“Royal Treatment: Jackie Robinson, Montreal, and the Breaking of Baseball’s Color Barrier”
The author: Sean J. McLaughlin The details: University of Nebraska Press, 296 pages, $36.95, released April 1, ’26 The links:Publishers website, Bookshop.org
A Jack Robinson Day preamble
Only a year ago, as we rounded up the book reviews for Jack Robinson MLB Appreciation Day — or however they’re selling it — the disgust over crude governmental redaction of all things DEI was front and center. It may seem like such a long time has passed. But it’s still lingering.
What would Jack Robinson had done if he was invited with the Dodgers’ championship team to be vetted in the Trump White House? What would his reaction be if he saw that a bio on his World War II military requirement that’s heralding him on the U.S. Department of Defense’s website had been taken down “by mistake” during a Trump-mandated cleansing history.
What could the Dodgers players do, as they were being “honored” for their 2024 World Series triumph, in protest to mark the occasion — all wear No. 42 jerseys? Give Trump a 42 jersey?
It was all the wishy-washy white washing that was abhorrent, and called out.
The irony of this public service announcement is positioning Jackie Robinson next to Bob Feller. In 1947, Feller, an established star pitcher for the Cleveland Indians, publicly expressed skepticism about Robinson’s ability to succeed in the major leagues, predicting he would not be able to hit elite pitching. Feller later observed Robinson with admiration for his courage and composure under extreme pressure, acknowledging his tremendous impact on the game. They were inducted together in the Baseball Hall of Fame Class of 1962.
When the Dodgers were recently in DC-adjacent territory over the Easter weekend to face the Washington Nationals, they said “a scheduling conflict” precluded them from making a Trump/Easter Egg roll re-visit to mark their 2025 title. Maybe they’ll reconnect sometime later in the season when some of the push back dies down. Hopefully not.
Embrace the disgraced general concept of enshittification as it pertains specifically to the New York Mets and, by geographic circumstances, also to the New York Yankees.
As pent-up anger and frustration ruins the way we wade through an existing world of A.I. slop, we learn that the Enshittocene — a noun coined by author Cory Doctorow and then fleshed out in his 2025 book about “Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to do About it” — expanding the definition beyond soul-crushing Big Tech stalwarts can be a healthy exercise for those who need a way to explain their grief and lack of relief.
If the Amazin’ Mets are an Amazon-Meta mashup, and the Yankees, way more than Waymo or Yahoo in their Oracle world, continue to reflect as the IBM of baseball, you Reddit right that it all happens under what locals call the Big Apple, but really it’s acting on algorithms engineered by the gigabytes of Tim Cook’s Apple Inc.
No wonder the Mets and Yankees start this new week having each lost on five consecutive days for the first time in history, according to Sportradar.
An AI query about how any of this might Venn diagram itself on the circles of despair looks like this:
Plenty of other sources that explain how Steven Cohen, who in 2020 bought the Mets for $2.4 billion from his hedge-fund stash that wasn’t penalized for insider trading, has granted the team a MLB-top $352 million payroll for the 2026. The Mets have under contract the highest-paid player in outfielder Juan Soto, averaging $61.9 million in salary. He is currently injured.
The Dodgers circumvent much of this by deferring payments that otherwise would boost their ’26 payroll to $395 million. They also are on tap to pay the highest tax rate on the Competitive Balance Tax payroll for exceeding MLB’s $244 million threshold. The Mets and Yankees are second and third on that list.
For all the lamentations that the Dodgers are ruining baseball with their ownership spending … why is it every July 1 that we’re all reminded that it is the Mets who continue to give 1999 retiree Bobby Bonilla a $1.193,240.20 paycheck and will do so through 2035 for its example of how defer payments continue to haunt a fanbase looking for excuses to be even more disheveled?
ESPN already has already crunched the numbers to deduct that this Mets-Dodgers matchup is on the hook for more than $1 billion in salary liability. Last year’s meeting between the Mets and Dodgers was the previous most expensive series at $764 million in combined payroll — $36 million in total payroll behind this year’s matchup. When you add in their tax bills, the total jumps to over $1.07 billion, surpassing last year’s record of $1.025 billion. The Dodgers and Mets have ranked first and second (in some order) in total payroll four times since 2022. 2023, when the Mets ranked first and the Dodgers fourth, is the only exception during that stretch.
Aside from cash flow, there’s the Zeitgeist/ethos comparison that can also provide more entertainment.
His riff was about how the franchise that continues to provide him with comedic fodder had to be somewhat dismantled over the last offseason because of political ideology that was contaminating the clubhouse vibe. Note: That was Brandon Nimmo batting leadoff for the Texas Rangers during last Dodgers’ homestand instead of what we’ve been used to seeing the Mets as they come into town this week.
As with most NYT stories, some of the best material is buried in the reader responses. Such as:
“Death in the Strike Zone: The Mystery of America’s First Baseball Hero”
The author: Thomas W. Gilbert The details: David R. Godine Publishing, 192 pages, $27.95; released March 24, ’26 The links:The publisher, the author website, Bookshop.org
A review in 90 feet or less
Josh Canales
In the summer of 2000, between the junior and senior seasons where he would become UCLA’s starting shortstop, Josh Canales jumped at a chance to go New York and play for the Newark (N.Y.) Raptors of the Northeast Collegiate Baseball League. His second base double-play partner would be Kelsey Osburn, a sophomore at the University of Arizona.
“Our attitudes were similar, our personalities were similar,” Canales would explain. “When we played up the middle we had an awesome chemistry and a lot of fun.”
Kelly Osburn
On July 11, as Canales was taking batting practice and Osburn was running the bases, Canales laced a ball heading foul down the third base line. The ball caught Osburn just above the ear on his right temple. Osburn, who had not been wearing a helmet, was conscious for about three minutes, crumpled to the ground and slipped into a coma. He was airlifted from the field in Newark, N.Y. to Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, where doctors performed brain surgery.
“I didn’t know if I ever wanted to pick up a bat again,” said Canales, who grew up in Carson and, at 14, briefly joined an inner-city gang out of rebellious adolescence. He had got himself on a productive path — as a senior at Carson High, Canales hit .380 with 25 stolen bases and 43 runs, and was drafted in the 19th round by Oakland.
The 5-foot-9, 145 pound infielder decided to go to the University of Florida for two seasons, transferred to UCLA, and after hitting .248 in 52 games as a junior, and improved to .376 with 15 stolen bases in 16 chances during in 53 games as a senior leading into the 2001 draft — a 16th-round pick by his hometown Dodgers. After logging a few seasons of Single-A ball (aside from one Triple-A at bat with Las Vegas in 2002), his baseball life was done.
But the death of Osburn lingered.
“It was a defining moment in my life,” said Canales, who played with the initials “K.O.” on his glove during the rest of his college and minor-league career. “There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t remember Kelsey. I feel like when Kelsey died, a piece of his heart went into me. He was 5-feet-5 and had to fight and scrap for everything he ever got. He had the heart of a lion. …
“This built character very quickly,” Canales said about what he went through. “I grew in my faith and learned to put life in perspective.”
It helped that Canales could turn his parents – Isaac, the pastor of 1,300-member Mission Ebenezer Family Church in Carson, and his mother, Ritha, a nurse. Canales has used his experience with this tragedy as he and his wife are pastors at the same Carson church.
“Kelsey Osburn died doing something he loved,” Canales says to help him keep things in perspective.
To start chapter 2 in his new book, Thomas Gilbert writes: “Nobody is supposed to die from playing baseball. Especially not amateur baseball — and certainly not a meaningless game with nothing at stake at the end of a season that nobody was playing much attention to. Yet that is how James Creighton, as dominant a pitcher as there has ever been, lost his life in the autumn of 1862.”
At a time when some 50,000 young men were losing their lives in the Civil War, this one 21-year-old’s death made even less sense.
As Gilbert continued to post blog entries on things he came across in his book research, an essay in March of 2021 titled “The Man Who Invented Modern Pitching — Which Killed Him” seems to have laid the groundwork for expansion of that topic for this book.
It starts: “The story of James Creighton is the oldest and saddest one in the baseball book.”
“Before They Wore Dodger Blue: Tommy Lasorda And the Greatest Draft Class in Baseball History”
The author: Eric Vickrey The details: August Publications, 348 pages, $24.95; released Dec. 7, ’25 The links:Author site, publisher site, Bookshop.org
A review in 90 feet or less:
The time capsule that Sports Illustrated has become, in the musky scent of its recent emasculation, can still be a bit jarring.
When the SI issue of May 19, 1969 arrived at our house, proclaiming a group of “hot young” Dodgers were about come to the rescue of a franchise still trying to find its footing from a 95-win team getting swept in the ’66 World Series, then watching Sandy Koufax retire, and now braced for Don Drysdale heading in that direction, there was some reason for optimism for all the kids in my neighborhood. The magazine’s 40-cent cover price our parents paid was also worth an investment in seeing the future as predicted by our wise elders.
Manager Walter Alston, as we were shown, had Bill Sudakis, Ted Sizemore and Billy Grabarkewitz all ready for the reboot. Tell Danny Goodman to start cranking out World Series trinkets.
Given that those ’69 Dodgers would finish 85-77, fourth-best and just eight-games out in the newly created National League West, it was a bit of an illusion, but much easier to compartmentalize after taking in a 76-86 showing in ’68 (seventh in the elongated NL, 21 games back) and a 73-89 free-fall from ’67 (eighth place, 28 1/2 games back).
Yet, these three Musketeers fresh out of the Mickey Mouse Club would bring it back to glory.
With mixed results.
Sudakis, a catcher and third baseman who signed as a free agent in 1964 a year before the MLB Draft began, hit .234 that ’69 season in 132 games, age 23. Sudsy, as was his nickname, seemed to be all but washed up by ’72 when the Dodgers waived him. The Angels kicked the tires on him before the ’75 season, then released him mid-way through after he hit .121 in 30 games.
Sizemore, a 15th round draft pick in 1966, somehow won the ’69 NL Rookie of the Year Award following Johnny Bench (in ’68) and Tom Seaver (in ’67) in an otherwise so-so year for up-and-coming talent. Starting at second base, Sizemore would have a career-best 4.2 WAR, hitting .271 in 159 games, age 24. After upping that to .306 in ’70, the Dodgers capitalized on his value, sending him to St. Louis with backup catcher Bob Stinson for Dick Allen (which didn’t end up so well). Sizemore came back to the Dodgers in ’76 via a trade for Willie Crawford, but by ’79, the Dodgers were done with him again, sending him this time to Philadelphia.
Grabarkewitz, taken in the 12th round of the ’66 Draft, was bestowed jersey No. 1 when he came up for 34 games that ’69 season, going 6 for 65 (.092). But the next year, he was on the NL All-Star team, hitting .289 in 156 games with a team-leading 17 homers, 92 runs scored, 84 RBIs and 19 stolen bases.
Then, poof.
In the 2024 book “Baseball’s Shooting Stars: Improbable Ascents and Burnouts in the National Pastime,” author David J. Gordon devotes a special chapter to Grabarkewitz, the man “who led the league in consonants” but was “stymied by badly timed injuries.” His 6.5 WAR in his career year in 1970 — a stat that didn’t even exist at the time but often used in modern times to measure former players in a new light — wasn’t that remarkable, but in the aftermath, Gordon write that Grabarkewitz “may have been the most extreme one-year wonder of any non-pitcher in MLB history … I can find no other historical example of a position player with a career lasting at least five years who posted a > or = 6.5 WAR in one season but played at or below replacement level for the remainder of his career.” Why he was out of the game by age 29, after a brief time with the Angels, can be baffling to some, but Gordon has a thought on that:
“My reflexive take on one-year wonders like Grabarkewitz is their career years were flukes and the law of averages caught up with them. But Grabarkewitz is something else. Nothing about his sterling 1970 season seems lucky or flukish. A combination of lesser injuries and an overloaded Dodgers farm system — not regression to the mean — conspired to prevent him from becoming the player everyone thought he would be for more than one season. I view Grabarkewitz mainly as a very unlucky player who might very well have achieved long-term success on a different team and under more favorable circumstances.”
Gordon allusion to “an overloaded Dodgers farm system” goes to why Vickrey’s book gives a greater context to how and why the team’s 1968 MLB draft remains, by consensus still today, the greatest haul of talent in the game’s history.
Dialing back to that ‘69 season, there was a brief glimpse of a 20-year-old Steve Garvey (1-for-3), 19-year-old Bobby Valentine (five pinch-running appearances) and 19-year-old Bill Buckner (0-for-1).
Valentine, Buckner and Garvey were prized pieces of a collection that included Ron Cey, Davey Lopes, Tom Paciorek, Doyle Alexander, Joe Ferguson and Geoff Zahn. Adding in Bill Russell, Charlie Hough and Tommy Hutton, the Dodgers’ foundation had been laid and would last more than a decade — let’s call it the 1981 World Series, after they team decided to let their prized infield break into pieces.
The link to all of them is Tommy Lasorda. As Vickrey details, it was Lasorda, that scout, who was a key figure in the Dodgers’ acquisition of talent before the instution of the 1965 MLB Draft — the first pick of that draft was Rick Monday, an outfielder from Santa Monica High who had gone to Arizona State and was all but signed as Dodgers home-town talent before the Kansas City A’s were allowed to take him. Just prior to that, Lasorda was the important figure in the Dodgers signing local talent Willie Crawford from Freemont High in L.A., one of the last of the “bonus baby” players who had to spend time on the major-league roster likely before they were ready.
Stomper, the official elephant mascot of the Sacramento/Las Vegas (former Oakland, Kansas City, Philadelphia) Athletics.
It’s made of actual elephant.
Oh, now you’re all ears.
In the product details, it notes: “All skins have CITES tags, meaning they were harvested in an approved program and comply with the Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species (CITES).”
Yes, your glove was “harvested” with oversight from … check the citing.
It also explains: “Elephant leather is one of the most durable materials used in our baseball gloves. Its dense fibers resist stretching and tearing, which allows the glove to maintain its structure season after season. Over time it breaks in beautifully, developing a unique patina while staying strong—making it a glove that can last for many years of play. Instead of Elephant leather wearing out, the glove gradually softens while maintaining its structural strength, giving it a broken-in feel without losing its shape.”
A “patina” is, by definition, a gloss or sheen as a result of aging.
So, we’re calling this “elephant leather”? Something often used in that part of the country for boots and belts, pool cues and holsters.
Asking price on the glove: $1,500. Personal engraving, add $80. Glove conditioner, add $20. If you want them to shape and break it in, add another $50. At least it’s made in the U.S. No tariffs, no problems.
It is probably not suitable for leaving in the trunk of your car. Please don’t tell the kids who have a relationship with the Athletics’ current mascot. And where are all the cows hiding in Texas these days?
It feels like decades since we last purchased a new baseball glove, so excuse our queasiness finding out that not only things other than a steer’s pelt are being used for corralling a stitched-up ball, but there are also a confusing number of companies cranking them out.
A well-oiled machine like Rawlings would never venture out past the pasture that has made for its fortunes and worship faux idols to appease the finicky masses, right?
Dick around at Dick’s Sporting Goods these days — are there any other chain sporting good stores left to shake us down? – and find a composition of mitts from companies from Akedema and All Star to Zett, with Emery, Gloveworks, Jax, Marucci, Miken, Mizuno, Nike, Shoeless Joe, Stinger, SSK, Under Armor and Vinci in between. All looking for that extra edge when up against the grandads of a Rawlings, or its otherwise chief rival Wilson and MacGregor. BaseballGloves.com lists more than 40 glove companies, including L.A.-based Buckler, Soto in Signal Hill and 44 Pro in Poway.
And don’t overlook the new-ish New Balance A2KSO17 model that Shohei Ohtani has during mound visits these days (with an assist from Wilson). According to those who offer such a glove on eBay.com, the production run was limited to 50 and they run for $15,000. Go ahead and add it to your watchlist.
In regards to the Rawlings models, JustBallGloves accentuates how the soft, deer-tanned cowhide is still used for the palm lining to go with its pro-grade lacing. It also says: “When you see the snorting bull in the palm of a baseball glove, you know right away that you’re looking at a Rawlings Heart of the Hide.“
The site has a Rawlings Heart of the Hide Yadier Molina catcher’s mitt for $350. Its also has a Croc Skin model (it’s really steer hide) that can go for $330. The Pro Preferred REV1X series with lighter, tighter grain kip leather, can go beyond $400. Something more for a Little Leaguer? Expect to pay up to $100.
They all, of course, now come in an array of rainbow of colors. Far beyond tan, brown, dark brown, and really dark brown.
A $329 Rawlings 2026 World Baseball Classic Heart of the Hide glove is already out of stock on its website.
When George Rawlings secured a patent for a padded glove/oversized winter mitten in 1885 that he claimed was “intended especially for the use of base-ball players and cricketers … for the prevention of the bruising of the hands when catching the ball,” it was a way to acknowledge that the game he saw being played in his hometown of St. Louis area was barreling up beyond its bare-hand stage of existence. The forward-thinking drawings he created for the patent actually came two years before the sporting goods company he created with his brother Alfred and named after themselves.
By 1957, Rawlings had the first Gold Glove Awards for the top defensive players in Major League Baseball. In 2011, it introduced the Platinum Glove Award, first through fan voting and later through sabermetric analysis.
A 1965 magazine advertisement for Rawlings
In 2018, when the Rawlings company was bought for $395 million by MLB Properties along with the Marina del Rey-based Seidler Equity Partners — the group of brothers who are nephews of former Dodgers owner Peter O’Malley and control ownership of the San Diego Padres — it was investment in a brand that carried value amidst competition. Two years later, Rawlings/Seidler bought up the popular Van Nuys- based Easton brand to increase Rawlings’ offerings in bats and apparel.
So much so that last year, a 14,000-square-feet, two-story Rawlings Experience flagship store was opened in St. Louis just to prove its point.
The store, no doubt, will carry this coffee-table sized book, which has to be larger than a typical MLB second-baseman’s glove. It’s 3-pound arrival isn’t so much a self-congratulatory glove bump boasting about its legacy and survival amidst a jungle of competitors.
Recruiting the services of Rizzoli Publishing in New York to produce something akin to a Taschen art book, the contents also allow it to be more a clever dive into the company archives to extract marketing materials it used to both educate and pitch the quality of its product to kids, mostly through the endorsement of MLB player name recognition.
Tom Hoffarth's The Drill: More Farther Off the Wall 