The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC featured two pieces about baseball recently. On March 28, Sportswriter Ken Dawidoff and pediatrician Dr. Harley Rotbart spoke about their new book, 101 Lessons from the Dugout: What Baseball and Softball Can Teach Us About the Game of Life (jump to the 56:00 mark). A few days later, A.M. Gittlitz, an organizer and writer and the author of Metropolitans: New York Baseball, Class Struggle, and the People’s Team, was on hand to talk about the way class and politics and baseball intersect with the story of the Mets baseball franchise.
The New Yorker reviewed Gittlitz’s book with the run headline “Engels in the Outfield.”
Dawidoff — a former guest of The Bookshelf Conversations — and Mike Vaccaro (The Bosses of the Bronx: The Endless Drama of the Yankees Under the House of Steinbrenner) both have YouTube pieces up. Dawidoff here and Vaccaro here.
Blue Jays sportscaster Hazel Mae to publish memoir this fall, to be titled, Before I Let You Go: My Life in Broadcasting, Baseball, and Beyond. Pub date slated for November 6.
Is anyone else shocked that The Saturday Evening Post is still around? I was when I saw this collection of baseball cartoons from its pages.
Doug Glanville evidently has his own baseball dictionary, as per his recent Substack post.
I’m always fascinated when a book about the (very) early days of baseball gets notice from sources you would not expect. This time it’s The Guardian, which examines Death in the Strike Zone: The Mystery of America’s First Baseball Hero by Thomas Gilbert.
Is this some sort of record? From Sports Collectors Daily, “Lou Piniella’s Cardboard Trail: From a Career-Changing Trade to a Three-Card Rookie Run and Beyond.”
