Went over to the local Barnes and Noble on my lunch hour. I always take a look at the “remainder” table to see if there’s a possibility I missed seeing some relatively recent baseball title. The answer is almost always “no,” unless it’s the occasional book produced especially for the store. These are usually coffee-table photo-heavy issues about the history of the game, ballparks, or the Hall of Fame and even I have to ask, how many of those can you have? (Obviously I am not a true collector, contrary to my wife’s protestations.) I can never make up my mind if it’s an “insult” to the authors to cut the prices so much, or a blessing, since the books are still being offered.
So here’s what was on the remainder shelf:
- Straw: Finding My Way
- Munson: The Life and Death of a Yankee Captain
- The Yankee Years(paperback edition)
- Citi Field: The Mets’ New World-Class Ballpark: A Ballpark Pop-up Book, marked down from $25 to $7.99. I know it’s an oversize, colorful product, but come on, $25 for this? IT’S A POP-UP BOOK, for crying out loud! You know how easy it is to ruin one of those things?
- A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez
- The Pride and the Pressure: A Season Inside the New York Yankee Fishbowl
I realize now I should have taken note of the prices, but aside from the Hall of Fame title, I would guess that they were all less than $10.
Over in the magazine section, Men’s Journal has a profile on Baltimore Orioles manager Buck Showalter, which is kind of funny, since the current edition (March 28) of Sports Illustrated has one by Tom Verducci. In the “let’s make something out of nothing” department, Buck’s been getting a lot of heat for saying in the MJ piece that Derek Jeter “pisses me off. That’s it. Ther’s just that one line, no elaboration, no context. Does Jeter piss of Showalter because he was mean to him? Or maybe because he’s just so good? No way of knowing, or even if Showalter was being serious. he also “criticized” Theo Epstein as not being a genius GM because the Red Sox have a big budget. Come on, guys. This is BS.
The New Yorker published a Ben McGrath piece on Barry Bonds, currently on trial for perjury in his steroids case. You can read a previews here (subscription site, I’m afraid).
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