From the category archives:

Business of baseball

Bits and pieces

June 27, 2010

* The Book Corner posted this review of Stephen King’s Blockade Billy. Upshot: The book “will definitely satisfy Stephen King readers as well as those who don’t normally go for the sort of stories on which he made his reputation. And it’s closer to those kinds of stories than the story that fills out the […]

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TWIBB: June 25, 2010

June 25, 2010

The top baseball books, according to Amazon.com as of Friday, June 25. Title Rank General Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, by Michael Lewis 1 Steinbrenner: The Last Lion of Baseball, by Bill Madden 2 The Game from Where I Stand: A Ballplayer’s Inside View, by Doug Glanville 3 The Bullpen Gospels: Major […]

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More on Madden

June 24, 2010

The Dorchester Reporter posted this Clark Booth review of Bill Madden’s latest title, Steinbrenner: The Last Lion of Baseball. Upshot: “It is, I believe, a decidedly important baseball book. Bill Madden is the man to tell it.”

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The Hall of Fame speedster turns 71 today. Although there are no books about Brock, per se, you can’t pick up any volume that analyzes baseball wheeling and dealing without a major mention of the 1965 transaction that switched Brock for St. Louis pitcher Ernie Broglio. Such titles include Trade Him!: 100 Years of Baseball’s […]

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The Sultan of Stats

June 17, 2010

Allan Roth did not invent baseball statistics. Henry Chadwick introduced those in the late 1800s, mostly for the benefit of the fans. What Roth did — first for the Brooklyn/Los Angeles Dodgers and later for network television broadcasts — was show how they could be used proactively, rather than as an afterthought published by newspapers […]

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Welcome to Ron Kaplan’s Baseball Bookshelf, the podcast! Bear with us; this is a work in progress. We’ll get it right as time goes by. In the first installment, we chat with Bill Madden, veteran NY Daily News sportswriter and columnist, about his NY Times‘ bestseller, Steinbrenner: The Last Lion of Baseball. You can read […]

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by Mike Greenberg and Mike Golic, with Andrew Chaikivsky. ESPN Books, 2010 A caveat and a confession: While “hate” may be too strong a word, I “intensely dislike” sports-talk radio. The idea of (supposedly) grown men and women getting apoplectic on the air over Oliver Perez or Ron Artest or Bill Belichick, et al…not my […]

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My review of Bill Madden’s riveting profile of the Yankees owner was published on Bookreporter.com. You can read it here.

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TWIBB: June 4, 2010

June 4, 2010

This top baseball books, according to Amazon.com as of Friday, June 4. Title Rank General Steinbrenner: The Last Lion of  Baseball, by Bill Madden 1 The Baseball Codes: Beanballs, Sign Stealing, and Bench-Clearing Brawls: The Unwritten Rules of America’s Pastime, by Jason Turbow with Michael Duca 2 Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, […]

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National Pastime Radio

May 31, 2010

George Will put in an appearance on The Brian Lehrer Show in April (how did I miss that), to discuss the re-release of Men at Work, first published 20 years ago. Say what you will about Will’s politics, he loves his baseball and can discuss it without engaging in overly vainglorious verbosity. You can hear […]

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Bits and pieces

May 22, 2010

SFReeper critiques Emma Span’s look at the game from the distaff side and Jason Turbow’s do’s and dont’s. If the British read Moneyball, do they have to convert it into pounds or euros? The AV Club conducted this Q&A with Dan Epstein, author of Big Hair & Plastic Grass. You gotta wonder if he grew […]

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TWIBB: May 21, 2010

May 21, 2010

This top baseball books, according to Amazon.com as of Friday, May 21. Title Rank General Steinbrenner: The Last Lion of Baseball, by Bill Madden 1 The Baseball Codes: Beanballs, Sign Stealing, and Bench-Clearing Brawls: The Unwritten Rules of America’s Pastime, by Jason Turbow with Michael Duca 2 The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron, […]

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Survey Says…

May 7, 2010

Today’s Wall Street Journal ran this extensive article about the differences (and similarities) between Met and Yankee fans. I took a brief on-line interactive survey, which rendered me — incorrectly — a fan of the Bronx bombers. (Only 14 people took the poll, which indicates that WSJ readers have better things to do with their […]

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This week’s best-selling baseball books, according to Amazon.com as of Friday, May 7. Title Rank General The Baseball Codes: Beanballs, Sign Stealing, and Bench-Clearing Brawls: The Unwritten Rules of America’s Pastime, by Jason Turbow and Michael Duca 1 The Bullpen Gospels: Major League Dreams of a Minor League Veteran, by Dirk Hayhurst 2 Moneyball: The […]

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Chicago Magazine published this profile of former Cub and current author/ESPN BBTN analyst Doug Glanville following the release of his excellent new memoir, The Game from Where I Stand, which it describes as “a blend of recast Times columns and new baseball-centric ruminations filed under broad chapter headings such as ‘The Stresses of the Game’ […]

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This week’s best-selling baseball books, according to Amazon.com as of Friday, April 23. Title Rank General The Baseball Codes: Beanballs, Sign Stealing, and Bench-Clearing Brawls: The Unwritten Rules of America’s Pastime, by Jason Turbow and Michael Duca 1 The Bullpen Gospels: Major League Dreams of a Minor League Veteran, by Dirk Hayhurst 2 Moneyball: The […]

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And Other Tales from the Edge of Baseball Fandom, by Emma Span (Villard, 2010) As much as I love baseball, there are times when I take a step back and wonder, “What am I doing with this nonsense? Surely, there are better ways to spend my time and energies.” And at the risk of being […]

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Less and less, it seems the answer to this age-old riddle is newspapers. Speaking from personal and practical experience, we have cut the stand-alone sports section at my weekly publication; instead I write the occasional sports-related piece. One kind old soul called to complain. He suggested we ditch the obituaries and put back the sports […]

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* TWIBB — April 9

April 9, 2010

This week’s best-selling baseball books, according to Amazon.com as of Friday, April 9. Title Rank General The Bullpen Gospels: Major League Dreams of a Minor League Veteran, by Dirk Hayhurst 1 The Baseball Codes: Beanballs, Sign Stealing, and Bench-Clearing Brawls: The Unwritten Rules of America’s Pastime, by Jason Turbow and Michael Duca 2 Willie Mays: […]

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* TWIBB — April 2

April 2, 2010

This week’s best-selling baseball books, according to Amazon.com as of Friday, April 2. Title Rank General The Bullpen Gospels: Major League Dreams of a Minor League Veteran, by Dirk Hayhurst 1 The Baseball Codes: Beanballs, Sign Stealing, and Bench-Clearing Brawls: The Unwritten Rules of America’s Pastime, by Jason Turbow and Michael Duca 2 Willie Mays: […]

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