Coming down the pike: New baseball titles, Part III — The next Moneyball and re-issues

The next Moneyball?

* A few “inside baseball (business)” pieces coming up: In Pursuit of Pennants: Baseball Operations from Deadball to Moneyball by long-time SABR members Mark Armour and Daniel Leviit. John Pessah adds to this sub-genre with The Game: Inside the Secret World of Major League Baseball’s Power Brokers. Lonnie Wheeler’s Intangiball: The Subtle Things That Win Baseball Games doesn’t come out until September. Boo.

Reissues

Yes, it’s been 40 years since it was first published, but I wonder why someone found the need to re-release Joe, You Coulda Made Us Proud. It was something of a jolt when it was first published, but now it seems almost quaint, a poor man’s Ball Four.

The prolific Harvey Frommer reprises two of his classics: Rickey and Robinson: The Men Who Broke Baseball’s Color Barrier and Five O’Clock Lightning: Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and the Greatest Baseball Team in History, the 1927 New York Yankees.

Peter Golenbock updates is oral history, Red Sox Nation: The Rich and Colorful History of the Boston Red Sox. He’s also giving us a re-release of his controversial 7: The Mickey Mantle Novel.

Haven’t we been here before?

Kevin Cook’s The Dad Report: Fathers, Sons, and Baseball Families comes out the same year as a reissue of Wayne Stewart’s Baseball Dads: The Game’s Greatest Players Reflect on Their Fathers and the Game They Love. Not to be confused with Dick Wimmer’s 1988 title, Baseball Fathers, Baseball Sons.

Maybe it’s the timing, but last year we had I Don’t Care if We Never Get Back: 30 Games in 30 Days on the Best Worst Baseball Road Trip Everby Blatt and Brewster and Cody Kaufman’s self-published 30 Tickets To Paradise: A Young Man’s Life-Changing Journey To Every Ballpark In Baseball. So maybe it’s too soon for Tobey Shiverick’s My Thirty Ballpark Summer: A Generational Baseball Journey. The word “generational” may set this one apart, I have found books like this to be generally the same: a nice experience, meeting like-minded people, getting the occasional free ticket or beer or swag.

Finally, just as an aside: In researching for this entry I found two books with the title Out at Home that definitely do not cover the same subject matter. One if a YA fiction ostensibly by Cal RIpken Jr., the other is the biography of Glenn Burke, a former major leaguer who came out as gay and later died of AIDS (also credited with being one of the creators of the high five).