* New titles from Bloomsbury

Their official spring-summer 2010 catalog isn’t online yet, but Bloomsbury is printing one new title and a 2009 title with a new afterword.

The new title is Charlie Finley: The Life of Baseball’s Super Showman, a joint effort by G. Michael Green and Roger D. Launius, slated for a July release.

From the catalog:

Before the “Bronx Zoo” of George Steinbrenner and Billy Martin, there were the Oakland Athletics of the early 1970s, one of the most successful, most colorful — and most chaotic — baseball teams of all time. They were all of those things because of Charlie Finley. Not only the A’s owner, he was also the general manager, personally assembling his team, deciding his pl;ayers’ salaries, and making player moves during the season — a level of involvement no other owner, not even Steinbrenner, engaged in.

From modest circumstances in Gary, Indiana, Finley saw his semipro career cut short by the tuberculosis that nearly killed him in 1946. Yet fourteen years later, his success in the insurance business allowed him to buy the downtrodden Kansas City Athletics. Despite promising never to move, he relocated the A’s to Oakland in 1968, and soon reaped the benefit of his talented minor leagues. With the emergence of players such as Reggie Jackson, Sal Bando, Joe Rudi, Catfish Hunter, Rollie Fingers, and Vida Blue — as skillful on the field as they were eccentric off it — the A’s won five straight division titles and three straight World Series (1972-1974) — the latter feat equaled by only one other team in history. However, Finley could be an insufferable bully and impetuously self-destructive. His battles with Commissioner Bowie Kuhn were monumental; and following the 1975 season, he tore his team apart in one of baseball’s most controversial moments.

Drawing on interviews with dozens of Finley’s players, family members, and colleagues, G. Michael Green and Roger D. Launius presents “Baseball’s Super Showman” (Time magazine’s description of Finley on the cover of an August 1975 issue) in all his contradictions: generous yet vengeful, inventive, yet destructive. The stories surrounding him are as colorful as the life he led, the chronicle of which fills an important gap in baseball’s literature.

Knowing how hyperbolic some of these catalgos and pressreleases can get, I’ll just add a couple of comments.

While Steinbrenner might not have had the title of general manager, I’m sure he was quite involved in players’ salaries, especially in the early years. The entry also alludes to Finley’s attempted “fire sale,” he he tried to peddle his stars Blue, Rudi, and Fingers for beaucoup bucks. Kuhn put the kibosh on that, invoking “the best interests of the game” clause. I gues it still qualifies as one of the biggest controversies.

* * *

The second Bloomsbury title is a re-release of Cooperstown Confidential: Heroes, Rogues, and the Inside Story of the Baseball Hall of Fame, by Zev Chafets, due out in June. This one features “a new afterword by the author,” which according to an email from Chafets, is as yet unwritten, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it includes revelations about high-profile players’ drug use that came out after the book’s original run.

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