* Bits and Pieces

Time to play a little catch-up:

• From Pressboxonline.com, a Baltimore-sports oriented site, a review of Bert Randolph Sugar’s new coffee table book about the Hall of Fame. “[The author] left nothing out and I can’t think of a better way to educate those whom are grasping for a better understanding of baseball’s history than to give Sugar’s account a long look.”
• From the Magazine History blog, this entry about early articles on  the new national game.
• From the Illinois-based Beacon News, a profile of first-time author John O’Donnell and his new book, Like Night and Day: A Look at Chicago Baseball 1964-1969.
• From NewJerseyNewsRoom, this Q & A with Curt Smith, author of the new Vin Scully biography. Smith will be at the Yogi Berra Museum in Little Falls on Sunday, June 28, at 4 p.m.
• Via a roundabout path, here’s a great piece by Robert Lipsyte on the spate of new books on baseball and steroids, including the usual titles (American Icon, The Rocket That Fell to Earther, A-Rod, Cooperstown Confidential, The Yankee Years, and more).
• Mark Lamster reviews Michael Shapiro’s Bottom of the Ninth in the Los Angeles Times. “Shapiro… does an admirable job telling this complex story. His biographical sketches of Rickey and Webb are especially compelling. But a sausage story is not always the most compelling of reads, and to inoculate himself against that reality, Shapiro has larded up this one by interspersing a second narrative, the story of Stengel’s final years with the Yankees, which is of little relation to the primary action of the book. It’s less than ideal, but Rickey, always an optimist, might have put a positive spin on it: Two stories for the price of one.”

Tagged as: Alex Rodriguez, baseball books, Baseball Hall of Fame, Brooklyn Dodgers, Chicago Cubs, Curt Smith, Michael Shapiro, Roger Clemens, steroids, Vin Scully