* Baseball review roundup: Publishers Weekly

Dermont McEvoy of Publishers Weekly published the magazine’s annual baseball roundup.

No surprise, but this year’s selections are heavy on the “bad boy” books, including Selena Robert’s A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez (April, Harper Collins).

PW contacted Roberts’s editor at HarperCollins, senior v-p/ executive editor David Hirshey. Hirshey, who in the past has waxed poetic about his baseball books (he published Jane Leavy’s much admired biography of Sandy Koufax), was more reticent about what might be in Roberts’s book. “Alex Rodriguez is universally regarded as the best player in baseball and his life off the field is often as interesting as his day job,” says Hirshey. “Having followed Selena’s work at the New York Times and Sports Illustrated, I pursued her to write the first definitive biography of a complicated superstar. Even though all the media focus has been on her extraordinary steroid reporting in SI, this is a book about the full nine innings of A-Rod’s life, not just one major strike against him.”

Other books about the use of PED include The Rocket That Fell to Earth: Roger Clemens and the Rage for Baseball Immortality, by Jeff Pearlman, (HC, late March); Crooked: A History of Cheating in Sports, by Fran Zimniuch (April, Taylor); Darryl Strawberry’s Straw: Finding My Way (May, Ecco); and Kirk Radomski’s Bases Loaded: The Inside Story of the Steroid Era in Baseball by the Central Figure in the Mitchell Report.

Thankfully, there are some more traditional stories out there. Marty Appel, the long-time Yankees PR man, has written Munson: The Life and Death of a Yankee Captain (July, Doubleday), about the legendary catcher.Staying with the Yankees, we have Peter Golenbock’s Steinbrenner bio, George: The Poor Little Rich Boy Who Built the Yankee Empire (May, Wiley).

Switching crosstown, in addition to the aforementioned Strawberry project, Ron Darling writes about his career in The Complete Game: Reflections on Baseball, Pitching, and Life on the Mound (April, Knopf).

According to McEvoy, Larry Rye has written the “definitive biography” of a another icon in Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend (June, Random House).