Author: fartheroffthewall

“The Cup of Coffee Club:
11 Players and their Brush with Baseball History”

The author:
Jacob Kornhauser

The publishing info:
Rowman & Littlefield
$29.95
216 pages
Released March 11

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’ll try to make this quick, efficient and caffeinated.

It’ll be sort like the single-day MLB careers of:
= Charlie Lindstrom (Sept. 28, ’58)
= Roe Skidmore (Sept. 17, ’70)
= Larry Yount (Sept. 15, ’71)
= Gary Martz (July 8, ’75)
= Rafael Montalovo (April 13, ’86)
= Jeff Banister (July 23, ’91)
= Stephen Larkin (Sept. 15, ‘98)
= Jon Ratliff (Sept. 15, 2000)
= Ron Wright (April 14, ’02)
= Sam Marsonek (July 11, ’04)
= and Matt Tupman (May 18, ’08).

They’re the Moonlight Grahams of their time without a “Field of Dreams” context to evoke bittersweet nostalgia — they made it the big leagues, played once, then something weird happened.

The Baseball Encyclopedia is full of them, and it’s where many first learned of Graham, and fell for the nickname. The BaseballReference.com lists 535 pitchers and nearly as many batters (which seem to add up to 999) as a reference point. There are about 150 of them in the last 50 years alone, writes Kornhauser, tet, the 11 above is who the Chicago native and current  producer at Fox Sports digital in L.A. decided to go after. They were available to still talk about what, the author calls, their “heartache of never making it back.”

Well, for some of them.  Exhibit A: Yount.

The older brother of eventual Hall of Famer Robin Yount, and both from Taft High in Woodland Hills, says he rarely thinks about that day he was called in from the bullpen to pitch for the Houston Astros, hurt his arm while warming up, and never faced the Braves lineup of Felix Millian, Ralph Gahr and Hank Aaron in that ninth inning.
Thus, the 21-year-old is the only one in MLB history to officially enter a game and never perform.
He went back to Triple A for two lousy seasons, was traded to Milwaukee in 1974 — just as Robin was signing to play there as an 18-year-old out of high school.

Heartache? He became a fabulous real estate developer in Arizona, and still gets some credit for helping convince former MLB commissioner Bud Selig to finally put a team in Phoenix.

“My life couldn’t have been any better (after baseball,” he says. “I overachieved so much. All of that was just a moment in time.”

Others do lament their one-and-only shot.

Charlie Linstrom, a catcher in the Chicago White Sox organization, the youngest son of former Dodgers utility player and Hall of Famer Freddie Lindstrom, says on page 12: “The truth of the matter is once I got into professional baseball, I really didn’t like it that well.”

Bad example. How about Gary Martz, who had nine years in pro ball but just one MLB game. “Financially, even family-wise, it really took a toll on me. Overall, I’d probably have to say it wasn’t worth it. … I always said I wanted to be the next Mickey Mantle … He was a helluva a drinker and I think I might have been able to outdrink him.”

Some handle adversity differently.

Bannister overcame cancer and went onto manage the Texas Rangers. Larkin, nine years younger than his eventual Hall of Fame brother Barry, still enjoys the thrill of talking about the day he was called up to be in the same lineup with his sibling, on the last day of the 1998 season with the Cincinnati Reds, while Aaron and Brett Boone played the other two infield positions.

Rafael Montalovo came up in the Dodgers organization, got his one game in with Houston, then tried to come back nine years later as a Dodgers’ Replacement Player during the 1995 spring training season. (Which Mike Piazza writes about later in his autobiography: “Some of the replacement players — mainly, a pitcher named Rafael Montalovo, who pitched one inning for the Astros back in 1986 and hadn’t played organized ball in the States for three years — were saying things like they were going to have us five games in first place by the time we got back and we’d probably want to thank them … Does someone really think we’ll be rooting for these guys?”)

Fame comes in many forms. How could you not root for all them, all things considered, to at least reached the top of the mountain.

How it goes in the scorebook

Rest in peace, Eddie Gaedel.

On a scale of 1-to-11, compatible with the lineup presented here, we had hopes of cranking this up to an 11. If all you have time to do here is pour yourself a mug of Joe, skim the names, try to connect with any of their stories, and then shake your head, count it an above-average success. Continue reading “Day 10 of (at least) 30 baseball book reviews for spring/summer 2020: We’ll take our coffee bleak” →

“The Wax Pack: On the Open Road
in Search of Baseball’s Afterlife”

The author:
Brad Balukjian

The publishing info:
University of Nebraska Press
$27.95
264 pages
Released April 1

The links:
At the publisher’s website
At Amazon.com
At BarnesNoble.com
At Powells.com
At IndieBound.org
At the author’s personal site
At the created site for the book

The review in 90 feet or less

The premise, simple: After ripping open a pack of 1986 Topps baseball cards, a guy spends 48 days during the summer of 2015 traversing America. It starts in the Bay Area, heads through Southern California, sweeping across the Southern states, a pilgrimage to Cooperstown, N.Y., left turn to Las Vegas and then to a cemetery headstone in Inglewood. That’s more than 11,000 miles through 38 states.

The goal, translucent: Interview every baseball player represented in that pack. If possible. A way to return to one’s baseball card-loving roots. Discover more about the person than just a set of numbers on the back stained in chewing gum.

The execution, perfect imperfection: Which makes this far more enriching than we could have ever imagined.

When your lineup is tracking down former Dodgers Steve Yeager and Rick Sutcliffe, former Angels Gary Pettis and Al Cowens, Hall of Famer Carlton Fisk, former All-Stars Doc Gooden, Garry Templeton, Vince Coleman and Lee Mazilli, plus — and the real gems — Richie Hebner, Jaime Cocanower, Rance Mulliniks and Randy Ready, get ready for some mixed results and unexpected pleasures.

That’s the reality of how a fundamental idea evolves, against the grain, label up.

Just as how this college-prof-turned author may have thought that once he could finally get a publisher to bite on it, he could go around the country and connect with people in promoting it.

Things can just go sideways.

Balukjian, a 39-year-old director of the National History and Sustainability Program and biology teacher at Merritt College in Oakland, has done freelance pieces for several publications, but he need not worry about his writing skills here. The stories speak for themselves, and what becomes a cathartic trip for the soul also allows him to come to grips with some other things in his life.

This is definitely an adventure where we need to do little explaining and trust that the freshness of the ride will get one quickly immersed and unable to put it down until the journey finishes. But then again, we can’t help ourselves.

The guy gets to watch kung fu movies with Templeton, play Cards Against Humanity with Cocanower, go bowling and lift weights with Ready. And listen to those who definitely have lives on the other side of the diamond experience.

With Yeager in the leadoff role of this lineup, we find him back at his Jersey Mike’s shop in Granada Hills, doting on his wife, Charlene, and with his kids, trying to quit smoking (he eventually does), and admitting: “There might be some people that think I’m tougher than I look. Don’t let the facial expression get you. I can sit there and watch a game with my glasses on and look like I’m boring a hole through you, but I might not be … Ya know, if the kids do something good, I cry.”

By the way, in that ’86 set of Topps, it started off with Boomer as a Dodger, but he was done with the team by then after 14 seasons and starting a last go-around with Seattle as a 37-year-old backup to Bob Kearney and Scott Bradley. We still can’t even get our masks around that one.

Templeton, who Balukjian tracked down in San Marcos, confides in having a daughter in April of ’74, when he was 18, two years before his debut in St. Louis. He ended up gaining full custody during her high school years when she moved to San Diego and joined the rest of the Templeton family. But the more he reveals, the better this visit gets.

It’s not unlike what Balukjian uncovers when he get around to Cowens.

He rests in Inglewood Park Cemetery across the street from the Forum. Acacia Slope, Lot 432, Grave F. The headstone: “Cowens, Husband, Father, and Grandfather, 1951-2002.” With his nickname: Ace.

“I rest his baseball card on top (of the headstone) and take a picture,” writes Balukjian, after learning far more than he might have expected after locating Cowens’ closest surviving family members.

If it takes the right person at the right time to shuffle this deck, Balukjian and all his baggage brings it to us with honesty, humor, and an inquisitive nature that allows you to ride shotgun without sharing in the expenses. When it’s over, you might wonder why you never did this yourself. Maybe you will — aside from time, money and perhaps social distancing issues?

And when it’s done, Balukjian leaves us with this sort of epiphany:

Everything changes except for this one constant: As long as you’re breathing, you will always have whatever is right in front of you. Make it count.

A very cool author Q&A

From his home in Oakland, Dr. Balukjian, a self-proclaimed bug collector, took a semester off teaching at Merritt College in Oakland (you can see his RateMyProfessor.com scores when he taught biology at Laney College) so he could focus on this book promotion, but he really hasn’t been able to spring himself loose. As the director of the Natural History & Sustainability Program at Merritt, he is trying to help coordinate ways to keep students engaged with online classes through May.
Balukjian, who also once started a Ph.D. program in Environmental Science Policy and Management at Cal-Berkley in 2006, has this classic description of himself on his website:

Brad Balukjian is a doctor, but not one who can write you a prescription (unless you’re a sick insect). He hated school when he was little, but now loves it so much that after graduating from the 23rd grade, he has moved to the other side of the desk to teach natural history at Merritt College in Oakland, California. He has strong opinions about the value of education, exposure to nature, and utility infielders from the 1980s, and is pursuing a hybrid career of teaching, writing, and research to get the word out that science is accessible and (gasp!) fun. He chose this path because he never wants to stop learning and apparently has a strong aversion to money. This is his first time writing in the third-person.

Balukjian, who once had an L.A. Times fellowship that allowed him write science stories while he was given a desk in the sports department at the old downtown building, gives us more about this book, about this process and what he wanted to achieve:

Did you think going in, most of these ex-players would accept the premise of your journey/book project and cooperate, based on how you approached this as some sort of social experiment, trying to document history as well as find a human side to a cardboard photo?

The beauty of the pack of baseball cards is to get a random sample. My favorite players were the underdog guys. This was my secret way to write about them. You could never do a book about Don Carmen or Jamie Cocanower or Randy Ready. What I tried to reinforce to all of them was that I wasn’t a traditional sports writer and this would be interesting beyond the field. That helped me. What was so rewarding and pleasant is how open they were, willing to be vulnerable.

It was also very interesting how you could incorporate your own journey into this, not just do a collection of “Whatever happened to …?” pieces that otherwise didn’t have a common thread.

I always knew this book would be tough and ambitious. I didn’t set out to write a “sports book,” but I knew it would get shelved in “sports,” where there are all sorts of biographies or stories about a particular season or a particular team. It’s rare, unless you’re that athlete who is the focus, to have the narrator integrated into the story. This becomes a mix of memoir, and baseball, and travel, and the challenge is how to keep it to 15 magazine profiles stapled together. Continue reading “Day 9 of (at least) 30 baseball book reviews for spring/summer 2020: Waxing nostalgic, beyond a journey of re-connecting with cardboard gods” →

“Swing Kings: The Inside Story of
Baseball’s Home Run Revolution”

The author:
Jared Diamond

The publishing info:
William Morrow/Harper Collins
$28.99
336 pages
Released March 31

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

The review in 90 feet or less

Craig Wallenbrock … where have we heard that name?

Flash back to a Tom Verducci piece for Sports Illustrated – March 21, 2018, headlined “Countdown to Liftoff: How Joey Gallo and Josh Donaldson Embody Baseball’s New Era”

Verducci wrote: “A confluence of three forces has changed offenses radically: technology, analytics and failed ballplayers turned private hitting tutors —t he veritable garage-and-basement indy start-ups of this disruption. Among them: a 71-year-old college dropout cum surfer, a former high school coach, a failed independent league player, a self-taught Internet baseball junkie and a .204 hitter who was released from Class A ball after just two seasons and four home runs. Not a major league at bat among them.”

That would be Wallenbrock, whom Verducci would later refer to in the story as the “Oracle of Santa Clarita.”

You can hang more than 10 Southern California angles on him. Once the hitting coach for Art Masmanian at Mt. San Antonio College. A guy who Dodgers special assistant and former MLB standout Raul Ibanez persuaded the team to hire as a consultant in 2016, and immediately sent Chris Taylor to work with. Taylor then connects with Robert Van Scoyoc, who would become the team’s hitting coach in the dugout. (The same Van Scoyoc who went 1-for-10 as a senior at Hart High in Newhall in 2005.)

That’s how the pages of this go up and down like the Dodger Stadium escalator between the field level and press box.

Through Wallenbroch came Doug Latta, a former Fairfax High guy from UCLA and Cal Lutheran who had a batting cage in Calabasas. That’s where Justin Turner came upon Latta, thanks to former Mets teammate Marlon Byrd, who stumbled onto him first.

Before swinging from the heels to take in all that’s in this compilation by the Wall Street Journal scribe Diamond, you need to get the visual on pages viii, which is pre-prologue and introduction and subsequent 16 chapters. The chart of the “Swing Kings Family Trees” looks like the Swiss Family Robinson of baseball, with who begat whom, what  influenced what, and how it all whiffs together into what we have created in today’s game — a repurposed attack at the plate that, simply put, involves more of a upper cut than chopping down at a pitched ball.

The results can’t be denied. Continue reading “Day 8 of (at least) 30 baseball book reviews for spring/summer 2020: How to get into the swing of things? Drop and drive with this Diamond gem” →

“The Baseball Book of Why:
The Answers to Questions You’ve Always Wondered About from America’s National Pastime”

The author:
John C. McCollister

The publishing info:
Lyons Press/Globe Pequot/Rowman & Littlefield
200 pages
$16.95
Released March 20

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

Why isn’t the Major League Baseball season starting today? Why am I watching the MLB Network just to see a bunch of guys talking on video screens from their homes? Why is SportsNet LA showing a replay of the Dodgers-Giants Opening Day game from 2013 — Clayton Kershow throws and shutout and hits a homer?

Why do I have an Anne Lennox song haunting my brain right now?

Question authority, we were told. Answer the call, we’re encouraged to do.

Today, we have a lot of quarantined questions that lead to awkward answers.

This paperback from McCollister — a former Lutheran pastor, federal arbitrator and fan of the game who has done many history books about the Pittsburgh Pirates and Detroit Tigers — isn’t going to blow your mind when it comes to taking up some 100 questions about why things happen in baseball as he lends his knowledge on explaining them.

It’s somewhat bias in what questions he chooses to answer — many have Pirates-centric references that seem a bit regional for a national-based publication. (Although, we admit we never knew how the Pittsburgh Pirates got their name, and now we do).

In a world of Google-the-question/quickly-find-the-result, a book like this may seem a bit naive, even outdated. It’s likely more geared for younger kids, read to them by their parent or older sibling, as a way to transfer information from one generation to another.

Still:

== Why are the Los Angeles Dodgers identified by such a strange name? That isn’t really answered here, other than “the name ‘Dodgers’ had to remain with the franchise” when Walter O’Malley moved them from Brooklyn to L.A. after the 1957 season. Did he really have to? It then explains the whole trolley dodging exercise and how sportswriters used it as a way to ID the team in the 1930s (after, of course, they were known as Bridegrooms, Grooms, Superbas and Robins before Dodgers evolved into the vernacular)

== Why did the Chicago Cubs hold spring training on Catalina Island for almost 30 years? Owner William Wrigley Jr., was instrumental in developing the land.

== Why is the National Baseball Hall of Fame’s annual award to a broadcaster called the Ford C. Frick Award? Because the former commissioner is said to have “helped foster the relationship between radio and the game of baseball.” (Still, we’d lobby to see this changed to the Vin Scully Award)

== Why hasn’t Marvin Miller, the late head of the Major League Baseball Players Association, been inducted into the Hall of Fame? That actually happened last December by vote of the Modern Baseball Era Committee, to be part of the Class of 2020. But McCollister likely didn’t know that happened.

So why have this book with its cool-to-look-at retro cover among our list of all those that might seem more procreative or compelling?

Because upon further research — the book’s back cover –McCollister never got to see this one come out.

He passed away on Dec. 19, 2019 at his home in Las Vegas.

How it goes in the scorebook

A moment of silence.

In 1983, McCollister published the book, “The Christian Book of Why,” trying to explain those burning esoteric religious questions such as “Why do Christians bake hot buns for Easter?” And “Why do Christians throw rice at weddings?”

McCollister also wrote a prayer that he called “The Baseball Invocation,” which is at the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.

It reads:

Almighty God,
you who are called the great umpire,
in this game of life we are unsure as to what uniform we should wear.
While we may be Angels in spirit, in reality we are Giants in pride,
Dodgers of responsibility, and Tigers in ambition.
When it comes to faith, we find ourselves in the minor leagues.
When it comes to good works, we strike out.
When it comes to knowledge of your word,
we are not even sure of the ground rules.
Therefore, we are thankful for your mercy when we are in foul territory,
for your forgiveness when we commit one error after another,
for your uplifting spirit when we are in the pitfalls of a slump.
Oh God, let our game plan be your will
and our response a sell-out crowd with standing room only.
And, when our number is retired here on earth,
may we head for your home base and rejoice to hear you call out “safe.”
In the name of Him who gives the final victory to all who believe,
Christ Our Lord, Amen.

If baseball is like religion, we can find even more potential quirks to work through. So, why are stadiums referred to as cathedrals? Why does baseball have so many “threes” in its vernacular — strikes, outs, bases — while the Bible has many references to things done in “threes,” including the Holy Trinity?

Maybe there are other books done on this “why?” theme in the past. From 1989, there’s “The Answer Is Baseball A Book of Questions That Illuminate the Great Game,” by Luke Salisbury. In 2003, there was “Why Is the Foul Pole Fair: Answers to 101 of the Most Perplexing Baseball Questions,” by Vince Staten.

But today, we’ll carry around this one. To honor McCollister, who didn’t live long enough to see where are struggling. Rest in peace with your number on earth retired.

“The Cactus League: A novel”

The author:
Emily Nemens

The publishing info:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux/Macmillian publishing
$27
288 pages
Released Feb. 4.

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

Today would have been the final day of spring training. Tomorrow, the regular season was to start.

We grapple with that, as well as with the framework of baseball as an entry point non-fiction has historical successes mixed in with other questionable outcomes.

We dig the novel approach. But it depends on our disposition. And the author. And on what we’re trying to achieve. For example, Stephen King’s 2010 “Blockade Billy,” about the “greatest Major League player to be erased by the game,” got just more than 50 percent five-star reviews on the Amazon.com process, with an overall mark of four of five. We probably set the bar too high on expectations. We kind of sampled another last summer, with “The Proposal” by Jasmine Guillory, which uses a hook of how one those video-board moments at Dodger Stadium devolves into something that didn’t much hold our interest.

Finding a less-than-prickly way into “The Cactus League” started with catching wind of its inclusion in The Wall Street Journal’s “10 New Books You Should Be Picking Up First In 2020.” Then came a review in the L.A. Times by Kate Tuttle: “For a book about the notoriously languorous sport of baseball, this is a quick and often thrilling read. For a debut novel, it’s remarkably self-assured.”

Cool. Grap a Cactus Cooler and we’re in.

Nemens, a 36-year-old first-time author and editor at the Paris Review, sets up nine somewhat independent stories – think of nine innings – that eventually interconnect around the Scottsdale spring training existence of the Los Angeles Lions.

It’s 2011, and the recession is still a thing. If you need a star player to pin any of this on, it’s outfielder Jason Goodyear, a recent American League MVP runner-up and Gold Glover. (It shouldn’t have one connecting dots to Mike Trout, if only because in this time frame, it would make Trout a 19-year-old, and Goodyear is divorced, addicted to gambling … naw, it can’t be).

Most is about his agent, the hitting coach, the fans, the ballpark staffers, the ones who chase players, the physical therapist … all their human frailties and desperation, trying to find a purpose and what defines oneself in survival mode.

An excerpt via the publishers’ website gets you into the first inning of work.

An author Q&A

 What was the goal of your book and do you feel it was met?

Initially, I wanted to write about the subculture of spring training, but even more than that, to write about a community and an ecosystem that was at once contained but also big and wild and endlessly fascinating. But I recognized those interests were a bit sociological and leaning toward reportage, so I had it in mind to overlay that exploration with the imagined stories of people who care about baseball and the spring season, for a whole myriad of reasons. Basically, I wanted to write a book that did several things at once. I do feel I met that goal—it took a long time to get all the plates spinning, but I did it.

There’s a great piece by Vanity Fair about your new role at The Paris Review as editor since 2018. Has this new position helped shape this book in anyway, if only in how to get a book done, or what you wanted to accomplish?

I started the book in 2011, and sold it in summer of 2018, right when I was starting at TPR. So the vast majority of the work was done already, though I did a big last edit in 2019 — and that required really tightening my belt to be efficient about my time, given all the responsibilities of the new job. At that point in the process, being a strong line editor by day really helped my evenings and weekends of that last big manuscript edit.
Also, at 36, it’s young, but feels a little “late” for a debut novelist. I’ve been busy with my day job, and tremendously proud of what I’ve accomplished at The Southern Review and now The Paris Review — that work has slowed down my writing life somewhat, and that’s OK.
It took a while to get this right — I first finished a version of this book in 2015, but then took it back to figure out the structure, the casts, and the momentum. Though in another way, TPR did help shape this novel: One of the first books I read when I started out on this sportswriting endeavor was “Paper Lion” by George Plimpton. I loved it, and I think George would be tickled to know that I’m carrying on the tradition of sport literature in my own small way. (Note: Plimpton was one of three who started The Paris Review literary magazine in 1953, established in Paris but based in New York City since 1973. Plimpton edited the review until his death in 2003).
Also, the TPR softball is going strong Continue reading “Day 6 of (at least) 30 baseball book reviews for spring/summer 2020: Emily Nemens’ cactus cooler, as spring training becomes just a novel idea from the ROY author/Ken Griffey Jr. fan” →