Coming down the pike, update

As I prepare for my baseball review feature for Bookreporter.com, I went back to Amazon to see what would make for interesting reviews. The parameters are that they have to have a release date of May or earlier.

Here is where I voice my standard criticism of Amazon’s search function: If they can put a person on the moon (and soon Mars), why can’t there be a way to zero in more on what the consumer is looking for? I had to go through 75 (!) pages for this list, the vast majority consisting of romance novels, books for kids, blank notebooks that happen to have some baseball-themed cover, and things that aren’t even about baseball at all (Practical Escrima Knife Defense: Filipino Martial Arts Knife Defense Training? Really?) I guess the powers that be over there want to make you scroll (and scroll and scroll) and perhaps you’ll get worn down to the point where you’ll buy something else.

Okay, whine over.

The last time I posted one of these things was all the way back in September, so this will only include titles that did not appear in the previous post.

• When the Braves Ruled the Diamond: Fourteen Flags over Atlanta, by Dan Schlossberg (February)
• Baseball in Occupied Japan: US Postwar Cultural Policy, by Takeshi Tanikawa (February)
• The 2022 Prospect Digest Handbook, by Joseph Werner (February)
• Beyond the Fields: A Cherokee Strip Farm, a Baseball Life, and the Love of Wisdom, by Randolph Feezell (February)
• The Science of Baseball: The Math, Technology, and Data Behind the Great American Pastime, by Will Carroll (March)
• Victory on Two Fronts: The Cleveland Indians and Baseball through the World War II Era, by Scott Longert (March)
• The 50 Greatest Players in Philadelphia Phillies History, by Robert Cohen (April)
• ’64 Cardinals, by Robert L. Tiemann and Ron Jacober (April)
• True: The Four Seasons of Jackie Robinson, by Kostya Kennedy (April)
• The Real Hank Aaron: An Intimate Look at the Life and Legacy of the Home Run King, by Terrence Moore (May)
• Branch Rickey and the Gospel of Baseball: Righting the Story of America’s Pastime, by James Diullard (May)
• Grassroots Baseball: Route 66, Photographs by Jean Fruth (May)
• The Baseball Talmud: The Definitive Position-by-Position Ranking of Baseball’s Chosen Players, by Howard Megdal (May)
• Dodgers!: An Informal History from Flatbush to Chavez Ravine, by Jim Alexander (May)
• Major League Baseball Players of the 1970s: A Biographical Dictionary from Aase to Zisk, by Bill Ballew (May)
• The Franchise: New York Yankees: A Curated History of the Bronx Bombers, by Mark Feinsand (June)
• The Lineup: Ten Books That Changed Baseball, by Paul Aron (June)
• Frank Grant: The Life of a Black Baseball Pioneer, by Richard Bogovich (June)
• Long Schott: Building Homes, Dreams, and Baseball Teams, by Stephen Schott with John Shea (June)
• Bill Virdon: A Life in Baseball, by David Jerome (June)
• Baseball’s Union Association: The Short, Strange Life of an Early Major League, by Justin McKinney (June)
• Coming Home: My Amazin’ Life with the New York Mets, by Cleon Jones and Gary Kaschak (June)
• Field of Magic: Baseball’s Superstitions, Curses and Taboos , by John Cairney (June)
• Willie Horton: 23: Detroit’s Own Willie the Wonder, the Tigers’ First Black Great by Willie Horton and Kevin Allen (June)
• Get Up, Baby!: My Seven Decades With the St. Louis Cardinalsm by Mike Shannon with Rick Hummel (July)
• Sho-time: The Inside Story of Shohei Ohtani and the Greatest Baseball Season Ever Played, by Jeff Fletcher (July)
• The Franchise: Boston Red Sox: A Curated History of the Red Sox, by Sean McAdam (July)
• The Church of Baseball: The Making of Bull Durham: Home Runs, Bad Calls, Crazy Fights, Big Swings, and a Hit, by Ron Shelton (July)
• Democracy at the Ballpark, by Thomas David Bunting (July)
• Black Stats Matter: Integrating Negro League Numbers into Major League Records, by Philip Lee (August)
• The Mustache Gang Battles the Big Red Machine: The 1972 World Series, by John G. Robertson and Carl T. Madden (August)
• Fans Called Him “Turkey,” I Called Him Dad: A Daughter Remembers Baseball Hall of Famer Norman Thomas Stearnes, by Rosilyn Stearnes-Brown (August)
• Strength for the Fight: The Life and Faith of Jackie Robinson, by Gary Scott Smith (September)
• How I Found Love Behind the Catcher’s Mask: Poems, by E. Ethelbert Miller (September)
• The Grandest Stage: A History of the World Series, by Tyler Kepner (October)
• 28: A Photographic Tribute to Buster Posey, by Brian Murphy et al (October)

The Baseball Talmud is an update of Megdal’s original, published in 2009. Grassroots Baseball Route 66 is Fruth’s followup to her 2019 release Grass Roots: Where Legends Begin.

Particularly looking forward to the works of Aron, Shelton, Berkow, Kepner, and Carroll.