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 →

Gabe Kapler speaks to the Taft High School baseball and softball team during a stop at his alma mater on the Dodgers Community Caravan in 2011. (Michael Owen Baker/Daily NewsStaff Photographer)

The book: “American Jews & America’s Game: Voices of a Growing Legacy in Baseball”

The author: Larry Ruttman

The vital stats: University of Nebraska Press, 500 pages, $34.95

Find it: At Barnes & Noble, Powells, at the author’s blog spot and the publisher’s website

The pitch: Gabe Kapler, the former Taft High of Woodland Hills standout who last played in spring training with the Dodgers a few years ago, has one tattoo on on his right calf with the post-Holocast phrase “Never Again,” and another depicting the Star of David on his left calf with “Strong Willied, Strong Minded” in Hebrew.

Jews, we’re also told, aren’t supposed to have tattoos.

Kapler explains his mother’s roots as director of a Jewish Adat Ari El Day School in North Hollywood, and feeling he is “a Jew ethnically” much more than religiously. His wife, Lisa, whom he met at Taft, was raised Catholic and he calls his family not religious, but “we’re very spiritual.”

Before this turns into a SNL gameshow — Who’s Jewish? Who’s Almost? Who Knew! — or a Adam Sandler novelty song, the project Ruttman pulls together here can be both enlightening and confusing at the same time. With Kapler as an example. Continue reading →

The book: “Francona: The Red Sox Years”

The author: Terry Francona, with Dan Shaughnessy

The vital stats: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 368 pages, $28

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

The pitch: It’s a whole new set of circumstances with the Boston Red Sox visiting Francona in Cleveland this week. Maybe that’s just how things work out.

It’s already been a strange couple of years for Francona, who went from Red Sox skipper, out of a job, working for Fox on their MLB package, then getting hired by the Indians — a job that opened when John Farrell left to fill the vacancy after Bobby Valentine lasted one year in Boston.

Maybe stranger for Francona is what he writes in his acknowledgement: “If you had told me on September 1, 2011 that (two months later) I would be jobless and writing a book with Dan Shaughnessy, I would have told you as eloquently as only I can do that this would happen as soon as a 200-pound hog jumps out of my ass. It turned out to be not only fun but very healthy for me to look back at the eight years of whirlwind ups and downs.” Continue reading →