In the “here’s something you don’t see every day” category: With so many books, it’s a rare thing when Publisher’s Weekly does something with a baseball title, but here’s what they had to say about Death in the Strike Zone: The Mystery of America’s First Baseball Hero, by Thomas Gilbert.
From America Magazine: The Jesuit Review (and I’m guessing they don’t cover a whole lot of baseball books either), this piece on Metropolitans: New York Baseball, Class Struggle, and the People’s Team by A. M. Gittlitz.
Nor does The New York Times include baseball titles in its reviews often enough for me, so it was quite interesting to see this on the classic novel, The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. by Robert Coover which was originally published almost 60 years ago. I wish there were more pieces like this which examine a decades-old book under a current-day lens. Just for fun, I wanted to see how many versions of this have been re-released over the years. A sampling:
Be honest, how many of you still keep track of the games via scorebooks? In 1993, I was working on a manuscript about the Mets and kept score for every single game that season. Well, all but one: the night my daughter was born. We we’re living in a friend’s apartment to be closer to the hospital in New York City and I thought I had programmed their VCR for the game. Imagine my horror when I returned to find out I had set it to the wrong channel and got a tennis match instead? Fortunately my wife stepped in and convinced the radio station that carried the Mets to send me audio tapes of their coverage! (P.S. That book never saw the light of day but I still have the scorebooks). This is a very long-winded way to introduce “The not-so-dying art of scorekeeping baseball,” which appeared in the baseball preview section of The Vacaville Reporter, based in Vacaville, CA.
Via Fox2Now in St. Louis, “New book from Ed Wheatley highlights the most iconic gloves in baseball!”
Finally…This has to be the weirdest giveaway by any team.