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.
Breaking news from FiveThirtyEight.com (and reissued by ABC News): “
Behold the “super bloom.” It has more to do with fields of orange poppies than grabbing a case of new Orange Vanilla Coke and wondering how Villanova didn’t make it to the Sweet 16 to defend its NCAA men’s basketball title.
Your bracket is already busted, right? Because you had Indiana and UCLA meeting in the final. The men’s NCAA basketball tournament has yet to start, and no one really wants to hear you complaining. How that all 68 slots have been filled, as well as those taking the consolation route through the NIT and others, we’ll just go eat some ants and see how UC Irvine (vs. Kansas State at San Jose, Friday at 11 a.m., TBS) defines the Southern California hoop experience.
Attention those who have places to go around Southern California on Sunday: The L.A. Marathon Version 34 has its regular run (Channel 5, 7 a.m.) of 24,000-odd participants hustling from Dodger Stadium to the Santa Monica Pier and does so with its 
Spring officially begins Wednesday. MLB spring training kinda ends in about a week. The Dodgers aren’t panicking about whether Clayton Kershaw is available by Opening Day. Or Walker Buelher. 
The Clippers’ 11-5 record since sending leading scorer Tobias Harris away to Philadelphia on Feb. 6 (along with Boban Marjanovic and Mike Scott) in exchange for rookie hot-shot Landry Shamet (plus Wilson Chandler, Mike Muscala, a couple first-round picks and a couple more second-rounders) is something to ponder. Remember, former Clipper Elton Brand, the Sixers’ GM, also agreed to this. And his team has clinched a playoff spot already at 45-25.
The next-to-last of the Kings-Ducks meetings (Saturday at Staples Center, 7:30 p.m., Fox Sports West, Prime Ticket) with one more left in Anaheim on April 5, at least give more head-to-head opportunities to get out of the Western Conference cellar.
If you’re just tuning into college basketball’s 2018-19 because March has flipped over on the calendar, sure, there’s time to catch up. Especially if all you seem to care about it the annual ritual of filling out a bracket and all of the sudden realize Loyola of Chicago didn’t make it this time.
The basketball madness of March reveals itself first with an intercity L.A. story that has nothing to do with the major college tribes.
Tom Hoffarth's The Drill: More Farther Off the Wall 