Bits and pieces / Review roundup, Dec. 31

Trying to clear out my mailbox o’ links by the end of the year.

USA Today had high praise for The Kid, allowing that “chances are, no “Teddy Ballgame” biography will ever match up with Ben Bradlee Jr.’s new and exhaustive book about baseball’s greatest hitter.” (Here’s a 10-year-old’s take on the book. He must be very precocious.)

The Kankakee Daily Journal posted this piece about Lawrence Baldassaro’s Beyond DiMaggio: Italian Americans in Baseball.

Love for baseball is not limited to the Major Leagues or even the United States, as evidenced in Sixty Years of Charlottetown Baseball, which considers the sport as played in a small Canadian town. And on the other side of the border, we have Mexican American Baseball in the Central Coast. Staying with the little-town theme, we have author Jeff Karzen and Josh Collmenter of the Arizona Diamondbacks appearing at Jack Pearl’s Team Sports in Battle Creek, Michigan on Saturday, Jan. 11, to sign copies of Homer: The Small-Town Baseball Odyssey. Here’s the book’s official web site.

Another author appearance: J.S. Levine will sign copies of his new book, The Ultimate Umpire, at Tatnuck Bookseller in Westborough, MA on Sunday, Jan.5, from 1-3 p.m. According to the local press, this is “a story that combines mystery, suspense, science-fiction and baseball” and these are a few of my favorite things.

Here’s a review of Winning Fantasy Baseball: Secret Strategies of a Nine-Time National Champion by Larry Schechter. Despite my ambivalence for FB (although I did do a review of Sam Walker’s Fantasyland: A Sportswriter’s Obsessive Bid to Win the World’s Most Ruthless Fantasy Baseball), I’m actually reading this one now.

National Pastime Radio: All Things Considered ran this piece on the late Lavonne “Pepper” Paire Davis of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League as a year-end wrap of of unusual stories. The story references the 1987 documentary A League of their Own, produced by, among others, Kelly Candaele, brother of former MLBer Casey Candaele). Their mother, Helen Callaghan, was also a member of the AAGPBL and a teammate of Davis with the Ft. Wayne Daisies and Minneapolis Millerettes.

Somewhere on the internet is a list of more than 100 errors in Ken Burns’ documentary series Baseball. Here’s one about an historical inaccuracy in 42, the Jackie Robinson bio pic. I’m sure there are others, even though, like so many other films of its kind, it’s based on a true story. (Truthiness, anybody?)

And finally, I thought you might curious about a statistical breakdown of the Baseball Bookshelf, courtesy of WordPress.

Whew, made it. My best wishes for a Happy New Year to all you out there. Looking forward to bigger and better things for the Bookshelf in 2014.