Spitball — “The Literary baseball Magazine” — recently announced the slate of finalists for the 2016 CASEY Award:
The Arm: Inside the Billion-Dollar Mystery of the Most Valuable Commodity in Sports by Jeff Passan
- The Baseball Whisperer: A Small-Town Coach Who Shaped Big League Dreams by Michael Tackett
- Bucky F*cking Dent (novel) by David Duchovny
- Game Worn: Baseball Treasures from the Game’s Greatest Heroes and Moments by Stephen Wong & Dave Grob
- The Last Innocents: The Collision of the Turbulent Sixties and the Los Angeles Dodgers (Harper) by Michael Leahy
- The Only Rule Is It Has to Work: Our Wild Experiment Building a New Kind of Baseball Team (Henry Holt) by Ben Lindbergh & Sam Miller
- Playing with Tigers: A Minor league Chronicle of the Sixties by George Gmelch
- The Selling of the Babe: The Deal that Changed Baseball and Created a Legend by Glenn Stout
- Terror in the City of Champions: Murder, Baseball, and the Secret Society that Shocked Depression-Era Detroit by Tom Stanton
- Wild in the Strike Zone: Baseball Poems by Tim Peeler
Information on the date and place of the 34th annual CASEY Awards Banquet will be forthcoming on spitballmag.com.
On a personal note, I haven’t read all these books, but the topics and production values are wildly diverse. How do you compare a high-end coffee table book like Game Worn with a book of poetry or a novel? Maybe Spitball should start breaking down into categories, like fiction, non-fiction, and miscellaneous. More work perhaps, but a better indicator when you judge a work within its own genre.
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