From the category archives:

“Oddballs”

* Welcome back, Leno

March 1, 2010

Jay Leno returns to The Tonight Show this evening. Herewith a gallery of some of the baseball big shots he’s had on…

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* Your face here

February 23, 2010

One of the things you really notice at Yankees Fantasy Camp — and I’m sure it’s the same at all the others — is the omnipresence of photographers. Team pictures, action shots, posed “candid” shots, photos at the dinners, et al. People love having their pictures taken with celebrities. So why did it take so […]

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* A little help here?

January 22, 2010

My stats-keepers indicates The Bookshelf has received more than a quarter million hits. My thanks to all you readers out there. I know there are thousands of baseball blogs and believe The Bookshelf is one of the few devoted to this particular niche. But I’m just curious as to your take on the best of […]

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* Who are you calling ____

January 22, 2010

Bruce Markusen, author of such books as A Baseball Dynasty: Charlie Finley’s Swingin’ A’s, The Team That Changed Baseball: Roberto Clemente and the 1971 Pittsburgh Pirates, Tales From The Mets Dugout, and The Orlando Cepeda Story, provided this list of Nickname “All-Stars” for The Hardball Times

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Marty Appel was kind enough to send me a copy of the Official 2007 Yearbook of the Israel Baseball League. Appel, who used to handle PR for the Yankees back in the 1970s, has his finger in just about every Jewish/sports pie, including the IBL, the Jewish Major Leaguer Card set, and the Maccabi Haifa […]

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* Sports books mad libs

December 24, 2009

The current issue of ESPN the Magazine includes a cute feature titled “Over the Top,” by Amanda Angel. The Greatest Story Ever Told is about Jesus himself, but these days you’d half-expect to find that title on a bookseller’s spoets shelves. A quick glance at the genre  shows many true, real and seemingly impossible epic […]

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* Bits and pieces

December 18, 2009 · 2 comments

Still trying to catch up from Yankee Fantasy Camp, so we’ll take it a few steps at a time: Richard Barbieri writes an intersting “This annotated week in baseball history” for The Hardball Times that deserves mention. The same can be said for Rob Neyer’s postings at ESPN.com, in particular his daily doses (Friday Filberts, […]

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Came across an interesting podcast awhile ago, Baseball’s Greatest Hits, produced by author and baseball historian Wayne McCombs for a radio station in Tulsa. Oklahoma. While the program is no longer live, you can still hear several episodes via iTunes, which is where I found this 1948 recording of Elmer, the Great, written by Ring […]

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* Ruh-roh

November 11, 2009

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So I went back to the baseball publications that came out prior to opening day. These included only national publications (i.e., no newspapers that might show favoritism for the home team): Baseball America, USA Today Sports Weekly, Sports Illustrated, ESPN the Magazine, Athlon, Lindy’s, The Sporting News (which took over my old pals, Street and […]

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Abrams publishers has come out with some very neat books over the last couple of years. The house, which specializes in art and photography books recently began a line of perpetual calendars on themes.The main problem reminds me of an episode from my childhood. When I was about 10, we had dinner at a local […]

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* One-shot deals

September 26, 2009

With the Mets season just about over, I needed to find new ways to amuse myself. When I was a kid at day camp, we used to play this game, “initials.” One player would think of the name of some baseball player, the other would try to guess. You got a home run if you […]

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* Baseball's "urban dictionary"

September 22, 2009

From the eclectic PitchersndPoets site comes the “Rogue’s Baseball Index,” a sort of urban dictionary about the national pastime. RBI is divided into several categories, including entries about players, fans, management, media, et al. A random entry: The George Will is a hyper-intellectualized fan who gets so caught up in the history and legend and […]

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* Keeping up with the Times

September 13, 2009

A few germane baseball items over the week that I overlooked: In today’s edition, John Klima, author of the recently relased Willie’s Boys: The 1948 Birmingham Black Barons, the Last Negro League World Series, and the Making of a Baseball Legend (Wiley), published this item on how the Yankees blew their chance to sign Willie […]

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* Ouchie

September 12, 2009

Unless that’s a chaw of tobacco gone wrong…

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* A numbers racket

September 10, 2009

Examiner.com, one of the websites that tailors to local communities, ran this piece on what is becoming a franchise book, _____ by the Numbers, in this case the Cubs (with a companion website). Matthew Silverman wrote the first of this genre about the Mets and titles about the Yankees (Bill Gutman) and Red Sox (Bill […]

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Such as Microsoft, according to this piece making the rounds. Microsoft’s Intellectual Property Group is building a financial model designed to value and predict prices for technology patents, allowing the company to better forecast and budget for intellectual property-related costs — all inspired by a best-selling book about baseball…. “I got this idea from reading […]

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* I'm baa-aack

August 4, 2009

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In this case, it’s “writing,” at least according to this entry on Seekerville, a blog about the writing craft. In baseball, like any other sport, in addition to having that natural talent, the players must spend years preparing: learning the nuances and rules of the game, conditioning themselves, practicing, playing, learning the “market” (how other […]

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With apologies to George Harrison. Apropos to this item regarding an article in The Wall Street Journal, Bob Wechsler of the Lehigh Valley News extrapolated on the correlation between players’ initials and statistics.

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