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The book: “Cuba Loves Baseball: A Photographic Journey”
The author: Words and photos by Ira Block, with additional words from forwards from Bob Costas and Sigfredo Barros
How to find it: Skyhorse Publishing, 144 pages, $27.99, released April 3
The links: At Amazon.com, at the publishers website.

A review in 90-feet or less: Picture a baseball life today on an island off Florida that we already know so much about its rich baseball history but perhaps so little else visually.
There’s a place in Matanzas called Estadio Palmar de Junco, which started hosting games in 1874. A photo of it is on page 20, and later on page 122.

How do kids on the street make a baseball? With a rock, paper and tape. And a piece of cardboard for home plate. Photos of that are on pages 80 and 98.
The men (and women) in their 60s, 70s and 80s who still play. Their soulful portraits span pages 110-117.
It’s apparent that many look content in the context of baseball in Cuba based on these extremely sensitive and often breathtaking shots provided by Block, who spent three years on this project in 2013 after he had already been there to shoot assignments in the late 1990s for National Geographic.
“The Cuban people live and breathe baseball,” Block writes in his author’s notes. “I wanted to document the game on all levels: from grassroots to the professional leagues, from players to fans, from cities to rural areas. … My assistant and I would drive into a town or village and ask ‘Where are they playing pelota?’ From that point, it was easy and the magic unfolded in front of me.”
There are many surprises we won’t spoil here, but if you’re wondering if there’s any references to the Dodgers’ Yasiel Puig, who made a goodwill visit to Havana a couple of years ago, the answer is yes.
The colors are rich, the framing is exquisite, and the words here don’t do it justice.
Experience it yourself framed in an oversized book that artistically allows the white space to allow your mind to wander. Continue reading “Day 10 of 30 baseball book reviews for 2018: Viva Cuba … and take a picture, it’ll stay in our mind’s eye much longer” →

The book: “Ninety Percent Mental: An All-Star Player Turned Mental Skills Coach Reveals the Hidden Game of Baseball”
The author: Bob Tewksbury, with Scott Miller
How to find it: Da Capo Press, 256 pages, $27, released March 20
The links: At Amazon.com, at the publishers website.

A review in 90-feet or less: In an April 3 piece for USA Today under the headline “Why Major League Baseball is ‘90% mental’ more than ever,” Bob Nightengale has a piece based on the ramifications that MLB teams now employ a total of 40 mental skills coach ontheir staffs. Only San Diego, Atlanta and Kansas City lack one.
Smart move?
Writes Nightengale about Tewksbury, who won 110 games in his 13-year career and then became a mental skills coach for the Boston Red Sox and San Francisco Giants:
“(He) is baseball’s lone mental skills coach with a master’s degree in psychology who also played in the big leagues. He was an All-Star who finished third in 1992 Cy Young Award balloting, and was released twice. He was a 17-game winner, and a two-time 13-game loser. 
“He grew up in an era when players were afraid to be seen talking to a sports psychologist, and now has written a book detailing his work: ‘Ninety Percent Mental: An All-Star Player Turned Mental Skills Coach Reveals the Hidden Game of Baseball.’
“With clubhouse camaraderie not as vibrant as it once was – and players likelier to retreat to the relative solitude of electronics –  human connection remains important.
“ ‘There’s so much down times and this game is so result-based,’  Tewksbury says, ‘and the combination of the two causes a lot of anxiety. Just to be able to have someone talk about it with can relieve some of that pressure.
“ ‘The demands of the player have become different. They’re at the clubhouse earlier, the games are longer, and when the game is over, they just shut down.’”
Can you get your head around that? Makes sense, doesn’t it. Isolation based on current lack of human interaction will equal a messed up situation in the brain when it comes to assessing success and failure. And baseball, as we’re taught, is all about failure with small bursts of successes.
Continue reading “Day 9 of 30 baseball book reviews for 2018: How to twerk the modern day snowflake baseball brain, by Tewks” →

The book: “From Spring Training to Screen Test: Baseball Players Turned Actors”
The author: Edited by Rob Edelman and Bill Nowlin
How to find it: SABR Digital Library, 410 pages, $19.95, released Feb. 22
The links: At Amazon.com, at the publishers website.

A review in 90-feet or less: A book this coffee-table-sized large lends itself to almost over-promising on what it contains. With further disappointment, this one also under delivers in a promise to shed more light on baseball players who have either dabbled in Hollywood or really gave it their all in a post-playing career.
Almost 60 essays written by some 40 SABR members such, most notably Edleman and Nowlin, give far too much coverage to the player’s onfield performance and very little depth on whatever their acting prowess might be. No where is it more unbalanced as the 12-page chapter on Babe Ruth’s career (already chronicled much more indepth by dozens of other writers) and completely lacking a mention of Ruth’s performances on the silver screen, most notably playing himself in the 1927 silent sports comedy “Babe Comes Home” (as “Babe Duan,” and there is only a photo of the movie poster included) or as himself in the 1942 classic “Pride of the Yankees,” which includes much detail from the 2017 book about it by Richard Sandomir.
Oops. Sorry. On page 233, there is this graph:
“Ruth also starred in a feature film entitled ‘Headin’ Home,’ which was filed in Fort Lee, New Jersey. The plot, such as it was, starred Babe as a country bumpkin who makes good in big league ball – not exactly playing against type. According to Variety, ‘It couldn’t hold the interest of anyone for five seconds if it were not for the presence of Ruth.’”
Later it mentions: “Ruth retired to a life of golf, fishing, bowling and public appearances.”
So there you go. At least another book coming out this spring, “Babe Ruth and the Creation of the Celebrity Athlete,” by Thomas Barthel, might do a deeper dive into this aspect of his life. Continue reading “Day 8 of 30 baseball book reviews for 2018: Lights, camera … action needs to be taken to further research about ex-players who dabbled in Hollywood” →

The book: “Fairly at Bat: My 50 years in baseball, from the batter’s box to the broadcast booth”
The author: Ron Fairly with Steve Springer
How to find it: Back Story Publishing, LLC, 214 pages, $13.99, released Feb. 1.
The links: At Amazon.com, at the publishers website.

A review in 90-feet or less: We were fairly certain that a book by Ron Fairly about his playing and broadcasting life in baseball, in the hands of  Steve Springer’s keyboard, would not go afoul.
To no surprise, it didn’t.
All expectations were met, and probably moreso, when you consider the 50-year span Fairly had in the game – 20 as a player starting with the Dodgers and ending with the Angels,  and 30 more as a broadcaster before his official retirement in 2016 — provided plenty of material to cull from. All it needed was some time to flesh out and organize and, viola, a book.
“The worst day in a baseball uniform was better than the best day I could have had in any other career,” Fairly writes at the end to tie things up, recapping a baseball life that started with a father who played professionally (11 years in the minor leagues), growing up in Long Beach, attending USC (turning down a UCLA basketball scholarship offer from John Wooden) and winning a College World Series title, then signing with the Dodgers the year they moved to L.A. in 1958 so he would stay home.
His first homer and his last came exactly 20 years apart, late in September of the ’58 and ’78 seasons, with the Angels in Anaheim, and he takes up Gene Autry on a job offer to join Don Drysdale and Dick Enberg in the broadcast booth.
How could anyone’s career be laid out so perfectly cool?

Fairly’s stories that involve his Zelig-like career are one thing, but recounting his time with people like Ted Williams, Duke Snider, Drysdale, Sandy Koufax, Walter Alston, Gil Hodges, Preston Gomez, Bob Gibson, Gene Mauch, Charlie O. Finley, and even the priceless moments in the booth with Phil Harris during the Angels’ spring training in Palm Springs, are unexpected gold.
The revelations aren’t going to knock you out of your first-base loge seat, but they are delivered as  folksy and down home as one would expect from Fairly.
And they he’ll buckle your knees with a curve ball that you didn’t see coming, like from page 85:
Continue reading “Day 7 of 30 baseball book reviews for 2018: Fairly’s tales hardly run afoul” →

The book: “Miracle in Shreveport: A Memoir of Baseball, Fatherhood, and the Stadium that Launched a Dream”
The author: David Benham and Jason Benham
(also available as a tandem at twitter.com/BenhamBrothers)
How to find it: Thomas Nelson Books, 208 pages, $19.99, released March 27.
The links: At Amazon.com, at the publishers website.

A review in 90-feet or less: Sometimes, stories that seem too good to be true really can be.
Pray on it … things happen.
By the time you make it to page 141 of this one, and run into the biblical passage from Philippians 4:6-7 that reads, “Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds in Chris Jesus,” it will all make more sense.
David and Jason Benham, twin brothers from Garland, Tex., are sons of a preacher who had this notion that someday, if they prayed hard enough,  they would play a game together at the Fair Grounds Field in Shreveport La., a place between their home and frequent family trips to Atlanta. They have a pretty excellent adventure to tell. Continue reading “Day 6 of 30 baseball book reviews for 2018: Bending belief by the Benhams” →