Since I posted the first of these on a Thursday, which is known on social media as a time of reflection, I thought to make it a regular thing under this rubric. These are kind of fun; it’s like a box of chocolates — you never know what you’re gonna get. (Actually, I never understood that famous quote from Forrest Gump. If it’s a box of chocolate covered cherries, don’t you know exactly what you’re going to get?)
On the one hand, I’m happy to report that I’m catching up/running out of these old links. On the other hand, it’s been cool reminiscing.
I highly recommend Pocket as a way to hold onto links you come that you want to keep. Unlike bookmarks, Pocket keeps the entire page and makes it relative easy for you to find stuff you “pocketed.” I have keepers going back six years — more than 5,000 links — and I’ve decided it’s time to start cleaning house so here are some submitted for your amusement, perusal, and education. Some are not current, but in a sense, they’re timeless. Note: Sometimes individual sites remove the content or simply cease their existence, so Pocket isn’t 100 percent foolproof.
- A review of John Grisham’s baseball novel Calico Joe
from mopupduty. (Here’s my review from Bookreporter.com.)
- A review of John Woodwards animated graphic novel Bottom of the Ninth courtesy of Comicbookresources.
- To be honest, the early history of the game has never held much allure for me. Fortunately there are guys like James Bailey, who posted this review of Daniel Levitt’s The Battle that Forged Modern Baseball: The Federal League Challenge and Its Legacy
on his site, Bailey’s Baseball Book Reviews.
- I also have a slightly hard time believing you can make a book out of seemingly limited subjects like Bill Dean’s Finding the Hidden Ball Trick: The Colorful History of Baseball’s Oldest Ruse
but I’m obviously wrong. The book was reviewed on NeverTooMuchBaseball.
- BaseballPastandPresent posted this charming interview with Robert Creamer, author of the classic Babe: The Legend Comes to Life
and other splendid biographies.
- It took me a long time to find a reviewer who agreed with me about all the praise heaped on The Art of Fielding, but here’s one from the Rockford Register Star.
- Now the the Cubbies are in the NLCS, I hope New Era will bring back those Chicago-based ads feature Nick Offerman and Craig Robinson.
- Neil Genzlinger of The New York Times reviewed the excellent documentary Ballplayer: Pelotero.
- The Perfect Game was another baseball film — feature, this time — about foreign born players, in this case a Little League team from Mexico. Of course they were underdogs when facing the more upscale competition. But their love and respect for the game won out, of course.
- If baseball is a metaphor for life, so is Moneyball, a book about baseball. So much so that it was named by the Library of Congress in 2012 as among the “88 Books that Shaped America.” Even the BaseballContinuum site had trouble with that.
- Ichiro Suzuki thinks he can hang around the game until he’s 50. Maybe this will give him extra motivation. Bonus: A piece from The Wall Street Journal from when Ichiro became a Yankee.
- I was just talking to a colleague yesterday about my belief that rereading favorite books over and over is a waste of time. But there are a handful that I will go back to on occasion after a long time away. For example, I’m returning to The Hidden Game of Baseball: A Revolutionary Approach to Baseball and Its Statistics
by John Thorn and Peter Palmer, figuring that since I’m 30 years older, I’m smart enough to finally understand it. I still might be wrong. But I wonder what it would be like for some people to come to these classic with a clean slate yet fully cognizant of modern statistical thought. BaseballPastandPresent considers “Reading Bill James for the First Time.”
is available on Amazon.com,
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