up from Suchon, the former KABC “DodgerTalk” co-host and current play-by-play man for the Dodgers’ Triple-A Albuquerque Isotopes.

The best way to showcase it this month, however, was waiting for the Dodgers-Mets series to begin in New York — unfortunately, not the same site as some of the most memorable moments in the 1988 NLCS because they’ve torn down Shea Stadium for the slick new Citi Field.

But you get the big picture. Continue reading →

The book: “Instant Baseball: The Baseball Instagrams of Brad Mangin”
The author: Brad Mangin, forward by Pedro Gomez
The vital stats: Cameron + Company, 162 pages, $18.95
Find it: At Barnes & Noble, Powells, author’s website or the publisher’s website
The pitch: I’m still trying to figure out how my Apple iPhone 5 works. If that’s even the proper name for it.
I’ve downloaded a few apps, including Instagram. One of these days, I’ll figure out how to make something happen there. Then I’ll Tout it. Then I’ll … wait until there’s another app to tell me what to do with every spare moment.
What may inspire me more is having experienced the end product of what Mangrin did with his iPhone 4S, using Instagram, to produce one of the more cutting edge books that seems to be out of place in many ways.

Instagram, if we’re not mistaken, is more of an online process of sharing photographs, making them squad, with an artistic ragged edge, tweaking the colors in some ways to make everything look brilliant and retro-dull and over-saturated at the same time.
Committing them to the pages of another medium like a print form seems almost backward.
But then, what do we know? Continue reading →

Highlights of the week ahead in sports, both here and afar:

THIS WEEK’S BEST BET:

NFL DRAFT, first round, 5-8 p.m. Thursday, ESPN, NFL Network:
Kevin Costner, Denis Leary Frank Langella and Jennifer Garner have been cast in an NFL comedy film produced by Ivan Reitman called “Draft Day.” Start the laugh track. Costner plays Sonny Weaver, Jr., the general manager of the Cleveland Browns, scrambling to trade up for the No. 1 pick while dealing with Leary (as the team’s head coach), Langella (the team owner) and Garner (a Browns’ front-office exec and love interest). Somehow, there’s got to be a role for Drew Carey.
Why it matters here — the thing probably won’t come out until late next year — is that filming will actually begin in New York this weekend during the “real” NFL Draft at Radio City Music Hall. They’ll try not to disrupt the proceedings, but part of it includes giving ESPN and NFL Network people  roles “as themselves” in the flick. So if during the live draft, you see Costner run to the podium, interrupt NFL commissioner Roger Goodell and claim the team had changed its mind – now it wants USC quarterback Matt Barkley – there’ll be some context.

According to those who are in the know, Barkley and teammate Robert Woods aren’t supposed to go in this real draft until somewhere in the second round. After the Manti Te’o drama ends. UCLA tailback Jonathan Franklin? Probably around Round 4. As for Khaled Holmes, Nickell Robey, T.J. McDonald and Joseph Fauria? They’ll take the fifth.

Otherwise, the Kansas City Chiefs are on the clock at No. 1 in the now annual three-day ordeal and strongly hint they’ll be scooping up some Texas A&M offensive tackle (yawn) named Luke Joeckel – no joke. At the very least, we know he can lift Johnny Football to the heavens.
That’s supposed to start a run on that position. And keep viewers glued to the screen? Someone who hopes to eventually run past all of them (and perhaps tackle Barkley again) is UCLA defensive end Datone Jones.

The ESPN draftniks are using all the right jargon to call him the real sleeper – but does that me he should be all dressed up on Thursday or Friday. “I love his versatility,” gushes Todd McShay of Jones. “He can play left defensive end in a 4-3. He can play a five technique in a 3-4. He shows up at the Senior Bowl kinda unheralded, but he was the most dominant player every single day in practice going up against Eric Fisher, Lane Johnson, the best of the best, getting it done. Highly productive. His football character is exceptional. (He) belongs in the first round but I’m hearing it won’t be until the middle of the second.” Adds Mel Kiper Jr.: “I agree, wholeheartedly. This is a kid with power and quickness. And they already have a nickname for Jones – Da-Tone Setter. Jon Gruden loves this kid. I think late first, early second round is where he comes off the board.”
The tone set in this thing usually emotes from the gut of Chris Berman, unless you’re smart enough to watch on the league-owned channel. That’s there you’ll find plenty of upside. Especially if Garner is taking up the draft cards.
Rounds 2-3 goes Friday (3:30-to-5 p.m.) with rounds 4-7 on Saturday (9 a.m.-to-5 p.m.)

BEST OF THE REST: Continue reading →

Alan R. Kamuda/Detroit Free Press

The book: “The Bird: The Life and Legacy of Mark Fidrych”

The author: Doug Wilson

The vital stats: Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, 306 pages, $26.99

Find it: At Barnes & Noble, Powells, or publisher’s website

The pitch: This is such an easy sell. Go to a publishing house, pitching them a story on how you’ll reconstruct the life of one of the most beloved big-leaguers in the last half century — a guy who always had a grin on his face and a mop of curly blond hair, talked to baseballs on the mound, shook hands with teammates after they made great plays, got on his knees to smooth over the dirt to his liking, and was linked to a beloved Sesame Street character.

How do you not buy into that?

The toughest job then is to pull it off. The cover created to spark interest with what’s inside is already a winner. What’s next? Execute. Continue reading →

Legally, we’re not sure if we can show you the marked-up legal pad that we’ve been using to keep track of all the books rotating in and out of dates we have slotted for them during the 30 days of April. But we will anyway:

To date, here are the 20 books we’ve done, with 10 go to: Continue reading →

The Ty Cobb statue outside Comerica Park in Detroit

The book: “Heart of a Tiger: Growing Up with my Grandfather, Ty Cobb”

The author:  Herschel Cobb

The vital stats: ECW Press, 279 pages, $24.95

Find it: At Barnes & Noble, Powells or the publisher’s website

The pitch: Ty Cobb made headlines in Southern California, as recently as 2011.

The great, great grandson of the Hall of Fame Detroit Tigers outfielder, also named Ty Cobb, enrolled at Occidental College to play, of all things,  Division III basketball. Continue reading →

The Hank Greenberg statue as it sits outside Comerica Park in Detroit.

The book: “Hank Greenberg: The Hero of Heroes”

The author: John Rosengren

The vital stats: Penguin, 392 pages, $26.95

Find it: At Barnes & Noble, Powells, author’s website or publisher’s website

The pitch: As a follow up to Thursday’s “American Jews & America’s Game,” we have more (again) on the former Tigers’ slugger who, when we last looked it up, wasn’t keen on being known as a hero.

Mark Kurlansky’s interesting take on Greenberg from 2011 gave us the impression that he was “the quintessential secular Jew, and to celebrate him for his loyalty to religious observance is to ignore who this man was.” The title included the headline: “The Hero Who Didn’t Want to Be One.”

Other approaches to Greenberg’s life — his own autobiography with Ira Berkow, reissued in 2009, for example, along with the acclaimed documentary on Greenberg from 2001 — give the same impression.

As the Angels start a three-game series against Greenberg’s former team this weekend in Anaheim, we’ll divert from the usual book review here to allow Rosengren, who used 100 books as a reference in his bibliography, to explain his approach from a recent e-mail exchange we had: Continue reading →

What made it into today’s weekly sports media column:

Circling back to the review we did of “Keepers of the Game: When The Baseball Beat Was the Best Job at the Paper” by Dennis D’Agostino, we’ve got more from the author on why he thought it was important to get this out now. Smokes and chokes makes a return to the new format at well, with news about Bob Miller’s upcoming book signings, the Long Beach Grand Prix TV coverage, and ESPN’s next attempt to clarify its media sources.

What didn’t make it:
 

== You will not get a fix-it ticket for driving a truck around in Long Beach with this design attached to the outside. Continue reading →

The range of emotions someone like Paul Sunderland has today is understandable, just hours removed from landing back in Southern California from three days spent in Boston.

The longtime broadcaster and former Lakers play-by-play man was assigned by NBC’s Westlake Village-based Universal Sports Network to host the live national TV coverage of Monday’s Boston Marathon.

This was a city he had visited dozens of times before. He returns home and admits: “Now I know what terror looks and feels like.”

There is measured infuriation in his voice. He pauses to collect his thoughts. He wants to capture the proper perspective of what he saw.

“Please, not to compare what I went through to what the victims went through,” Sunderland said this morning from his home in Malibu. “I was close to it all, but I’m OK. For so many others, their lives are forever changed.”

When the first bomb on Boylston Street went off, Sunderland had just finished walking up through that people-pack thoroughfare and finally reached a production trailer on Exeter Street about 50 meters away, not far from the race’s finish line.

“It took 25 minutes just to walk those two blocks,” he said. “I followed a young mother pushing a stroller with twins as she cut a path through the crowd. There were children and families everywhere on both sides of the street.”

The live TV coverage of the race had finished at 1 p.m. Eastern Time, but he had to circle back for a 2:45 p.m. production meeting. The broadcast crew was to be back on the air at 4 p.m. with updates and interviews featuring the winners and top finishers.

That didn’t happen. Continue reading →