Bits and Pieces, May 7, 2019

Haven’t done one of these in a while…

I’ve long said that The Lords of the Realm was one of the underrated baseball books of all time. Apparently Ben Lindbergh (The MVP Machine: How Baseball’s New Nonconformists Are Using Data to Build Better Players and The Only Rule Is It Has to Work: Our Wild Experiment Building a New Kind of Baseball Team) agrees as per this review on The Ringer.

A tad late, but the sentiment is the same. In her excellent Sports Bibliography Digest, posted on May 5, Wendy Parker noted

This weekend the Cincinnati Reds are marking their 150th anniversary as Major League Baseball’s first professional team, and that original 1896 team will be getting a tribute monument at the Great American Ball Park; The festivities call for the current club to wear throwback uniforms; more on the 1869 club by John Erardi, the co-author of a new book about them, and he does a podcast here.

A review of Paul Goldberger’s Ballpark: Baseball in the American City appeared in the Bowling Green Daily News.

Howard Cole asked Tyler Kepner, Danny Knobler, and Tom Stone to chat up their books in this Forbes column.

Speaking of Kepner, here’s a syndicated review from the Washington Post on his book, K: A History of Baseball in Ten Pitches.

Here’s another syndicated review, this one on The Legendary Harry Caray: Baseball’s Greatest Salesman by Don Zminda.

NPR’s Scott Simon recently interviewed Dale Berra on his memoir about growing up with the Hall of Fame catcher. Those who’ve been reading my posts for a while know I’m not a big fan of books like this, written by a moon circling a planet (it’s a labored metaphor, I know, but you get the point). Interesting to note that the headline reads, “Yogi Berra’s Son On Baseball, Family And Overcoming Hardships,” as opposed to just using the author’s name, although I do have a little empathy, always being identified as my daughter’s father or my wife’s husband rather than just plain old me.

Newsday offers this roundup of mini-reviews, heavy on titles about the local ball clubs.