Category: Uncategorized

The book: “Slide! The Baseball Tragicomedy That Defined Me, My Family, and the City of Philadelphia – And How It All Could Have Been Avoided Had Someone Just Listened to My Lesbian Great Aunt (1964 Phillies)”
The author: Carl Wolfson
How to find it: Mascot Books, 224 pages, $19.95, released December 5, 2017
The links: At Amazon.com, at the publishers website.

A review in 90-feet or less: Another pluck from the late ’17 releases, long after our list last year was assembled and released.
We won’t make a habit of this, but because of the subject matter, and the timing, this comes at an opportune moment.
Consider just the first few games that Gabe Kapler, rookie manager for the 2018 Philadelphia Phillies, the former Taft High of Woodland Hills kid, has already gone through.
Kapler is “Unlike Any Manager Phillies Fans Have Known (and Booed),” according to a New York Times headline over the weekend. And that’s before all the bizarre moves he has made with his bullpen that caused MLB to take notice.
That also led to a Deadspin.com post: “Gabe Kapler’s Cosmic Brain is Putting The Phillies In Some Tough Spots.”
“The label Philly fans get is that they’re tough,” Kapler says in the NYT story.  “Well, they just want you to play well, play with passion, sacrifice your body and never take a play off. Is that tough, or is it … normal? I see it as normal.”
Now, meet the Wolfsohn family (spelling later changed by the author to “Wolfson”). Party of five from Arlington, Va., who had to move back to Philly via Jersey, and became die-hard Phillies fans just in time for the darkest period of the franchise history.
A period still book-worthy because of the honest laughs it continues, in this instance, to generate.
If you’re already familiar with the premise of “The Goldbergs” or “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” then it’s not much of a stretch to imagine how someone like Wolfson could still create his own sit-com treatment based on his journey of faith during the Phillies Great Collapse of ’64 – a point in time where Wolfson still has (and shows on the back cover) a pennant from that time proclaiming the Phillies as the 1964 National League Champions.
Not quite. Continue reading “Day 4 of 30 baseball book reviews for 2018: If you can reference a lesbian great aunt in a baseball book title about one of the great collapses in MLB history, we’re in” →

The book: “Brothers in Arms: Koufax, Kershaw and the Dodgers Extraordinary Pitching Tradition”
The author: Jon Weisman
How to find it: Triumph Books, 384 pages, $19.95, due out May 1, but copies are currently being shipped by Amazon.com.
The links: At Amazon.com, at the publishers website.

A review in 90-feet or less: In this case, it should be limited to 60-feet, 6 inches.
Connecting dots in a sports franchise’s history can turn up a lot of interesting coincidences, or reinforce a pattern of success.
The given narrative we hear so much – The Dodgers are all about a durable, dependable and distinguished pitching resume – is reinforced by many metrics.
* A record 12 Cy Young Awards won since the thing was invented some 60 years ago (the next closest franchise is seven by Atlanta, Philadelphia and Boston).
* The first relief pitcher to be so dominant that he had to be given the first Cy Young, setting records still unmatched. The second reliever to win it in a Dodger uniform was also record-setting.
* The players listed 1 and 2 in MLB record books for consecutive scoreless innings pitched is the same in the Dodgers’ record book.
* The most important arm surgery in the history of sports happened to a Dodgers pitcher. And it worked to where it’s common (too common) in the game.
* The first major person to experience the freedom of free agency? An All-Star pitcher who left L.A. for Atlanta.
As the Dodgers send Clayton Kershaw to the mound for the second time this season, his career ERA already down to 2.36 in 1,941 IP, we are able to appreciate the beauty of this project by Weisman — a former L.A. Daily News sportswriter, author of two versions of “100 Things Dodgers Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die,” and a former Dodgers’ front man for their digital and print content, including the work on the “Dodgers Insider” blog.
Many of these Dodgers are still around to put their time, and their accomplishments, into some context. Weisman is the best equipped journalist to do it.
Continue reading “Day 3 of 30 baseball book reviews for 2018: How the Dodgers’ pitching history has been a win-win-win-win-win arms race linked by greatness” →

The book: “The Year of the Pitcher: Bob Gibson, Denny McLain and the End of Baseball’s Golden Age”
The author: Sridhar Pappu
How to find it: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $28, 400 pages, released Oct. 3, 2017
The links: At Amazon.com, at the publishers website.

A review in 90-feet or less: This, thankfully, got us through the long winter.
We admit, we don’t usually include books that came out in the fall of the previous year, but the importance of this project by this tenacious columnist was not just ahead of its time, but it jumped the others in getting out in front of a narrative about a) the 50^th anniversary of that 1968 pitching season for the ages, and b) focusing on a World Series highlighted by Bob Gibson and Denny McLain that somehow got many of us hooked on the game forever from our black-and-white TV sets.
From an L.A. perspective, Don Drysdale’s 1968 season could have been a story unto itself. He was carrying the team almost by himself two years removed after Sandy Koufax’s retirement and the maturation of Don Sutton, etc. Drysdale would only last one more season after this year of an 2.15 ERA, with eight shutouts and 12 complete games. And none of those stats led the NL in ’68.
The 58 2/3 inning scoreless streak, which came amidst the assassination of Bobby Kennedy in L.A., was a transformational moment. But in this book, it’s almost a sidenote, remarkably.
Drysdale finished that season 14-12. And the Dodgers would grind out a 76-86 record, 21 games behind the Cardinals in 10-team NL, posting an MLB low 470 runs (compared to the 671 by Detroit).
In this book, Drysdale’s achievements are mostly confined to Chapter 10, 12 total pages — and while that’s kind of disappointing, it’s somewhat understandable in the scope of this David Halberstam-type remembrance of a year unlike any other in the game’s history.
Gibson and McLain were the NL and AL MVP and Cy Young winners. A 1.12 ERA for one, a 31-victory season for the other. What makes no sense is how Gibson even lost nine games against 22 wins. Continue reading “Day 2 of 30 baseball book reviews for 2018: On Gibson, McLain … and, oh yeah, Drysdale, Marichal, Jenkins … with 50 years of perspective of a very volatile season” →

The book: “Why Baseball Matters”
The author: Susan Jacoby
How to find it: Yale University Press, 224 pages, $25, released March 20
The links: To Amazon.com and Yale University Press.

Our review in 90-feet or less: America needs baseball’s virtues more than ever.
That was the headline on an L.A. Times op-ed piece last week published on Thursday’s Opening Day by John R. Bawden, an associate professor of history at the University of Montevallo in Alabama, just south of Birmingham.
“MLB franchises are businesses designed to make money, but even the league’s distasteful attempts at spectacle — like halftime shows at the MLB Homerun Derby — cannot overwhelm the substance of our national pastime,” he wrote. “At a moment when post-truth politics poisons our discourse, opening day can’t get here soon enough.”
Rebuttal? The next day, read what Paul Moser III from Palm Desert wrote:
“John R. Bawden is rhapsodizing about an idealized pipe dream of baseball. The game is no longer America’s pastime; it is the wealthy elite’s pastime. Prices for tickets, parking and concessions have risen far beyond the working-class father’s ability to take his wife and two kids to a game.
“The Dodgers have pulled their games from broadcast TV and sold the rights to cable television for billions of dollars. No longer do we see Dodgers vs. Giants games on our local TV channels. No longer do most of us see Dodgers vs. Giants games at all. They are reserved for those who can pay the steep price of admission.
“Walter O’Malley is spinning in his grave. I propose that we let this former national pastime die of its own greed and replace it with something more egalitarian. Soccer, anyone?”
Both statements have merit. We can even discuss them philosophically, societal and just plain small talk between innings of a game we’re attending.
(Even if it’s hard to trust anyone who writes “homerun” as one word for knowing much about baseball.)
Continue reading “Day 1 of 30 baseball book reviews for 2018: So ‘if’ baseball matters … wait, as a matter of fact, baseball ‘does’ matter … and thanks for asking” →

The latest sports media post picked up by the Southern California News Group takes an extended Q-and-A with ESPN’s new “Sunday Night Baseball” play-by-play man Matt Vasgersian and attempts to explain better his role with the franchise that now includes Alex Rodriguez and Jessica Mendoza.
In addition to what’s in the version online, we have a few interesting outtakes to put out here:

Q: You have no Twitter account. Do you stay away from social media? Is it like having a loaded gun that can only cause you harm?

A: No, my reluctance to being on there is that I am keenly aware of what I would post if I were to be on there. I guess it’s a reaction to what I see by a lot of peers in the business who are more concerned with the number of followers and responses and likes than they are the actual job they were hired for. The unfortunate part for me is we’re all being judged now by Twitter followers. I’ve been in the office even of some old-school executives who upon talking about adding new talent, the first thing they do is go to Twitter to see what the account looks like and how many followers there are. Really? Even you?

Q: And read the kinds of things they tweet about, and determine if they’re too toxic to have around?

A: I think they do that, but anybody can clean themselves up on Twitter. It’s far from a perfect way to judge an applicant. I like to be a little counter cultural, so that’s my way of staying away, not to mention the access is a little creepy. I can see how it can overwhelm someone who does what I do and I don’t want to be the guy who, every time we go to commercial, looks at my phone to see ‘How did I do?’ I’ve seen a lot of that and I don’t want to go down that rabbit hole.

Q: But you’re in a booth with ARod who is very social media savvy, active, accessible.

A: He’s used it well, though. I’ll give him a lot of credit. A huge part of his post-baseball redemption has been how shrewd he has been on social media. He never puts anything controversial or agitating out there. He asks a lot of questions. He posts a lot of pictures. My wife followed Alex on social media before he and I started working together because she was interested in what he was doing with his kids and with Jennifer. I think my wife is a perfect example of someone would never be interested in any baseball player under different circumstances, but he’s reached a lot of people that way. She watches him on ‘Shark Tank.’
The thing that I don’t think his detractors don’t get about him is that he has a really pure curiosity about things. He wants to learn things he doesn’t know. He wants to be finely tuned to things outside of sports. So he’s interested in finance, and photography. He’s a very interesting guy. Continue reading “Catching up with Matt Vasgersian: Even more Q&A where that came from — his no-Twitter policy, ‘The Chamber’ fiasco and Boo Radley’s house in Universal Studios” →