* Announcement: New baseball titles from University of Nebraska Press

For some, it’s Christmas catalogs. For others, it’s gardening. For me, it’s book catalgs from publishing houses.

The Fall/Winter ’08 issue from University of Nebraska just arrived and, past being prelude, there are some interesting baseball titles sprinkled throughout.

• Wally Yonamine: The Man Who Change Japanese Baseball, by Robert K. Fitts: In an odd switch, Yonamine was the first American-born Japanese to play pro ball in his ancestral home. In a sense, he was a Jackie Robinson figure, inexplicably drawing the ire of the native-born, but eventually letting his bat speak for him. Fitts has previously written on the subject in Remembering Japanese Baseball: An Oral History of the Game.
• The Warsaw Sparks: A Memoir, by Gary Gidner. The adventures of the author, who was working at the University of Warsaw on a Fulbright scholarship, as he takes over coaching the Polish professional team.
• The Postwar Yankees: Baseball’s Golden Age Revisited, by David G. Surdam. “…Surdam deconstructs this idyllic period to show that while the Yankees piled on pennants and World Series titles throughout the 1950s, Major League baseball attendance consistently declined and gate-revenue disparity widened through the mid-1950s. Contrary to popular belief, the era was already experiencing many problems that fans of today’s game bemoan….”
• UNP is also re-issuing Farewell to Sport, by NY Daily News columnist Paul Gallico; Three Finger: The Mordecai Brown Story, by his grandchildren Cindy Thomson and Scott Brown; and Harvey Frommer’s Shoeless Joe and Ragtime Baseball.

Tagged as: Announcements, new baseball books, University of Nebraska Press