* Alert: Redundancy in baseball books. Redundancy in baseball books.

The writer of this interesting piece by Clark Booth in the Dorchester Reporter brings up a good point: Why do we need so many books on the same subjects, such as the Boston Red Sox in 1978?

It’s been said lately that the strings are being pulled tightly in the publishing industry. Several factors are purportedly involved including the general decline of the printed word in our brave new internet driven world as well as the general malaise loosely termed global recession. Whatever, it’s said to be tough to get stuff published with titles already in the pipeline being dropped.

Maybe so, but you can’t prove it by the subjects of sports in general and baseball in particular. Not a week goes by without a feverish new tome on some subtle baseball footnote hitting the streets leaving us to wonder why anyone would want to read a whole book on such minor and irrelevant slices of reality let alone write or publish one.

Not that it’s all junk. Some is quite decently done and most of it is earnest. But there is too much of it and – above all – much too much of it is hopelessly redundant.

Booth also offers the two high-profile books about the Yankees as further evidence of what he considers unnecessary duplication: The Yankees Years, by Joe Torre and Tom Verducci, and Selena Roberts’ biography about Alex Rodriguez.

One point on which I disagree is the notion of just who should be eligible to write said books:

…why is it that anyone can write a book about baseball whereas on other topics you need to establish credentials and maybe even some authority, or at least a personal connection like ‘having been there’ or ‘done that’. Authors, especially those who have a little celebrity, are casually drawn to the task because it’s easy, harmless, and highly profitable. In the old days important writers would rip off a travel book to make quick bucks. Now they write about baseball.

It’s called research. What about all those books on Abraham Lincoln? Are those authors disqualified because they weren’t around when he delivered the Gettysburg Address?