♦ As we celebrated the 50th anniversary of Hank Aaron’s breaking the all-time home run record, I’m kind of surprised he hadn’t already had a stamp issued in his honor.
♦ Emily Nemens, author of The Cactus League: A Novel, wrote “On the All-But-Invisible Role of Interpreters, in Literature and in Baseball” for Lithub.com. I wonder how soon we will see a book about the “Shohei Ohtani Scandal?”
♦ I think we need to take a look as what we mean when we call someone an “iron man” in baseball. Playing “a full 162 games three times and … at least 155 games in addition four times?” Maybe that’s the new definition in a game where pitching aces barely throw 200 innings these days. They don’t make ’em like Cal anymore.
♦ Wow, this makes me feel old. From MYNorthwest.com, “As some diehard fans still remember, the Pilots were Seattle’s first Major League Baseball team.” Diehard fans? As an older person, I guess I take for granted that any baseball fan should know this, but I may be wrong. The same piece suggest “many books have been written about the multifaceted shenanigans that contributed to the team’s demise.” Many? How many is many? This is what I found on a quick Amazon search:
- The 1969 Seattle Pilots: Major League Baseball’s One-Year Team, by Kenneth Hogan (McFarland, 2006)
- Becoming Big League: Seattle, the Pilots, and Stadium Politics, by Bill Mullins (University of Washington Press, 2014)
- Inside Pitch: Insiders Reveal How the Ill-Fated Seattle Pilots Got Played into Bankruptcy in One Year, by Rick Allen (Persistence Press, 2020)
- The Seattle Pilots Story, Carson Van Lindt (Marabou Pub., 1993)
Of course, any substantial account of the Milwaukee Brewers should have the Seattle “heritage” Seattle in it.
♦ From NPR station WSIU, this in connection with recent events: “With the total solar eclipse coming up on Monday, April 8, we thought we would revisit Pete Peterson’s Reading Baseball segment from just before the 2017 eclipse where Pete looks at a novel that includes a story of an eclipse and America’s favorite pastime.” Spoiler alert: The book is Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, published in 1889. (More on Twain and baseball via MLB official historian John Thorn.)
♦ There have been several books about “unwritten rules,” but I’m waiting for an overall view of “The anthropology of the baseball brawl.”
