Author: fartheroffthewall

“Searching for Toothpick Sam: A Baseball Card Odyssey”

The author:
Jamie Selko

The publishing info:
McFarland
216 pages
$29.95; released Dec. 17, 2023

The links:
The publishers website
At Bookshop.org
At Target.com
At Powells.com; at BarnesAndNoble.com; at Amazon.com

“When Baseball Was Still Topps:
Portraits of the Game in 1959, Card by Card”

The author:
Phil Coffin

The publishing info:
McFarland
243 pages
$39.95; released December 5, 2023

The links:
The publishers website
At Bookshop.org
At Powells.com
At BarnesAndNoble.com; at Amazon.com

“Cramer’s Choice: Memoir of a
Baseball Card Collector Turned Manufacturer”

The author:
Mike Cramer

The publishing info:
McFarland
253 pages
$29.95; released Oct. 17, 2023

The links:
The publishers website; at Bookshop.org
At Powells.com
At BarnesAndNoble.com
At Amazon.com

The reviews in 90 feet or less

The stories stack up like a pile of baseball cards. The residual effects of the COVID-19 pandemic lock-down has resulted in, for some reason, baseball cards becoming a ring-a-ding thing again.

We had some time to go through, sort, re-evaluate, and find like-minded, lonely people who believed in this idea. In September of 2020, as we extended our annual baseball book review series, Axios sports examined the trading card boom over the prior months. As well as exposing the dark side of forgeries. In July, Bill Shea of The Athletic had a piece under the headline “State of the sports card boom: After sky-high surge, is the market still healthy?” The conclusion was: Yeah, kinda.

In September of 2022, The Wall Street Journal produced: “The Most In-Demand Investment Might Be Your Baseball Card Collection.” Then in March 2023, Ian Thomas of CNBC posted the real push moving this forward: “How Fanatics and MLB are planning to keep the trading card boom going.” Fanatics was the company that pried the rights to making MLB trading cards from Topps in August, 2021, ending a partnership that went back to 1952. Fanatics then acquired Topps outright in early 2023 for $500 million.

And if you’re wondering: The nine most valuable baseball cards in history are pretty much a) the ones you think they are and b) the ones you’ll never own.

Our personal cardboard collection during the pandemic wasn’t so much to revisit all the book binders, shoe boxes and plastic cases we’ve stashed away in various rooms and closets. It was renovating a home office that resulted in re configuring closet space — and actually gave the card collection a higher place of honor within the home structure. The space gained allowed us to display more book shelves. So binders with “Topps 1970-71,” and “Hall of Famers” and “Future Hall of Famers” (which was horribly in need of an update — sorry Chris Sabo) could be addressed.

Now there was also another shelf to hold our lineup of baseball card-related books:

== “The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading And Bubblegum Book,” by Brendan Boyd and Fred Harris (1973).

We saw recently how the e-book (right) is advertised as “The Spinal Tap of Baseball Books.” It’s still best described by people like Jeff Katz for the SABR Baseball Cards Research Committee: “For Hannukah that year I got (the book). It’s impossible to overstate the impact of this book on me, and every other card collector of the era, from 10 years old and up. Again, I’ll give it a shot. First, there were cards. Pages and pages of cards, nearly all from the 1950’s and 1960’s. I had never seen these before! How could I? The catalogs didn’t have many pictures, if they had them at all. What a gift. It made my head spin. Second, there was the writing. It was beyond funny: sharp, but warm, silly, but deep, nostalgic, but not maudlin. Harris and Boyd had a ‘60’s sense of irreverence and impudence, and even for a kid like me it resonated. There was a love for the game and the cards that was genuine, but not too serious. This was a life lesson I could take to heart. Third, there was a sense of shared community. Most of my friends were card collectors, but they were children. Harris and Boyd were grown men, seemingly in their late-20’s. They looked pretty cool too. What were these guys doing in the baseball card world? That looked like a future I could embrace.”

“Frank Chance’s Diamond:
The Baseball Journalism of Ring Lardner”

The author/editor:
Ron Rapoport

The publishing info:
Globe Pequot/Lyons Press; Rowman & Littlefield; 264 pages; $24.95; released Feb. 6, 2024

The links:
The publishers website; the author’s website; at Bookshop.org; at {pages}; at Powells.com; at BarnesAndNoble.com; at Amazon.com

The review in 90 feet or less

The name Ringgold Wilmer Lardner still rings a bell.

For us, it started with a USC journalism class syllabus in the early 1980s that required reading “Sports and the Spirit of Play in American Fiction: Hawthorne to Faulkner,” by Christian Messenger.

Chapter Five — “Lardner: The Popular Sports Hero” – started this way:

“The most talented sportswriter was Ring Lardner, the innovative chronicler of American games, comic players and their foibles. He allied himself to popular sport and the realist tradition while irrevocably fixing the stereotype of the professional athlete for modern fiction. Lardner stands at the center of any discussion of popular sport in modern American literature.”

Our education continued with Ron Rapoport, our former colleague at the Los Angeles Daily News who we are grateful in that he created the forward to our new Vin Scully appreciation book.

Rapoport, a recipient of the Ring Lardner Award for Excellence in Sports Journalism, has a deep appreciation for the man who, in 1963, was the Baseball Writers Association of America career excellence recipient as acknowledged by the Baseball Hall of Fame. The honor came 30 years after his death.

Rapoport, a one-time Chicago Sun Times columnist competing with the likes of Lardner’s former employer, the Chicago Tribune, has a connection to Lardner’s work that goes deepest in his cultivation of a nearly 600-page book, “The Lost Journalism of Ring Lardner,” in 2017 for University of Nebraska Press. Rapoport mined the archives to find his earliest work in the South Bend Times and Chicago Tribune, where it was just sports but also politics, war, Prohibition and other essays about life in America. Rapoport had the support of Lardner’s grandson and New York Times writer James, plus his cousin Susan.

This “Frank Chance’s Diamond” is a condensed version of that, based only on baseball shaped his vernacular.

When Rapoport appeared recently at the NINE convention of baseball writers and enthusiasts in Tempe, Ariz., he did about a 15- minute presentation about how and why he came to do this manuscript.

Somewhere, Lardner’s ears must be ringing. Rapoport talked about:

“Schoolboy: The Untold Journey of a Yankees Hero”

The author:
Waite Hoyt
Tim Manners

The publishing info:
University of Nebraska Press; 260 pages; $34.95; released April 1, 2024

The links:
The publishers website; the authors website; at Bookshop.org; at Powells.com; at BarnesAndNoble.com; at Amazon.com

The review in 90 feet or less

Wait a second … “Schoolboy” Waite Hoyt has finally come out with his story? What have we been missing here?

Who’s the fool of this April 1 prank?

For all intents and purposes, this certified Baseball Hall of Famer, and one of the most well-known baseball broadcasters of his day, has just been waiting for his close-up.

It got done, nearly 40 years after his death.

Hoyt may seem like an ancillary part to the 1920s-era New York Yankees’ dynasty. Sure he went 22-7 and 23-7 in back-to-back seasons – but these were the ’27 and ’28 Yankees. Aside from that he won 19 games in back-to-back years with the Yankees in the ’21 and ’22 seasons. And 18 more in ’24. And 17 to boot in ’23.

That’s 157 total in his 10 years. When he retired, that was fourth all-time in franchise history (and now sits ninth, as well as ninth for pitching WAR at 36.4 and eighth in innings pitched and games started).

Yet for 14 of the 15 years Hoyt mingled with six other franchises, he had a sub-.500 record. The exception was a 10-5 stretch for the Philadelphia Athletics for half a season of 1931, when he was selected off waivers from Detroit in July. But then the A’s released in the ’32 off season, he signed with his hometown Brooklyn Dodgers as a free agent, and then he was released in June of ’32.

It’s tough to think of him as a young man, but his claim to fame for many years was that he was a teenage player, under contract with the New York Giants, thanks to manager John McGraw.

Yes, just a school boy.

But in the end, he circled back to Brooklyn and was sadly discarded as a 38 year old by the Dodgers in 1938 after an 0-3 start in six games and only one start.

Because of the nickname, Hoyt may even be confused in baseball lore with Schoolboy Rowe, who overlapped Hoyt’s career for six seasons (two of them as an All Star with three World Series Detroit Tiers teams).

Now, we’ve been set straight.

By Waite Hoyt himself.

And mostly by his son, who kept a box of his stuff and gave it up to someone who could finally craft this quasi-autobiography at a time when he was perhaps best known for his decades of work broadcasting Cincinnati Reds game.

“Let There Be Baseball: The 60-Year Battle
To Legitimize Sunday Play”

The author:
Arthur G. Sharp

The publishing info:
McFarland; 292 pages; $49.95
Released Nov. 8, 2023

The links:
The publishers website; at Bookshop.org; at Powells.com; at Vromans.com; at TheLastBookStoreLA; at BarnesAndNoble.com; at Amazon.com

The review in 90 feet or less

Imagine the blasphemous idea of actually playing baseball on an Easter Sunday.

Good grief. Especially for those trying to observe a Good Friday of penance.

Rotten eggs everywhere.

Why would actual the Catholic Padres and actual Catholic Cardinals approve of it – especially as the Dodgers, who started their season with two games against San Diego’s Padres in Seoul and now have their U.S.-based opening day series against St. Louis’ Cardinals?

Because, they’re baseball fans, too. They respect the religious importance of the moment, and they enjoy the community that the game brings.

Let’s not even get into as to how the Angels – the heralded Halos of Los Angeles – have been dispatched on these holiest of days to Baltimore? Maybe the tragedy of the bridge collapse there necessitates the city needing something of a communal place of healing. Like the cathedral of baseball.

As Arthur Sharp writes in his introduction to “Let There Be Baseball”:

“Today people attend or play in baseball games on Sundays without giving a thought to who made it possible, how they did it, or how long it took to secure the right. The story of the pro-Sunday baseball advocates’ struggle to overcome the determined opposition’s push to enforce the draconian blue laws, aka Sunday laws, in the United States that prevented Sunday baseball in most states is one worth reading.”

As we believe we have before.

“A Grand Slam For God:
A Journey From
Baseball Star to Catholic Priest”

The author:
Fr. Burke Masters

The publishing info:
Word on Fire; 138 pages; $29.95
Released Aug. 14, 2023

The links:
The publishers website; the authors website; at Bookshop.org; at Powells.com; at Vromans.com; at MajestyChristianStore.com; at BetterWorldBooks.com; at Alibris.com; at BarnesAndNoble.com; at Amazon.com

The review in 90 feet or less

A phrase that the late Dodgers broadcaster Vin Scully loved to use frequently comes to mind in a time of angst and confusion: If you want to make God smile, tell him your plans.

“That quote has been so much a part of me, I don’t know when it began,” Scully told me in a 2019 conversation. “Maybe as a child I heard a priest say it and it just stuck. It makes good sense. You know, we try to write our own script and it’s a mistake. There’s a script already written for us.”

Fr. Burke Masters seems to have a Masters degree in his concept.

In 1990, he was Burke Masters, Mississippi State senior second baseman. Soon to be a grand hero.

In the NCAA’s South Regional playoffs, on the Bulldogs’ home field at Starksville, Miss., the SEC champions trailed in the third-round game to top-seeded Florida State, 8-7, in the top of the ninth inning.

Masters, already 5-for-5 in the game, came up and worked the count to 3-and-1. He could pray for a walk to force in the tying run. But that’s not really what a hitter does, does he?

He lined the next pitch to left, clearing the fence for a grand slam to put his team ahead.

Two days later, the teams met again in the regional final, and MSU prevailed. On to the College World Series at Omaha, Neb., as a No. 5 seed, the Bulldogs were eventually eliminated by No. 1-ranked Stanford).

Masters’ feat has been voted the “top sports moment” in Mississippi State baseball history — a program that goes back to the early 1900s and has produced the likes of Buck Showalter, Will Clark, Bobby Thigpen, Rafael Palmeiro, Jonathan Papelbon and Hunter Renfroe.

When Masters writes in his book abot that moment, he says it “sealed my decision to make baseball my career.” That was reasonable. He had set a school record playing in 251 career games from 1987 to ’90. He’d find his way through the minor leagues. Maybe even play for his favorite team, the St. Louis Cardinals.

Ten years before all this, his parents sent him to a Catholic middle school, a beleaguered eighth grader trying to figure things out. Five years after that moment, he was converting to Catholicism as a senior at a Providence Catholic High.

Master said a sister in his theology class gave him a bible and pointed him to the Gospel of Matthew. He went on a retreat. He had experiences during Mass he couldn’t explain. He had a girlfriend who accompanied him to church and led him discern a sudden desire to enter the priesthood.

He wondered: If God gave me the talents to play baseball, perhaps at a high level, why wouldn’t He allow me to get called to to the major leagues someday?