PSA for the PBBC, August 27, 2021

Headnote: One of the thing I like about the Pandemic Baseball Book Club is that it’s a kind of “one stop shopping.” Instead of posting about various authors, projects, and events, all I’m doing here is cutting and pasting their weekly newsletter. Do take a moment to read the author Q&A. I find them particularly interesting as they discuss the arduous process of bringing their projects to press.

By the way, here are “Bookshelf Conversations” I’ve had with some of the authors associated with the PBBC:

Visit the PBBC for the latest batch of authors with new books coming out this year.

Brad “This Guy” Balukjian got a pleasant surprise when none other than Bob Costas randomly called out The Wax Pack in the Wall St. Journal. Never mind that Brad’s presence is limited to a “This guy” reference. That’s an awesome endorsement, let alone premium product placement.

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ASK AN AUTHOR
Tony Castro
Maris & Mantle: Two Yankees, Baseball Immortality, and the Age of Camelot (Triumph Books, Sept. 28, 2021)

What brought you to this subject?
Roger Maris, pure and simple. By chance coincidence, I sat in on a Harvard symposium on the Age of John F. Kennedy, where presidential historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. remarked that early-1960s America was defined as much by Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle as by President Kennedy. I’d written extensively about Mantle, and that comment was inspiration to write a book harkening back to a golden age in baseball and in America, centered around Schlesinger’s idea of Maris/Mantle/JFK being a pop-cultural troika.

What’s the book about?
On one level it’s about America’s obsession with the home run, not only in baseball but also in politics, entertainment and pop culture. Author Richard Hoffer once suggested that we don’t mind our heroes flawed or even doomed. (He was, of course, speaking about Mantle.) In America, failure is forgiven big swingers, and the world will always belong to those who swing from the heels. Maybe that’s why Mantle once said, “I guess you could say I’m what this country’s all about.”

You’ve already written a Mickey Mantle trilogy. What do you call it now that you have a fourth book?
I never intended to write a trilogy. If you’ve read the books, you know that I met Mickey in 1970 when I was a young reporter with the Dallas Times Herald, just out of college. Mantle was in his third year of retirement in Dallas, playing golf almost every day. I was a scratch golfer myself, working at an afternoon newspaper where my hours—6 a.m. to 2 p.m.—allowed me to get in a full 18 holes each afternoon. One day Mickey and I hooked up over hamburgers and beer at a Turtle Creek restaurant. It was a hoot, and I frequently found myself driving an inebriated Mickey home to North Dallas, then driving his wife, Merlyn, back to pick up Mickey’s El Dorado at whatever golf course he’d parked it.

Mickey had been drinking heavily since his rookie season in 1951, and by 1970 was a broken-down drunk who was barely newsworthy in Dallas. He had trashed his name by being unfriendly, obnoxious and unkind to the local sportswriters, who were not nearly as forgiving as New York writers had been. Dallas was a football town, and Mantle was old news. It had been six or seven years since his last big season, and he was still a couple of years away from his Hall of Fame induction.

“No one gives a damn about me anymore,” he often whined to me. By that point I had moved on to reporting about civil rights, minorities and politics; my interest in Mickey was personal, not professional. I did keep a notebook on my time with him, but it wasn’t with the intention of writing a book.

Still, he knew you were a reporter, right?
Mickey didn’t care. Merlyn, though, often asked if I planned to write about them. Finally she just came out and requested that if I were write about this time in their lives, I do so after they were no longer around. At the time, I barely even considered the notion. My professional interest was politics, which is where I won a fellowship in Washington in 1971. I wrote a civil rights history in 1974, and was awarded a Nieman Fellowship to Harvard in 1976. Still, I kept in touch with Mantle over the years. By coincidence, when I came to work in LA, the literary agent I signed with, Mike Hamilburg, was the son of Mitchell Hamilburg—the agent who had produced Safe at Home!, the 1962 baseball comedy starring both Mantle and Maris, which capitalized on the duo’s chase of Babe Ruth’s home run record the previous season. When Mickey died in 1995, Mike suggested that I write a new biography of him.

The manuscript I came up with was 2,500 type-written pages. Mike laughed so hard that I thought he would choke to death. He said that at 800,000 words, it was eight times longer than anything a publisher would be interested in. Editing it down seemed impossible, but Mike finally auctioned a manuscript of 600 pages for what became Mickey Mantle: America’s Prodigal Son, which we still had to trim to 400 pages for publication. There was a lot of material—on Mantle’s relationships with Joe DiMaggio, Casey Stengel and Maris himself—that was left out of that first book, and new material kept coming in. That’s how my next three books—DiMag & Mick and The Best There Ever Was, plus this new one—came to be.

Are the subsequent books simply deleted passages from the first one?
More went into them than just picking up what was left out of that first book. New analytics change the way we can look at Mantle’s career. There are also new interviews with the likes of Bob Cerv, Ted Williams, Roger Maris to which I didn’ have access until after the first Mantle book was out. Not to mention Holly Brooke, Mickey’s New York girlfriend, who I spoke to almost every day from 2006 until her death in 2017. I also had a couple of long conversations with Merlyn that led me to reconsider Mickey’s place among baseball’s greats.

Maris & Mantle will be published on Sept. 28. Preorder here.

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NOW UP AT PBBCLUB.COM
1962: Baseball and America in the Time of JFK

Nineteen-sixty-two saw John Glenn become the first astronaut to orbit earth, even as JFK stared down Russia in the Cuban Missile Crisis. The baseball season saw five no-hitters and a seven-game World Series, with Mickey Mantle’s Yankees winning their 20th title over the Mays-McCovey-Cepeda Giants. There were the expansion Mets and Colt .45s, and the opening of Dodger Stadium. Weaving the 1962 baseball season within the social fabric of this era, David Krell delivers a fascinating book as epochal as its subject. He’s here in conversation with E. Ethelbert Miller about 1962: Baseball and America in the Time of JFK for the Pandemic Baseball Book Club.

Watch it here.

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WHAT THEY’RE SAYING ABOUT US
Luke Epplin‘s Our Team was reviewed by the Buffalo Sports Page.

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WHAT ELSE WE’RE DOING
Jared Diamond broke some big news for the Wall St. Journal about MLB and the MLBPA ditching Topps for a new agreement with a company controlled by Fanatics, in which baseball’s power players will have a stake. Because of course they’ll have a stake.

Devin Gordon wrote about Bobby Valentine‘s bid to be mayor of Stamford, CT, for GQ.

Lincoln Mitchell wrote about Afghanistan and the Republican party for Brussels Morning.

Dan Epstein was all over the musical map, with a Q&A with Iron Maiden front man Bruce Dickinson for Revolver, and a review of the new Barbara Streisand outtakes album for the Forward.

Eric Nusbaum‘s Sports Stories this week is about the Filipino swimmer who redefined the breast stroke in the 1920s before becoming a casualty of WWII.

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WHERE WE’VE BEEN
Dave Jordan and Dave Parker went onto SABRcast with Rob Neyer to discuss COBRA: A Life of Baseball and Brotherhood. Any hour you get to spend listening to Dave Parker is a good hour.

John Shea went onto High Heat with Chris Russo on the MLB Network to discuss the Giants, plus the breaking-news fact that 24: Life Stories and Lessons From the Say Hey Kid is coming out in paperback on Sept. 14.

Eric Sherman gave a speech honoring the induction of Jerry Koosman—who he befriended while writing the book After The Miracle—into the New York State Baseball Hall of Fame.

Gaylon White went on Jefferson Public Radio in Ashland, Oregon, to talk up The Best Little Baseball Town in the World.

Dan Epstein went onto the Sox Degrees podcast to discuss The Captain & Me.

Greg Larson was featured on FiveThirtyEight’s Hot Takedown podcast, talking up Clubbie, and presented for SABR’s Babe Ruth chapter. Also, he had a time at the archery range with his dog, Penguin.
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WHERE WE’LL BE
Danny Gallagher will sign copies of his Expos book, Never Forgotten, at the Coles bookstore in Toronto this Saturday, Aug. 28, from 11:30 a.m. to noon.

E. Ethelbert Miller will launch his upcoming book of baseball poems, When Your Wife Has Tommy John Surgery, at Busboys and Poets in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 23.

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GET SHOPPING
You have totables. Get this tote bag and start toting.