Coming down the pike: New baseball titles, Part II

Rather than lay it all out there, I thought I would divvy this up into smaller, more manageable bites, so here’s Part 2.

* denotes items of particular interest (to me, at any rate).

History

One of my bugaboos has long been titles such as The Nats and the Grays: How Baseball in the Nation’s Capital Survived WWII and Changed the Game Forever (emphasis added). Guess you’ll have to read it to find out if they actually did.

* John Klima (Bushville Wins! and Willie’s Boys) takes a look at one of my favorite topics with The Game Must Go On: Hank Greenberg, Pete Gray, and the Great Days of Baseball on the Home Front in WWII.

Vying for this “title,” we have Jeff Katz’s Split Season: 1981: Fernandomania, the Bronx Zoo, and the Strike that Saved Baseball up against another veteran sports columnist, Filip Bondy, with his The Pine Tar Game: The Kansas City Royals, the New York Yankees, and Baseball’s Most Absurd and Entertaining Controversy, which also looks at a long-ago season.

Team profiles

One title I’m sure will get a lot of attention is Andrew O’Toole’s Strangers in the Bronx: DiMaggio, Mantle, and the Changing of the Yankee Guard, since it packs together three of the most written about subjects: the Yankees, the Clipper, and the Comet.

Will this be the year the world ends, er, that Cubs fans will have something to celebrate? Or will they still have to refer to the great teams of more than 100 years ago? Until opening day comes, you can read about those heroes in Laurent Pernot’s Before the Ivy: The Cubs’ Golden Age in Pre-Wrigley Chicago.