Author: fartheroffthewall

“Doc: The Life of Roy Halladay”

The author:
Todd Zolecki

The publishing info:
Triumph Books
$28
352 pages
Released May 19

The links:
At the publisher’s website
At Amazon.com
At BarnesAndNoble.com
At Powells.com
At Indiebound.org

The review in 90 feet or less

We had this idea back at the MLB trade deadline of 2009, advocating for the Dodgers to shore up their patchwork pitching rotation to do whatever was necessary to grab veteran ace Roy Halladay for the stretch run during a Toronto Blue Jays fire sale.

Even if the cost was swapping out this new young gun named Clayton Kershaw.

“Thanks for all, Kershaw, but Dodgers now need a Halladay” started this way:

Clayton Kershaw, thanks for all the weeks you’ve put in as a member of the Dodgers. We admire your tiresome efforts to get past the sixth inning start after start after start. … But now you have a higher calling. You’ve become our sacrificial left-hander in our quest to make the city of Los Angeles temporarily misremember that the Lakers’ 2009-10 season will start in just three months.

The Toronto Blue Jays have made it known they would like to have you on their roster. We will oblige them – in turn, by taking Harry Leroy “Doc” Halladay III off their payroll. We consider this a win-win situation. We’ll win more games. You’ll win more opportunities to endorse snow tires in eastern Canada.

In Kershaw, you relent on the chance he’ll develop into an elite hurler.
In Halladay, you get it, guaranteed.

In Kershaw, you dispatch someone who may never adjust to life in the Great White North, unable to avoid another Tim Horton’s doughnut-stuffing break from his flat on the way to the stadium.
In Halladay, you get someone due $5 million for the rest of this season, $15 million more for next season (or a bit less than what the Dodgers are giving to Jason Schmidt for his painful efforts), and the inside track to signing him until he’s finished with some Hall of Fame-worthy numbers.

So, it didn’t happen. No Halladay trade even came about by July 31, even if the Phillies — champions in ’08 and eventual NLCS champs in ’09 — tried.

Good, bad or indifferent to all teams involved?

That 2009 season would be Halladay’s 13^th and final one in Toronto, a franchise dumping salary and going no where. In his age 32 season, he would be nearing 150 career wins and continue to annually lead the AL in complete games, innings pitched and expending energy on a team that couldn’t make the playoffs.

That same year, Kershaw, at age 21, would still be just a .500 pitcher trying to find his way – 13-13 after some 50 starts, a season where he’d also amass a career-high 91 walks in 171 innings, up against 185 strikeouts. His breakout wouldn’t come for two more seasons. The Dodgers’ 2009 season ended up in an NLCS loss to the Phillies, trying to make due with a staff that only got a team-best 12 wins from 24-year-old Chad Billingsley, plus Randy Wolf, Kershaw in the No. 3 hole, Hiroki Kuroda and Jeff Weaver, with help from Vicente Padilla and Eric Stultz.

See how Halladay could have been one to strap them all to his back?

Note: As we read now in this bio,  the Angels actually came closer than the Dodgers to making something happen in July 2009 — Toronto wanted Jered Weaver or Joe Saunders, plus shortstop Erick Aybar and outfield prospect Peter Bourjos. The Angels turned it down — with Aybar as the deal-breaker.

In the 2009 offseason, Halladay ended up getting traded to Philadelphia, for Travis d’Arnaud, Kyle Drabek and Michael Taylor. The Phillies had playoff momentum and wanted to keep it as some key players were leaving.

Halladay’s annual salary jumped to $20 million a year, and the Phillies appear to get their money’s worth — a 21-10 record, a 2.44 ERA, nine complete games, nearly 1,000 batters faced, and a second career Cy Young Award. He threw the spectacular no-hitter against Cincinnati in the NLDS and then did all he could when the Phillies ran into the San Francisco Giants in the NLCS, with Halladay twice going up against Tim Lincecum, losing Game 1, 4-3, but getting the win in a 4-2 Game 5 triumph.

Halladay followed that up with 19 wins in 2011 — a Cy Young runner-up to the now-emerging Kershaw, who took his first trophy.

But that was about all Halladay had left.

He would combine 2012 and ’13 with a 15-13 record and an ERA of about 5.00 in 38 starts. He wanted to pitch through all this pain in his shoulder — taking pain meds that made him lose weight and send up red flags. He wanted to finish the contract he signed up for.

His wife, Brandy, begged him to quit. She explains, starting on page 259: Continue reading “Extra inning baseball book reviews for 2020: Now it’s “Doc,” with all of Roy Halladay’s perfect moments and personal imperfections … then an ESPN doc” →

“A High Five for Glenn Burke”

The author:
Phil Bildner

The publishing info:
Farrah, Straus and Giroux/MacMillian
For ages 10-13/Grades 5-7
$16.99 hardcover
$7.99 paperback
288 pages
Released February, 2020

The links:
At the publisher’s website
At Amazon.com
At BarnesAndNoble.com
At Powells.com
At Indiebound.org
At the author’s very cool website

The review in 90 feet or less

My two kids are a couple decades removed from this early-teen age range, yet I never stop wondering how a middle-schooler purposefully navigates today’s world with everything thrown at them.

We remember some of our own experiences in the 1970s. We saw our own son and daughter work through the trial-and-error stages at their own pace, with school as a foundation and sports/dance/clubs/music as an extension of finding path to what interested them. This is on top of having divorced parents. They might not have realized how they were figuring out lessons about becoming more independent while realizing the benefits of teamwork, how individual achievement can be enjoyed when looking back at the ways hurdles were overcome in the process. There’s self esteem and empathy and all those esoteric things that later would have far more defined labels, but at this point, were just concepts to wrestle with.

In 2020, how might a kid process such adult-based media concept about the increasing acceptance amidst the stigmas that continue to push back about an LGBTQ “authentic” existence? What do kids in this age range stumble upon watching YouTube or social media that affects their thinking and image?

The way author Phil Bildner finds an entry point into this topic for this age group, having done noteworthy work with his baseball-based “Sluggers Book” series (2009-’10) for age 8-12, is through a multi-layered baseball story.

Dodgers followers who may know various elements of the Glenn Burke story — the athletic center fielder with star potential who was on the 1977 NL pennant-winning roster, but then oddly traded to his hometown of Oakland in the middle of the ’78 season to his teammates disappointment. He was out of the game after four MLB seasons. Burke’s sexuality was acknowledged and accepted by many of his Dodgers teammates, but not by management.

In 1995, Burke was able to work with writer Erik Sherman to author his autobiography, “Out At Home: The True Story of Glenn Burke, Baseball’s First Openly Gay Player.” Burke died that year, in May, at age 42. More about Burke’s life and times can be found in OutSports.com, a 2010 documentary, “OUT: The Glenn Burke Story” produced by Doug Harris, and a marvelous 2014 story in the New York Times by John Branch. An ESPN “30 For 30” film “The High Five” directed by Michael Jacobs is also in circulation.

In Bildner’s novel, sixth-grader Silas Wade is already navigating the rapid-paced life of a mom who just started a coffee house but practices “self care” and a dad with tight schedule as a CPA. His two younger sisters also demand attention – especially one with special needs. He find comfort in the friendship of a classmate, Zoey, a member of the school’s robotics team, as they juggle schedules, share rides to practices and events, and become intertwined in their successes and failures.

Introducing Burke into Silas’ world as the subject of a school presentation – who invented the high five? – also gives Silas a starting point to see how he feels about what Burke endured as a baseball player, and afterward. Silas wears No. 3 on his baseball team – like Burke (but also as a nod to Benny “The Jet” Rodriguez from the movie “The Sandlot,” who, in the sweet ending to the flick, also ends up playing for the Dodgers).

Bildner doesn’t sugar-coat any of the Burke facts – pointing out how Dodgers general manager Al Campanis tried to pay him to get married, and how managers  Tommy Lasorda and Billy Martin dealt with it in their own insecure ways. In pulling from stories and books done about Burke, Bildner builds the story.

By chapter 8, Silas is already struggling with how to tell Zoey about his feelings. Continue reading “Extra inning baseball book reviews for 2020: Glenn Burke, high-five alive, for kids who need to know his story” →

“The Final Game at Ebbets Field”

The author:
Noel Hynd

The publishing info:
Red Cat Tales Publishing LLC/Los Angeles
241 pages
$14.95
Released June, 2019

The links:
At Amazon.com
At Powells.com
At Indiebound.org

The review in 90 feet or less

From what we’ve come to find out about Noel Hynd — piecing together bios of him on the Internet Movie Database (imdb.com), something called the FantasticFiction.com site, more from Amazon.com’s author info, a touch more from Encyclopedia.com, and another tale spun on GoodReads.com — we’ve got something of a good read on this prolific writer, born somewhere between 1947 and 1952, far more known in the world of fiction novels, New York born and now based in Culver City.

From what we really don’t know about the last game played at Ebbets Field – a Baseball Hall of Fame story notes the end “came quietly, with just 6,702 fans watching … the cheers, however, resound to this day” — added up to a 2-0 Dodgers win on Tuesday, Sept. 24, 1957, with someone named Danny McDevitt going the distance. The two-hour, three-minute exercise seemed to be a bit of a footnote to the history of the place.

It wasn’t the last games played by the Brooklyn Dodgers. They went to Philadelphia, lost two of their last three, and polished off a 84-70 season, 11 games behind NL champion Milwaukee.

With those two points on the map, the intersection of Hynd and Dodger history in these self-published pages is an odd burst of non-conformist confusion, inspiration and, when we’re done, splendid bliss.

It’s also award worthy. Continue reading “Extra inning baseball book reviews for 2020: In hindsight, Hynd’s reward for remembering the end of Ebbets Field is a salad bowl of information” →

“Buddha Takes the Mound:
Enlightenment in 9 innings”

The author:
Donald S. Lopez Jr., Ph.D.

The publishing info:
St. Martin’s Essentials/Macmillan
$19.95
192 pages
Released today, May 5

The links:
At the publisher’s website
At Amazon.com
At BarnesAndNoble.com
At Powells.com
At IndieBound.org

The review in 90 feet or less

From this rather cosmically whimsical cover, it might not reveal to us that Lopez is kind of a big deal in the Buddha world. Wikipedia kind of big,  if that actually supersedes Encyclopedia Britannica largeness.

The Arthur E. Link Distinguished University Professor of Buddhist and Tibetan Studies at the University of Michigan, and part of the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, Lopez received a BA in Religious Students in 1974, an MA in Buddhist Studies in 1977, and a doctorate in Buddhist Studies in 1982 at the University of Virginia. He is married to another prominent Religious Studies scholar, Tomoko Masuzawa.

Lopez is also referred to as the “only public intellectual in the field of Buddhist Studies.” Can we assume most of them are pretty quiet people otherwise?

The takeaway from Lopez adding to the betterment of our humanity, aside from this piece, is the mind-blowing idea that not only is Buddhism integral to baseball, but baseball is Buddhism, and baseball is ourselves.

If only we could spend all day in the on-deck circles talking in circles about this.

Baseball is about suffering and failure. A public display of errors documented in the media. Relief pitchers are rewarded for averting disaster. There are all sorts of connections in the metaphysical world. Continue reading “Extra inning baseball book reviews for 2020: Zen and the art of believing that baseball is Buddhism, and baseball is ourselves” →

“Issei Baseball: The Story of the
First Japanese American Ballplayers”

The author:
Robert K. Fitts

The publishing info:
University of Nebraska Press
$29.95
344 pages
Released April 1

The links:
At the publisher’s website
At Amazon.com
At BarnesAndNoble.com
At Powells.com
At Indiebound.org
At the author’s website

The review in 90 feet or less

Chapter 4, Page 37 begins a story about Los Angeles at the turn of the 20th Century. As this melting pot of a city incorporated in 1850, a year before statehood, continued to take shape, the Japanese population numbered fewer than 100 in 1890. By 1907, it was up to 6,000.

Nearly all these new residents were men. Known as birds of passage — deseki in Japanese — they planned to stay in the United States a short time, earn as much money as possible and return to Japan with enough money to purchase a farm of business and start a family. … Most were located around North San Pedro Street and First Avenue, an area that became known as Little Tokyo.

That’s also when a couple of students at USC — 25-year-old Seijiro Shibuya and 26-year-old Masaharu Yamaguchi — launched the Rafu Shimpo (Los Angeles Currier) in April 1903, written by hand and mimeographed, with offices soon to be at 128 N. Main Street, where City Hall now stands. It became a daily paper on Feb. 1, 1904.

“The writers were a young, rowdy bunch,” writes Rob Fitts, a former archaeologist with a PhD from Brown University who left academics to follow his passion of Japanese baseball. The writers often had to be awakened with hangovers after sleeping in segregated bathrooms, some sticking their heads into the dirty water of the toilet, flushing it, and ready to work again.

This matters why?

“On weekend afternoons, when they were not working, drinking or whoring, the young reporters played baseball,” Fitts tell us.

On May 17, 1905, the Japanese Baseball Club of Los Angeles is big enough to draw an article in the Los Angeles Herald. Continue reading “Extra innings past 30 in new baseball book reviews for 2020: Fitts’ fitting tribute to Japanese immigrant baseball has a clear L.A. connection” →