Bits and pieces, July 21, 2015

Rob Neyer occasionally posts “book club” entries as part of his Just a Bit Outside site. This one was put up shortly after the passing of Alison Gordon, a sportswriter who covered the Toronto Blue Jays and chronicled the experience in her book Foul Ball!: Five Years in the American League.

This piece from BaseballEssential about Molly Knight‘s The Best Team Money Can Buy was a bit of a headscratcher for me. It contained so much parsing that I couldn’t decide if the writer actually like the book or not until the very end: “I am not a literary critic, so I am not calling this a book review. But I love baseball and I love books and I love baseball books, and this is one of the best I’ve ever read.” He also includes this odd (again, to me), item: “There is nothing about the book that benefits from being written by a woman, but the entire thing is remarkable because a woman wrote it.” I have no idea how old the author of this piece is, but really? Is that so odd these days that it’s even worth mentioning the sex of the book’s author? After all, things have come a long way since Gordon broke in with the Jays.

Here’s a Q&A with Knight from the LASportshub website.

Another new Dodger-centric book is The 50 Greatest Dodger Games of All Time, by J. P. Hoornstra, a Los Angeles News Group beat writer for the team.

Here’s a nice piece about Arnold Hano and the documentary about him by Jon Leonoudakis from the Huffington Post.

When is someone going to do a biography on the former Yankees third baseman-turned-cardiologist-turned-American League president Bobby Brown? Until that happens, here’s a profile on Brown from the Dallas Morning News.

The New York Daily News promotes one of its own — Filip Bondy, author of The Pine Tar Game

They say baseball is a metaphor for life (isn’t everything a metaphor for life?), but I wonder what Paul Dickson, author of the excellent Baseball Dictionaries would have to say aboutFirst Base and Beyond, a “reference” work that puts baseball in terms of sex (or is it vice versa?). I’ll probably do more with this at some point, but it will be a challenge to keep this a “clean” blog. More on the book here from RantSports. Of course, there’s a Kickstarter campaign for the project. (FYI, Dickson, who is hard at work on his new biography on Leo Durocher, declined comment.)