In the course of messing around, we came across a video on YouTube.com recently that made us wonder if what we try to do every spring is worth being sprung on everyone else:
It’s really not that difficult if you’ve done it now, what, more than 10 years …
A dozen years? Jeez.
The 2019 edition of new baseball books is really more than 30 total as we find. The first couple days alone are combined entries, because of how they best relate and can be compared and contrasted.
A year ago, our baseball book colleague Ron Kaplan was nice enough to post a review of our review, saying one of “the big regrets was not following Tom Hoffarth’s excellent annual project of reviewing 30 baseball books in 30 days.” The home for this now is on this website, and it seems sufficient enough to find.
As we start this off we also found an excerpt from a column by the late, great Dan Jenkins, from his August 2018 collection: “Sports Makes You Type Faster: The Entire World of Sports By One of the Most Famous Sportswriters” (Texas Christian University Press, $32, 200 pages):
“There’s a poetry that certain baseball writers discover about our national pastime. The poetry results when the baseball writer transforms himself from a seamhead into a member of the literati. He will stop writing his tough, hard-hitting ledes — ” Chico likes to throw at white guys, his father mowed their lawns” — and lapse into describing a win stream as something ephemeral and a slump as a catharsis. His byline should read Ralph Waldo Spellcheck.”
Most of these books coming up, if written that way, will get marked down. You can’t baffle us with your bullshit.
So starting April 1, we roll … activate spellcheck, please.
Tom Hoffarth's The Drill: More Farther Off the Wall 