Bits and pieces

Another in a series of futile attempts to catch up.

Because you can keep minutiae on your bookshelf, here’s a new community baseball site that looks like it’s going to be fun: Eephusleague.com.It has a cool design and icons that take the visitor to a host of categories, including uniforms, rules, articles, photos, scorekeeping, etc. Definitely worth a few visits, as it needs time to build. The Uniwatch site did a nice interview with Bethany Heck, proprietor of EephusLeague.

Peter Schiller did a brief review of Tim Wendel‘s High Heat over on BaseballReflections.
AM New York posted this one on Robert Elias‘ The Empire Strikes Out. It’s almost a year old, but somehow it just turned up in my Google Alert email. Upshot: “the book is unconvincing, ponderous, and often just plain silly. Missing is any subtlety about the complex history of America’s (and baseball’s) engagement with the world—a history that includes colonialism, yes, but also diplomacy, benign trade, and migration flows into and out.” Ouch.
The Bleeding Cubbie Blue blog posted this review of Doug Glanville’s The Game From Where I Stand. Glanville was a member of the team in 1996-97 and again in 2003, so there’s more of a connection than than from a non-interested party. Upshot: “Go buy this book. It will pleasantly fill the hours until this year’s Opening Day.”
In case you missed it, here’s a sneak peak at Jonah Keri’s upcoming book, The Extra 2%: How Wall Street Strategies Took a Major League Baseball Team from Worst to First.
Mike Silva’s NY Baseball Digest updates the progress — or lack thereof — on Mike Piazza’s memoirs. “Two years ago Piazza announced his “memoirs” would be released to the public in 2010. According to [Murray] Chass, this project is delayed because the original author, Michael Bamberger of SI, claims he couldn’t write the book because Piazza wouldn’t commit to telling the truth about steroids.”
I’ve blogged about the possibility of a Hard Knocks-type show about the SF Giants, but how about this from the distaff side? Still not 100 percent convinced it’s not a gag, though.
According to this site, we’re due for a new abseball book written from the female perspective in Adventures of a Baseball Fan: Baseball Diamonds are This Girl’s Best Friend by Candy L. VanDyke.
And if you think this is far-fetched just because it comes from The Onion’s faux-sports show, don’t be too sure. You can’t put anything past the Yankees these days.