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“Baseball before We Knew It:
A Search for the Roots of the Game”

The author: David Block
The details: University of Nebraska Press, 416 pages, $29.95, released April 20, 2025; best available at the publishers website and Bookshop.org

A review in 90 feet or less

We’ve been around the block with David Block on this subject before.

In June of 2019, before we knew it, Block did “Pastime Lost: The Humble, Original and Now Completely Forgotten Game of English Baseball.” We pounded out a review that started out about trying to know more about another book he did in 2005 as a first-time author called … well … see above.

By his own accounts, Block was a retired systems analyst and amateur baseball historian. But he had produced a book that Tom Shieber, the senior curator at the Baseball Hall of Fame, called “to me probably the single most important baseball research of the last 50 years, if not more.” It crushed the whole Doubleday creationist story. It supported the claim that a 1791 ordinance in Pittsfield, Mass., banned the playing of “base-ball” near its town’s new meetinghouse. It brought to light the 1744 English kids book, “A Little Pretty Pocket-Book,” that revealed another earlier usage of the word “base-ball.”

So important was Block’s initial publication, it garnished its own Wikipedia page (which still has not noted the nuance of the second “b” lacking capitalization).

Back to the future, Block’s updated, revised and dusted-off  version of “Baseball before We Knew It” 20 years later because just as stimulating as another visit to the La Brea Tar Pits and its sticky-finger museum store.

Continue reading “Day 13 of 2025 baseball book reviews: When old news is new news, who knows if that’s the historiography speaking” →

“Skipper: Why Baseball Managers
Matter and Always Will”

Updated: 6.25.25

The author: Scott Miller
The details: Grand Central Publishing/Hatchette Book Group, $30, 400 pages, released May 13, 2025; best available at the publishers website and Bookshop.org.

“The Last Manager:
How Earl Weaver Tricked, Tormented
& Reinvented Baseball”

The author: John W. Miller
The details: Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster; $30, 368 pages, released March 4, 2025; best available at the publishers website and Bookshop.org.

A review in 90 feet or less

Joe Maddon had a burr in his saddle. The former Angels’ skipper felt tossed overboard with a flimsy life preserver that, for the moment, provided him with nothing to preserve much of his patience or self-worth.

As once the manager of the successful Tampa Bay Rays when the organization was at the forefront of the analytics revolution in the 2000s, Maddon rode the Chicago Cubs to 103 wins and the 2016 World Series title, despite arm-wrestling the front office over lineup decision and then exposing himself at various times in the championship series against Cleveland.

Maddon’s return to the Los Angeles Angels starting in 2000 (he had interim managerial stints in 1996 and ’99) was once again too short to properly size up. It should have been a victory lap after all the years he spent as a team’s bench coach and fact-checker of managerial decisions on the fly. Instead it was more internal combustion of old school-new school thinking — at least that’s one way of thinking about it.

Jason Jenks from The Athletic reached out to Maddon recently for a Q&A that started this way:

Continue reading “Day 12 of 2025 baseball book reviews: Effective skippering” →

“The Baseball Stadium Guide”

The author: Ian McArthur
The illustrator: Daniel Brawn
The details: Aspen Books/Pilar Box Red Publishing,112 pages, $28.99, re-released March 11, 2025; best available at the publishers website.

“The Modern Baseball:
History of MLB Through the
Art of the Logoball”

The author: Tyler Burton
The details: Self published, 220 pages, $49.99 softbound, $99.99 hardbound, released June 2024; best available at the author’s website.

“Movies With Balls:
The Greatest Sports Films
of All Time, Analyzed and Illustrated”

The illustrators/authors: Rick Bryson and Kyle Bandujo
The details: Penguin/Random House, 256 pages, $24.99, released September of 2024;  best available at the publishers’ website, Bookshop.org and the book’s official site.

“Movies and the Church
of Baseball: Religion in the
Cinema of the National Pastime”

The author: Jonathan Plummer
The details: McFarland, 198 pages, $55, released Feb. 6, 2025;  best available at the publishers website and Bookshop.org

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A review in 90 feet or less

One major transactional aspect of the Art of the Game’s exhibits you hopefully encounter at Dodger Stadium or Angel Stadium (as well as one at formerly named Staples Center) centers on the art of a deal.

Sales tax included. It can be pricey quickly. Check yourself.

Once you sign your name on the credit card statement, the exchange rate is you get something with someone else’s signature on it, perhaps far-more-famous (but not necessarily in Southern California). It adds to the composition of a nifty limited-edition portrait or other piece that brings lifetime admiration.

Justify it as an investment. A Jackson Pollock-meets-Reggie Jackson-meets-A.J. Pollock moment. But don’t stuff it away in a safe deposit vault. Show it off.

This monetized artwork goes in a place where as many as possible can see, admire it, maybe even envy it. Here’s where you, as a patron of the arts, have chance to express your allegiance to the game, bold and beautifully, through a framed painting, photograph, mixed-media… all with the most intoxicating element that you’ve again become a representation of nostalgia’s powerful lure.

You have purchased a memory.

Continue reading “Day 11 of 2025 baseball book reviews: You outta be in pictures” →

“Here Comes The Pizzer:
The Found Poetry of Baseball Announcers”

The editor: Eric Poulin
The contributors: Jim Armenti, Gabriel Bogart, Kurt Blumenau, Frank Cressotti, Dan D’Addona, T.S. Flynn, Harrison Golden, Pallas Gutierrez, Joanne Hulbert, Molly McClure, Jordan Nielsen, Ray L. Nielsen, Byron Petraroja, Eric Poulin, Mark Schwaber, Hart Seely, Mark S. Sternman, Cecilia Tan, James R. Walker, Tim Wiles, Robert Zussman
The cover art: “Roger” by Frank Cressotti
The details: Society of American Baseball Research, $14.95, 116 pages, released March 18, 2025; best available at the SABR publishers’ website or Bookshop.org. Also free digitally with a SABR membership.

“The Ancient Wisdom of Baseball:
Lessons for Life from
Homer’s Odyssey to the World Series”

The author: Christian Sheppard
The details: Greenleaf Book Group, $27.95, 184 pages, released March 25, 2025; best available at the publishers’ website, the author’s website and Bookshop.org

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A review in 90 feet or less

About three dozen Vin Scully “vintage” broadcasts, recorded between 1957 and 1980, have found a spot on the Youtube.com home of Classic Baseball on the Radio. The Tuesday afternoon July 29, 1969 game where the Dodgers are facing the Chicago Cubs at Wrigley Field is a fine example of what’s been captured for our modern listening pleasure.

About the 20 minutes into that particular broadcast, after the Cubs’ Fergie Jenkins walked the Dodgers’ Bill Sudakis in the top of the second inning of a scoreless game. Scully, ever mindful that he’s living up the title as game’s polyunsaturated poet laureate, reminds listeners that “this Dodgers-Cubs broadcast is coming from Chicago.”

He then recites 10 seconds of script perfectly timed to create a window where stations on the Dodgers radio network can do their top-of-the-hour ID.

This is what might otherwise be an innocuous transcript of that moment in time: You know, when your telephone rings it’s a good idea to try to answer it as promptly as possible. It’s thoughtful, courteous and a good way to make sure your caller doesn’t hang up.

So now if we go ee cummings on you, re-imagine that as “found poetry.”

Take existing words — printed, spoken, mangled — and refashion them, reorder them, and present them as poems. The literary equivalent of a collage.

So that so-so Scully clip/transcript above becomes sonnetized for your pleasure:

You know,
when your telephone rings
it’s a good idea to try to answer it
as promptly as possible …
It’s thoughtful,
courteous
AND
a good way to make sure your caller
doesn’t hang up

That message, once lost, is now found. Maybe this is why some refer to baseball innings as “stanzas.”

Continue reading “Day 9 of 2025 baseball book reviews: Poetic justice, sonnetized and unsanitized” →