Bits and Pieces

June 12, 2007

RickLibrarian offers a review on Baseball Haiku. In my “day job” as editor of the Real Life page for the NJ Jewish News, I write a weekly haiku on the week’s reading from the Torah. While it has been generally wel-received since I started it (save for the rare reader who thinks they’re blaspehmous), I find poetry, like fiction, extremely subjective, which is why I rarely review novels or poems. Nevertheless, I did review Line Drives, a collection of poems edited by Tim Wiles of the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown for ForeWard Magazine.

The Museum of the City of New York will host an exhibit on “The Glory Days: New York City Baseball, 1947-1957.”

Accordng to the Website,

The Glory Days… explores how and why New York City came to dominate the sport, how this changed by 1957, and how the events of these eleven seasons shaped today’s game. In addition, the exhibition uses baseball as a lens through which city life in the post-war years is examined, and contextualizes baseball’s dominance in the history of the city.”

The exhibit opens June 27 and runs through Dec. 31.

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The Baseball Toaster’s “Griddle” Page offers this review of The Gashouse Gang, by John Heidenry.

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Since newspapers often wind up on my bookshelf (what can I say, I’m not the best housekeeper in the world), here’s a piece from the New York Observer on the recent Alex Rodriguez affair. Well perhaps affair isn’t the appropriate word in this case. Anyway, it’s an interesting examination of how the sports media is turning into gossip columnists, contrary to “back in the day,” when Babe Ruth could practically host an orgy in the hotel fountain and you’d never find a word about it in the next day’s newsprint. Houston Astros catcher Brad Ausmus contributed an article to June 18 issue of ESPN The Magazine on the omnipresent demands of an omnivorous press.

“In an open-locker-room, scoop-hingry sports world, where have all the boundaries gone?” reads the sub-title.

Yet Ausmus seems to believe the blame does not fall entirely on the press.

“I know every news story can’t be rosy. That’s not reality,” he writes. “And there’s little we can do to stem the growing intrusion of the press. So until newspapers stop printing, ESPN stops broadcasting, and the Internet disappears, maybe some of us just need to develop thicker skins. Or do what many athletes do: don’t pick up the newspaper, turn on the TV or listen to talk radio.”

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