PSA for the PBBC, July 16, 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.

TATTERED COVER
Last week the Tattered Cover bookshop in Denver put on a Baseball-book-a-palooza in conjunction with the All-Star Game, stocking more than 1,000 titles at a pop-up shop adjacent to Coors Field. Also, they convened some panels—like, a lot of panels—of baseball authors discussing baseball-author stuff. Many of them featured proud, card-carrying members of the Pandemic Baseball Book Club. One of them was even co-sponsored by the PBBC. For those of you who missed out, every discussion is now available online. Here’s a rundown:

Telling Baseball People’s Stories was a panel on baseball biography, focusing on living subjects and exclusively featuring PBBC members. Moderated by Jason Turbow (They Bled Blue), the participants—Dave Jordan (Cobra), Mitchell Nathanson (Bouton) and Dan Epstein (The Captain & Me)—discussed the form and function of the genre, and things like how to get your subject to open up, and how to write in somebody else’s voice. It’s a barn burner. Watch it here.

Comeback Season is the title of Cam Perron’s new book (Comeback Season: My Unlikely Story of Friendship with the Greatest Living Negro League Baseball Players), and it describes the renewed recognition of the contributions African-American players made to the game before and after Jackie Robinson. PBBC stalwart Luke Epplin (Our Team) joins Perron, Howard Bryant (The Last Hero), Paul Dickson (Dickson Baseball Dictionary) and Ron Rapoport (Let’s Play Two). Watch it here.

Fathers and Sons Playing Catch features our own Andrew Maraniss (Singled Out) and our own Andrew Maraniss’ father—journalist David Maraniss (Clemente)—in conversation with longtime Sports Illustratted writer Steve Wulf. Watch it here.

Between the Lines focuses on baseball fiction. Tim Wiles, the former baseball Hall of Fame librarian, moderates a panel that includes PBBC member Emily Nemens (The Cactus League), as well as Chad Harbach (The Art of Fielding). They are joined by Steve Wulf, Richard Hunt (a professor at the University of Buffalo who once coached baseball in the collegiate division that provided the setting for The Art of Fielding) and writer Daniel Okrent. Watch it here.

Home and Away covers the history, scenery, camaraderie and cuisine of ballparks, particularly in Los Angeles. PBBC member Eric Nusbaum (Stealing Home) joins Timothy Malcolm, author of Moon Travel Guides’ Moon Baseball Road Trips. Moderated by Dodgers play-by-play man Tim Neverett. Watch it here.

The Tattered Cover also convened in-person panels featuring PBBC members John Shea, Tyler Kepner, Jared Diamond and Dan Schlossberg. If you were in Denver and got to check ’em out in person, consider yourself lucky.

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Steve Kettman’s labor-of-love collection of essays about Pedro Gomez was published yesterday by Wellstone Books. To commemorate the moment, we asked him some questions.

ASK AN AUTHOR
Steve Kettman
Remember Who You Are: What Pedro Gomez Showed Us About Baseball and Life (Wellstone Press, June 13, 2021)

What’s your book about?
It hit so many people hard in February 2021 when Pedro Gomez of ESPN died of sudden cardiac arrest. As basketball coach Frank Martin put it, it was like getting hit by a Mike Tyson left hook. What was it about Pedro that touched so many lives? Why did he have such impact as a journalist? It seemed important to pull together diverse voices to explore those questions in 62 personal essays, representing a wide variety of people, from seven current big-league managers to nationally known writers like Mike Barnicle and Paul Begala to (current and future) Hall of Famers Dennis Eckersley and Max Scherzer to ESPN colleagues Rachel Nichols and Shelley M. Smith to baseball writers Tim Kurkjian, Tim Keown, Buster Olney, Howard Bryant and Jack Curry.

What’s one noteworthy thing you learned during the research of your book?
My favorite detail was that Pedro’s grandfather had been an umpire in Camaguey, Cuba—and was born in Spain in 1899. Pedro was a proud Cuban American, and he picked up his love of baseball from sitting with his grandfather when Pedro was a boy in Detroit, listening to Ernie Harrell on the radio. His grandfather, newly arrived from Cuba, spoke no English, but he spoke baseball, and could follow the action with no problem.

What are some lessons you learned along the way?
I think anyone reading the essays in this book will come away with a sense of Pedro’s courage—his willingness to do what felt right, even when it wasn’t easy. That’s a quality to be emulated. He was a great reporter who could be very tough, but he always treated his subjects as people first and subjects second.

Did you receive any notable outside help in pulling the manuscript together?
So many people helped, eager to honor Pedro’s memory, but the most amazing help came from the great sports photographer Brad Mangin, known for his work for Sports Illustrated, who worked long hours as volunteer picture editor on the project, and collected 185 great photographs that we use in the book, including many by Brad himself and his good friend, Michael Zagaris.

Read excerpts of Remember Who You Are at ESPN.com and the Athletic. Also, Lookout Santa Cruz ran a nice feature about the book, as did Bleacher Report.

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NOW UP AT PBBCLUB.COM
It’s fiction time at the PBBC! Novelist Tim Wendel brings his readers back to Havana with Escape from Castro’s Cuba, his visionary sequel to Castro’s Curveball, where the main character becomes entangled in a scheme that pits him against his old friend, Fidel Castro. He’s here in conversation with Emily Nemens, author of The Cactus League.

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ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD WINNER
Congratulations to @JacobK013, who walks away with our grand prize of all seven of Rowman & Littlefield’s 2021 baseball releases. And congrats to the seven PBBC readers who won a single copy each. There’s reading to be done.

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BUONGIORNO ITALIA!
Good news for Emily Nemens and Italian baseball fans: The Cactus League is out in Italy, published by 66th and 2nd, translated by Leonardo Taiuti. We know you were looking for a description of the book in Italian, and we’re here to please:

Jason Goodyear è la star dei Los Angeles Lions, squadra di baseball in ritiro precampionato nel torrido deserto dell’Arizona. Bello, celebre, talentuoso, Goodyear è il miglior esterno sinistro dai tempi di Ted Williams, ora però è nel mezzo di una crisi profonda. Si dice che sia a un passo dal divorzio. Ma qual è il tarlo che lo divora? Ha a che fare forse con la passione per il gioco d’azzardo, con il casinò che si trova vicino al nuovo stadio di Scottsdale? Se lo chiedono anche gli allenatori, i tifosi, i compagni, le mogli e le fidanzate dei giocatori, oltre a una coppia di strozzini.

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WHAT THEY’RE SAYING ABOUT US
The Los Angeles Daily News gave a glowing review to Greg Larson‘s Clubbie: “Larson … emerged from two years of baseball’s tangled darkness, understood it the way the poets never could, and still found himself spellbound. If ‘Clubbie’ isn’t the best piece of baseball literature since ‘Ball Four,’ it’s the leader in the clubhouse.” They weren’t alone. The Greenfield Recorder and Queens Chronicle also chimed in.

The Stratford Herald discussed Danny Gallagher’s book, Never Forgotten, focusing on former Expos shortstop Chris Speier.

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WHAT ELSE WE’RE DOING
Huge news for Jim Overmyer, whose book, Queen of the Negro Leagues, was optioned by On Television Group for a limited TV series titled The Eagles of Newark. Anya Adams (Black-ish, GLOW, Ginny & Georgia) is attached to direct the pilot.

Rocco Constantino is moving back to New Jersey from Santa Barbara to take over as the athletic director at Middlesex College. Also, he interviewed former Braves second baseman and longtime scout Randy Johnson for BallNine.

Tyler Kepner wrote about baseball’s difficulties with reaching young, Black players—as evidenced by the National League’s All-Star roster—for the New York Times.

Jason Turbow wrote about Mike Yastrzemski‘s basepath shenanigans at The Baseball Codes blog.

Lincoln Mitchell wrote something for CNN.com after hanging out at Oracle Park with Turbow, watching the Giants lose to St. Louis. It went live on CNN’s site hours later, just after last week’s newsletter was published. So we’re linking to it now. Also, he wrote for the San Francisco Examiner about the Giants’ home city.

Dan Schlossberg interviewed Ozzie Albies prior to the All-Star Game for Latino Sports.

Eric Nusbaum’s latest Sports Stories focuses on that time in 1987 when the Milwaukee Bucks played the Soviet Union. Like, for real.

Greg Larson posted a new video about why players smell their bats. You learn something new every day.

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WHERE WE’VE BEEN
A trio of PBBC authors—Steve Steinberg, Larry Baldassaro and Don Zminda—spoke with SABR president Mark Armour in an event sponsored by Seattle’s Elliott Bay Book Company and SABR.

E. Ethelbert Miller had a conversation on the Poetry Channel with Indran Amirthanayagam.

David Krell was interviewed by Frank Morano on his show, The Other Side of Midnight on New York’s WABC 770 AM.

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WHERE WE’LL BE
Robert Whiting will join in a Japan Society discussion surrounding the 150th anniversary of baseball in Japan, as well as the upcoming Tokyo Olympics, along with former MLB and NPB players Warren Cromartie, Matt Murton and Leon Lee. Moderated by director Yuriko Gamo Romer, whose upcoming film, Diamond Diplomacy, explores the relationship between the U.S. and Japan through a shared love of baseball. July 14, 8 p.m. EDT.

Tim Wendel will speak with E. Ethelbert Miller as part of the 1455 Summer Literary Festival. In “Tim and Ethelbert Play Catch,” they’ll discuss the national pastime specifically and writing (poetry, novels, columns) in general. July 17, 11 a.m. EST.

Rocco Constantino will guest on Chip Howard Sports Talk (KZNE 93.7 FM; College Station, Texas) on July 19, and 5:30 p.m. EST.

This one’s especially cool because it’s in person. The SABR 19th Century Baseball Grave Marker Project, headed by outgoing chair Ralph Carhart, will celebrate the life and legacy of Luis “Jud” Castro, the first Latino to play Major League Baseball, at Mount Saint Mary Cemetery in Flushing, NY. Participants include Major League Baseball’s official historian, John Thorn, and Senator Jessica Ramos (D, WF) of the 13th Senate District (the first Colombian American Senator in New York State history), on Colombian Independence Day, as they dedicate Castro’s new headstone. Castro, who was born in Medellín, Colombia, was a star player for Manhattan College before joining the Philadelphia Athletics in 1902, when he made his historic MLB debut. Join them on July 20 at 10 a.m. EST.

Andrew Maraniss will be the keynote speaker at the 2021 Candy Brown Holocaust & Human Rights Educator Conference at the Dallas Holocaust & Human Rights Museum. July 26.

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GET SHOPPING
If you check out the link to the first video in this newsletter, the one about the Telling Baseball People’s Stories panel at the Tattered Cover, you’ll see two people wearing PBBC t-shirts during that discussion. Look at them. Revel in their glory. Note how much better those people look than the people who are not wearing PBBC t-shirts. I mean, Epstein and Jordan are alright, but think about how much better they’d look wearing this gear. Seriously. Way to go, Nathanson and Turbow, y’all are sartorially advanced. Now head over to the PBBC shop and get one for yourself.