* RK Review: Dingers!

Older title

A Short History of the Long by, by Peter Keating (ESPN, 2006) Dingers is to literature what ESPN is to journalism. You can’t count on it to be serious, but it sure is fun. Keating’s work has appeared in a well-rounded series of publication. That is, he’s not just a sports guy, so he’s not […]

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* RK Review: The Bill James Handbook 2009

2008 title

Joe Posnanski’s great column on SI.com about which statistics are the best indicators of baseball talent reminded me that I was going to do a review of the 2009 Bill James Handbook. I must admit, I don’t make a habit of reading books of this type. I always enjoyed the Total Baseball books or the […]

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* "The best baseball book you have probably never read…"

Autobiography/memoirs

according to Michael Weinreb on ESPN.com’s Page 2 is Veeck: As In Wreck, the autobio of the game’s most maverick front office man (What, you thought the McCain/Palin campaign invented the word?) If there was ever a guy who didn’t take life too seriously, it was Bill Veeck, who made even the St. Louis Browns […]

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* "Five minutes 'til curtain, Mr. Canseco."

Reviews from other sources

What took so long? From The New York Times, this review of Back, Back, Back, an off-Broadway play about steroids in baseball. No even a walk-on part for Jose? After all, he was in that reality TV show. Upshot: Mr. [Itamar} Moses’ disappointingly drama-free drama does little more than skim the surface of the protracted […]

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* Source of the week: Life photo archives

Magazines

I miss Life magazine. None of its descendants match the mix of news and photos and even social impact that the legendary publication enjoyed during its heyday. Now, thanks to Google, you can view some 200 baseball images. It’s a nice mix, but after looking over the available shots, there’s obviously a lot missing. Not […]

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* In the name of the father

Author appearance

Julia Stevens, the daughter of Babe Ruth, recently appeared at a Las Vegas book store to promote her new book, Babe Ruth: Remembering The Bambino in Stories, Photos, and Memorabilia. It was only seven years ago that she and her co-author, Bill Gilbert, published Major League Dad: A Daughter’s Cherished Memories. (Not to be confused […]

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* Author profile: Zack Hample

2008 title

via the Sports by the Numbers blog.

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Review: Remembering Yankee Stadium

2008 title

This review on Harvey Frommer’s paean to the House that Ruth Built comes via River Avenue Blues. Upshot: Frommer has crafted a great mix as he honors Yankee Stadium, and presenting a building that has stood the test of New York time for so many decades is no easy task.

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* Review: Living on the Black

Reviews from other sources

This one on John Feinstein’s most recent baseball title comes from the DailySkew Baseball blog. Upshot: Overall, a good modern baseball book about how cerebral the game of pitching is, and how pitchers work out in-between starts. Also, an inside look into the Mets 2007 collapse (so you can read about Willie Randolph, Jose Reyes, […]

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* In these troubled Times, there is no room for Play

Annoucements

Too bad they can’t get rid of some of those annoying supplements that highlight fashion, furnishings, and vacations that “regular” folks can’t afford instead of doing away with Play, the Times‘ sports supplement. If the sports department is the toy store of a newspaper, I guess we won’t be getting much in the way of […]

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* RK Review: So Long, Shea

2008 title

Five Decades of Stadium Memories (Triumph Books, 2008) Compared with some of the wonderful books that have been published about Yankee Stadium’s last season, this slim paperback comes across like a poor stepchild, an afterthought in the world of recorded memory. I know the Mets’ home since 1964 doesn’t have the same cachet of the […]

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* RK Review: Sports Weekly Baseball Insider

Magazines

It used to be you had to wait until the following year to read about previous season. But now, thanks to all kinds of new technologies, it’s almost instantaneous. Baseball Insider, a special issue of Sports Weekly, does a great job of recapturing the excitement of the 2008 season while examining the strengths and weaknesses […]

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* It doesn't Happen Every Spring

2009 title

from Library Journal.com, this “prepub Alert: McCarthy, Matt. Odd Man Out: A Season on the Mound with Minor League Baseball’s Most Unlikely Pitcher. Viking. Mar. 2009. 320p. ISBN 978-0-670-02070-6. $25.95. It’s not every Yale molecular biophysics major who ends up playing baseball professionally. McCarthy, currently interning at New York’s Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital, here recounts a season […]

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* Now hear this: The Modern Scholar takes on baseball

Audio

Where were lectures like this when I was in college? Prof. Timothy B. Shutt from Kenyon College offers this eight-plus-hour rendering of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game: The History of Baseball in America.” Here’s the Course Overview from rbflim.com: “Baseball has been celebrated as “America’s National Pastime” for more than one hundred and […]

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* Stadium Shout-Out

Audio

The New York Times ran these audios from various celebrities regarding their thoughts on Yankee Stadium, including Penny Marshall (A League of Their Own) Robert Creamer (Babe: The Legend Comes to Life) Author Jane Heller Ari Fleischer, former White House Press secretary

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* Review: The Baseball Economist: The Real Game Exposed

Business of baseball

BaseballReflections.com posted this review of J.C. Bradbury’s book. Upshot: While the writing is not inherently strong, Bradbury does a good job of simplifying complicated economics issues for those of us who don’t spend our lives studying these things. Overall it is a very interesting read for those who are interested in outside the box issues […]

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* New book recalls George Plimpton

2008 title

Sure, Plimpton wrote about things other than sports, but that’s where I remember him best. No doubt he was the inspiration for hundreds of other sportswriters to step down from their glass-enclosed press box to give the games they covered a whirl. I even took a turn, playing in a game with a men’s 35-and-over […]

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* Try a novel aproach

Fiction

The Oklahoman’s sports columnist Berry Tramel offers this list of five favorite baseball novels, which does not contain many of the “usual suspects.”

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* This week (Nov.16) in SI

Magazines

Ha, made you look.

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