Your 2024 baseball book review automatic renewal … this time aligned on South Korea time

Of all the speed bumps, detours and roundabouts we encountered since leaving the 2023 Major League Baseball season – we’ve been told the Rangers won out, outlasting the Diamondbacks, yet we’re still not convinced it wasn’t a COVID nightmare – we hesitate to ramp to the 2024 campaign that begins with the Dodgers and Padres officially on a working good-will vacation in South Korea — 16 hours ahead from L.A., and 6,000 miles West into the future — showing off Shohei Ohtani to a new part of the world, and, with that, relaunching the annual baseball book review project.

For those who aren’t up to our speed ball, this has been an exercise in empathy for the authors and efficiency on our end trying to crank out (at least) 30 reviews of new spring baseball books and post them, once a day, during the month of April. It was deemed something of a success for many years starting in 2011*. We were on target with 30 reviews in 2023.

*Our memory is fading and we weren’t actually sure, but that’s the best guess, since we’ve got The Wayback Machine to find things we’ve posted going back on InsideSoCal.com going back to our first posts in 2006.

Our ’24 baseball book review list again deviates a bit from its original intent. We’ve reigned that we can’t do it as before as life’s challenge intercede but the spirit is still there. We’ve started a bit pre-April early (because the MLB season keeps backspacing itself on the calendar leading to a November conclusion) and try to time the landing of reviews to dates that make sense – such as April 15’s Jackie Robinson Day.

We promise to be as diligent and perhaps less wordy with these reviews. The point it to let readers know these works exist, should you be temped to pick them up for purchase without knowing their caveats. It’s also a way to uncover projects that otherwise might be off the radar.

So let’s crack this thing open …

Among the books we look forward to highlighting this spring/summer:

= “Don Drysdale: Up and In — The Life of a Dodgers Legend” by Mark Whicker (although just checking the latest projection is it won’t come out until 2025)

= “The Last of His Kind: Clayton Kershaw and the Burden of Greatness,” by Andy McCullough

= “Under Jackie’s Shadow: Voices of Black Minor Leaguers Baseball Left Behind” by Mitchell Nathanson

= “Schoolboy: The Untold Journey of a Yankees Hero” by Waite Hoyt, with Tim Manners, where some 40 years after the death of the one-time Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher, a memoir has been uncovered.

= “Baseball: The Movie,” by Noah Gittell, touted to be the definitive history of the game as portrayed on film since 1915.

= “Remembering Torn-Down Ballparks, Over a Cold Beer: A Beer Table Book Celebrating Lost Ballparks” by Ken Finnigan, providing a 10 inch-by-8 inch manuscript that you can put your beer stein on (with a coaster … or is the coaster provided?)

Add to that the fact we have been undangling participles and prepping punctuation for “Perfect Eloquence: An Appreciation of Vin Scully,” submitted to University of Nebraska Press editors for a May 1 release. We also been cultivating another media project called (at least for the moment): SoCal Sports History 101: The prime jersey numbers from 00 to 99 that uniformly, uniquely and unapologetically create an authentic all-time roster.  One of those numbers assigns No. 67 to Scully, which somewhat deviates from the premise of a jersey or uniform number, but on the other hand, how many organic Scully 67 jerseys have been seen at Dodger Stadium over the last handful of years? We also pulled a story from our “Perfect Eloquence” about the time Scully did don a real Dodgers jersey and sit in the dugout for a game at Wrigley Field.

More side notes before going forward

A post-Christmas and pre-New Year’s trip to Portland (please, bring this great city back to what it once was) led to another pilgrimage through Powell’s City of Books. I picked up three first-edition copies of baseball books I’ve long wanted to put on my shelf that are reminders/relics of where baseball journalism has evolved.

Book 1: George Plimpton’s “Out of My League” (1961, Harper and Brothers Publishing, 150 pages, purchased for $19.95) recounts the day in 1958 when he talked his way onto the mound at Yankee Stadium to see what it would be like if an Average Joe (he was a 31-year-old known-enough-around-New York scribe) actually pitched against real All Stars. It’s fascinating how rudimentary this all came to happen – and it’s a keen reminder about how the participatory sports journalism we came to know him for was really inspired by Paul Gallico’s work decades earlier. We had thought this was only done for a Sports Illustrated story – it involved hiring an SI photographer to document it, and the magazine put up $1,000 as a “contest” prior to an exhibition game for Plimpton to get the attention of Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle, Frank Robinson, Gil Hodges and other legends of the day to buy into it. It doesn’t end well, as an exercise for Plimpton’s ego, but he so creatively tells how it devolved in front of his blurry eyes and what he took away from it. Even more impressive is the book has a blurb endorsement from Ernest Hemingway, and it launched Plimpton’s mission to become a Detroit Lions quarterback and Boston Bruins goalie.

Book 2: Jim Brosnan’s “The Long Season” (1960, Harper and Brothers Publishing, 273 pages) has a brief mention in Plimpton’s “Out of My League,” which shares the same publisher. There is a strange overlap in these two that could have put the idea into Plimpton’s head to journal about bring a big-league pitcher. Yet Brosnan’s diary is of his 1959 season (months after Plimpton’s stunt). It started with him as a member of the St. Louis Cardinals and diverts with him to Cincinnati during a June trade. He had been in the league 12 years at that point. Excerpts of this book were printed in SI. Brosnan’s book, of course, is often cited as a precursor for Jim Bouton’s more well known “Ball Four,” which launched in 1970 and also is fortunate for Bouton in some regards that he was also traded in the middle of that season, from the expansion Seattle Pilot misfits to the Houston Astros after already having built a career with the New York Yankees (and would come back years later with the Atlanta Braves).

Book 3: Tom House’s “The Jock’s Itch: The Fast-Track Private World of the Professional Ballplayer” (1989, Contemporary Books, 129 pages) calls this his “Ball Four-esque” attempt to tell it like it was when the former USC pitcher somehow made it through an MLB career with Atlanta, Boston and Seattle that ended in the late 1970s. It goes deeper into his post-life, trying to figure things out based on lessons not learned as a pro baseball player, and always having that “itch” to get back into it as a coach. (And, yes, he was the Braves’ relief pitcher who caught Hank Aaron’s 715^th home run while in the bullpen, despite Bill Buckner’s attempt to climb the wall and get it). House, at the time, was starting as a Texas Rangers pitching coach who created new techniques – like warming up with a football – to launch a whole new career as an expert in this new field of mental and physical training, leading to a dozen more books on the subject. This first-person account of what it was like for him doesn’t try to call out former illicit teammates, only the circumstances they all faced in what was a somewhat mature-deficient situation made worse by hero worship.

The three together form a nice trilogy of work that now give more meaning to my expanding collection of Bouton’s “Ball Four” editions that I’ve collected over the years and was fortunate enough to have him sign several of them before his 2019 passing (and provided so much context for a tribute we were able to do about him for the Los Angeles Times – note, we took the picture of the book covers as we laid them out on our backyard lawn to give it a nice baseball-looking background texture.)

Now, upward and onward.