Category: Uncategorized

“Yogi: A Life Behind the Mask”

The author:
Jon Pessah

The publishing info:
Little, Brown and Company
$30
576 pages
Released April 14

The links:
At the publisher’s website
At Amazon.com
A BarnesAndNoble.com
At Powells.com
At Indiebound.org
At the author’s website

The review in 90 feet or less

Another Berra book is like … what’s the phrase … déjà vu all over again.

And we’re not even covering the plate of all the self-help/humor books you’ll come across when just googling this simple title.

It feels as if we just put down “Yogi Berra: Eternal Yankee” in March, 2009, Allen Barra’s 480-page piece de resistance that publisher W.W. Norton & Company called “a gripping biography.” It was difficult to forget, based on the weight and achievement of that project. Barra said his goal was to create the first comprehensive work about Berra, the “greatest ballplayer never to have a serious biography.”

(And, for what it’s worth, Berra is metaphorically lifting his mask off his face here).

And now comes this from Pessah, whose 2015 book, “The Game: Inside the Secret World of Major League Baseball’s Power Brokers” did extremely well peeling back the business of the game. That took him  five years of research and more than 150 interviews, an achievement well worth the talents of one of the founding editors of ESPN the Magazine who was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for editing and writing an examination into the role of racism in Major League Baseball.

We’re not against marketing, but it may seem odd that these publishers have decided to call Pessah’s work “the definitive biography” and a “transformational portrait.” The same publishing house already produced “My Dad, Yogi,” by Dale Berra in 2019, and “When You Come to a Fork in the Road, Take It!” in 2002, so it has a history in this Berra business.

In channeling his version of  “Yogi,” Pessah goes 100 pages better than Barra, explaining how it took him four years and more than 150 interviews. In noting his sources, Barra’s “Eternal Yankee” is cited. But interestingly, no interview with Yogi’s son, Dale. Seems obvious, but then again …

You can observe a lot by watching how many authors try to capture Yogi Berra in a cover-to-cover, over-the-counter contemporary narrative. Continue reading “Day 12 of (at least) 30 baseball book reviews for spring/summer 2020: Unmasking more Yogi Berra? What will the market bear” →

“Sixty-One in ’61: Roger Maris Home Runs
Game by Game”

The author:
Robert M. Gorman

The publishing info:
McFarland & Company
$39.95
347 pages
Released in October, 2019

The links:
At the publisher’s website
At Amazon.com
At BarnesAndNoble.com
At Powells.com
At IndieBound.org

The review in 90 feet or less

This gets personal.

My date of birth occurred early on the morning on the eighth of June in ‘61. It will be noted in the context of this review, that was a day between Roger Maris hitting home run No. 17 in Game 49 against Minnesota and No. 18 in Game 52 against Kansas City, both at Yankee Stadium.

On June 8, Roger Maris dragged himself through an 0-for-8 day, a twi-night doubleheader against the Athletics that included a few rain delays. Yet, the whole thing still started at 6:02 p.m. in New York and ended shortly after 11 p.m.

In a true Hollywood scenario, Maris would have hit a homer that night at Wrigley Field in L.A., just miles from the hospital where I arrived that, at the time was near La Brea and Coliseum, at the base of Baldwin Hills.

It would have been against the Los Angeles Angels, also celebrating their first year of MLB existence.

As it turns out, Maris only hit two that memorable season at the L.A. friendly confines of Wrigley – both numerically significant. One against the Angels’ Eli Grba to deep left-center field on May 6, the 100th of his career (and third of the season). The other was off Ken McBride on Aug. 22, the 50^th of the season.

It’s not such a chore to find that info based on BaseballReference.com records. There’s also the laundry list of those who gave up the homers.

The Angels’ temporary home field, as the team awaited the opening of Dodger Stadium to share it with the National League team, would surrender a major-league record 248 homers in 81 games. It was, for many reasons, the place of choice for the 1959-61 TV show, “Home Run Derby,” the campy black-and-white series that watched players like Aaron, Mantle, Mays and Killebrew launch homers onto 51^st Street beyond the 345-foot power alley in left field.

(Nope, Maris never appeared on the show).

But because of all that Maris was up against that year – the theory that the AL was watered down due to expansion and all these smaller parks that played into his strength, and more would have rather seen the idolized Mickey Mantle instead be the one to challenge Babe Ruth’s single-season home run record (set in 154 games, instead of 162) – a book like Gorman’s comes in handy despite all that’s already been done about the man from Fargo, North Dakota.

We need facts, not myths, to explain this thing.

So here’s a retired university reference librarian from Rock Hill, South Carolina, who once won the SABR Baseball Research Award for his 2009 book with David Weeks, “Death at the Ballpark,” and was a 12-year-old fan of Maris during that ’61 season.

As an adult, Bob Gorman decided not enough had been documented about many of the particulars of that HR  chronology.

While more than half the 48 pitchers who gave up homers to Maris that year gone to a greater place – as is Maris, who died in 1985 – Gorman managed to track down:
= Detroit reliever Terry Fox, now 84;
= Johnny James, now 86, a Hollywood High grad and USC player who split that season, his last in the big leagues, between the Yankees and Angels;
= Cleveland starter Dick Stigman, now 86.
Gorman also found Cleveland All-Star catcher John Romano, who died in Feb., 2019 at age 84.

While there’s also a perfect symbiosis of the numerical value of 61 in ’61, Gorman’s research underpins the reality that Maris had actually hit 63 that year. One was taken away by a rainout. The last came in the ninth inning of Game 3 of the World Series against Cincinnati at Crosley Field to give the Yankees an eventual 3-2 win. That was one of only two hits Maris had in the Yankees’ five-game series victory. Continue reading “Day 11 of (at least) 30 baseball book reviews for spring/summer 2020: At least 61 new things to learn about Roger Maris’ 61 homers in ’61” →

“The Cup of Coffee Club:
11 Players and their Brush with Baseball History”

The author:
Jacob Kornhauser

The publishing info:
Rowman & Littlefield
$29.95
216 pages
Released March 11

The links:
At the publisher’s website
At Amazon.com
At BarnesAndNoble.com
At Powells.com
At IndieBound.org

The review in 90 feet or less

We’ll try to make this quick, efficient and caffeinated.

It’ll be sort like the single-day MLB careers of:
= Charlie Lindstrom (Sept. 28, ’58)
= Roe Skidmore (Sept. 17, ’70)
= Larry Yount (Sept. 15, ’71)
= Gary Martz (July 8, ’75)
= Rafael Montalovo (April 13, ’86)
= Jeff Banister (July 23, ’91)
= Stephen Larkin (Sept. 15, ‘98)
= Jon Ratliff (Sept. 15, 2000)
= Ron Wright (April 14, ’02)
= Sam Marsonek (July 11, ’04)
= and Matt Tupman (May 18, ’08).

They’re the Moonlight Grahams of their time without a “Field of Dreams” context to evoke bittersweet nostalgia — they made it the big leagues, played once, then something weird happened.

The Baseball Encyclopedia is full of them, and it’s where many first learned of Graham, and fell for the nickname. The BaseballReference.com lists 535 pitchers and nearly as many batters (which seem to add up to 999) as a reference point. There are about 150 of them in the last 50 years alone, writes Kornhauser, tet, the 11 above is who the Chicago native and current  producer at Fox Sports digital in L.A. decided to go after. They were available to still talk about what, the author calls, their “heartache of never making it back.”

Well, for some of them.  Exhibit A: Yount.

The older brother of eventual Hall of Famer Robin Yount, and both from Taft High in Woodland Hills, says he rarely thinks about that day he was called in from the bullpen to pitch for the Houston Astros, hurt his arm while warming up, and never faced the Braves lineup of Felix Millian, Ralph Gahr and Hank Aaron in that ninth inning.
Thus, the 21-year-old is the only one in MLB history to officially enter a game and never perform.
He went back to Triple A for two lousy seasons, was traded to Milwaukee in 1974 — just as Robin was signing to play there as an 18-year-old out of high school.

Heartache? He became a fabulous real estate developer in Arizona, and still gets some credit for helping convince former MLB commissioner Bud Selig to finally put a team in Phoenix.

“My life couldn’t have been any better (after baseball,” he says. “I overachieved so much. All of that was just a moment in time.”

Others do lament their one-and-only shot.

Charlie Linstrom, a catcher in the Chicago White Sox organization, the youngest son of former Dodgers utility player and Hall of Famer Freddie Lindstrom, says on page 12: “The truth of the matter is once I got into professional baseball, I really didn’t like it that well.”

Bad example. How about Gary Martz, who had nine years in pro ball but just one MLB game. “Financially, even family-wise, it really took a toll on me. Overall, I’d probably have to say it wasn’t worth it. … I always said I wanted to be the next Mickey Mantle … He was a helluva a drinker and I think I might have been able to outdrink him.”

Some handle adversity differently.

Bannister overcame cancer and went onto manage the Texas Rangers. Larkin, nine years younger than his eventual Hall of Fame brother Barry, still enjoys the thrill of talking about the day he was called up to be in the same lineup with his sibling, on the last day of the 1998 season with the Cincinnati Reds, while Aaron and Brett Boone played the other two infield positions.

Rafael Montalovo came up in the Dodgers organization, got his one game in with Houston, then tried to come back nine years later as a Dodgers’ Replacement Player during the 1995 spring training season. (Which Mike Piazza writes about later in his autobiography: “Some of the replacement players — mainly, a pitcher named Rafael Montalovo, who pitched one inning for the Astros back in 1986 and hadn’t played organized ball in the States for three years — were saying things like they were going to have us five games in first place by the time we got back and we’d probably want to thank them … Does someone really think we’ll be rooting for these guys?”)

Fame comes in many forms. How could you not root for all them, all things considered, to at least reached the top of the mountain.

How it goes in the scorebook

Rest in peace, Eddie Gaedel.

On a scale of 1-to-11, compatible with the lineup presented here, we had hopes of cranking this up to an 11. If all you have time to do here is pour yourself a mug of Joe, skim the names, try to connect with any of their stories, and then shake your head, count it an above-average success. Continue reading “Day 10 of (at least) 30 baseball book reviews for spring/summer 2020: We’ll take our coffee bleak” →

“The Wax Pack: On the Open Road
in Search of Baseball’s Afterlife”

The author:
Brad Balukjian

The publishing info:
University of Nebraska Press
$27.95
264 pages
Released April 1

The links:
At the publisher’s website
At Amazon.com
At BarnesNoble.com
At Powells.com
At IndieBound.org
At the author’s personal site
At the created site for the book

The review in 90 feet or less

The premise, simple: After ripping open a pack of 1986 Topps baseball cards, a guy spends 48 days during the summer of 2015 traversing America. It starts in the Bay Area, heads through Southern California, sweeping across the Southern states, a pilgrimage to Cooperstown, N.Y., left turn to Las Vegas and then to a cemetery headstone in Inglewood. That’s more than 11,000 miles through 38 states.

The goal, translucent: Interview every baseball player represented in that pack. If possible. A way to return to one’s baseball card-loving roots. Discover more about the person than just a set of numbers on the back stained in chewing gum.

The execution, perfect imperfection: Which makes this far more enriching than we could have ever imagined.

When your lineup is tracking down former Dodgers Steve Yeager and Rick Sutcliffe, former Angels Gary Pettis and Al Cowens, Hall of Famer Carlton Fisk, former All-Stars Doc Gooden, Garry Templeton, Vince Coleman and Lee Mazilli, plus — and the real gems — Richie Hebner, Jaime Cocanower, Rance Mulliniks and Randy Ready, get ready for some mixed results and unexpected pleasures.

That’s the reality of how a fundamental idea evolves, against the grain, label up.

Just as how this college-prof-turned author may have thought that once he could finally get a publisher to bite on it, he could go around the country and connect with people in promoting it.

Things can just go sideways.

Balukjian, a 39-year-old director of the National History and Sustainability Program and biology teacher at Merritt College in Oakland, has done freelance pieces for several publications, but he need not worry about his writing skills here. The stories speak for themselves, and what becomes a cathartic trip for the soul also allows him to come to grips with some other things in his life.

This is definitely an adventure where we need to do little explaining and trust that the freshness of the ride will get one quickly immersed and unable to put it down until the journey finishes. But then again, we can’t help ourselves.

The guy gets to watch kung fu movies with Templeton, play Cards Against Humanity with Cocanower, go bowling and lift weights with Ready. And listen to those who definitely have lives on the other side of the diamond experience.

With Yeager in the leadoff role of this lineup, we find him back at his Jersey Mike’s shop in Granada Hills, doting on his wife, Charlene, and with his kids, trying to quit smoking (he eventually does), and admitting: “There might be some people that think I’m tougher than I look. Don’t let the facial expression get you. I can sit there and watch a game with my glasses on and look like I’m boring a hole through you, but I might not be … Ya know, if the kids do something good, I cry.”

By the way, in that ’86 set of Topps, it started off with Boomer as a Dodger, but he was done with the team by then after 14 seasons and starting a last go-around with Seattle as a 37-year-old backup to Bob Kearney and Scott Bradley. We still can’t even get our masks around that one.

Templeton, who Balukjian tracked down in San Marcos, confides in having a daughter in April of ’74, when he was 18, two years before his debut in St. Louis. He ended up gaining full custody during her high school years when she moved to San Diego and joined the rest of the Templeton family. But the more he reveals, the better this visit gets.

It’s not unlike what Balukjian uncovers when he get around to Cowens.

 

He rests in Inglewood Park Cemetery across the street from the Forum. Acacia Slope, Lot 432, Grave F. The headstone: “Cowens, Husband, Father, and Grandfather, 1951-2002.” With his nickname: Ace.

“I rest his baseball card on top (of the headstone) and take a picture,” writes Balukjian, after learning far more than he might have expected after locating Cowens’ closest surviving family members.

If it takes the right person at the right time to shuffle this deck, Balukjian and all his baggage brings it to us with honesty, humor, and an inquisitive nature that allows you to ride shotgun without sharing in the expenses. When it’s over, you might wonder why you never did this yourself. Maybe you will — aside from time, money and perhaps social distancing issues?

And when it’s done, Balukjian leaves us with this sort of epiphany:

Everything changes except for this one constant: As long as you’re breathing, you will always have whatever is right in front of you. Make it count.

A very cool author Q&A

From his home in Oakland, Dr. Balukjian, a self-proclaimed bug collector, took a semester off teaching at Merritt College in Oakland (you can see his RateMyProfessor.com scores when he taught biology at Laney College) so he could focus on this book promotion, but he really hasn’t been able to spring himself loose. As the director of the Natural History & Sustainability Program at Merritt, he is trying to help coordinate ways to keep students engaged with online classes through May.
Balukjian, who also once started a Ph.D. program in Environmental Science Policy and Management at Cal-Berkley in 2006, has this classic description of himself on his website:

Brad Balukjian is a doctor, but not one who can write you a prescription (unless you’re a sick insect). He hated school when he was little, but now loves it so much that after graduating from the 23rd grade, he has moved to the other side of the desk to teach natural history at Merritt College in Oakland, California. He has strong opinions about the value of education, exposure to nature, and utility infielders from the 1980s, and is pursuing a hybrid career of teaching, writing, and research to get the word out that science is accessible and (gasp!) fun. He chose this path because he never wants to stop learning and apparently has a strong aversion to money. This is his first time writing in the third-person.

Balukjian, who once had an L.A. Times fellowship that allowed him write science stories while he was given a desk in the sports department at the old downtown building, gives us more about this book, about this process and what he wanted to achieve:

Did you think going in, most of these ex-players would accept the premise of your journey/book project and cooperate, based on how you approached this as some sort of social experiment, trying to document history as well as find a human side to a cardboard photo?

The beauty of the pack of baseball cards is to get a random sample. My favorite players were the underdog guys. This was my secret way to write about them. You could never do a book about Don Carmen or Jamie Cocanower or Randy Ready. What I tried to reinforce to all of them was that I wasn’t a traditional sports writer and this would be interesting beyond the field. That helped me. What was so rewarding and pleasant is how open they were, willing to be vulnerable.

It was also very interesting how you could incorporate your own journey into this, not just do a collection of “Whatever happened to …?” pieces that otherwise didn’t have a common thread.

I always knew this book would be tough and ambitious. I didn’t set out to write a “sports book,” but I knew it would get shelved in “sports,” where there are all sorts of biographies or stories about a particular season or a particular team. It’s rare, unless you’re that athlete who is the focus, to have the narrator integrated into the story. This becomes a mix of memoir, and baseball, and travel, and the challenge is how to keep it to 15 magazine profiles stapled together. Continue reading “Day 9 of (at least) 30 baseball book reviews for spring/summer 2020: Waxing nostalgic, beyond a journey of re-connecting with cardboard gods” →

“Swing Kings: The Inside Story of
Baseball’s Home Run Revolution”

The author:
Jared Diamond

The publishing info:
William Morrow/Harper Collins
$28.99
336 pages
Released March 31

The links:
At the publisher’s website
At Amazon.com
At BarnesAndNoble.com
At Powells.com
At IndieBound.org
At the author’s WSJ home base.

The review in 90 feet or less

Craig Wallenbrock … where have we heard that name?

Flash back to a Tom Verducci piece for Sports Illustrated – March 21, 2018, headlined “Countdown to Liftoff: How Joey Gallo and Josh Donaldson Embody Baseball’s New Era”

Verducci wrote: “A confluence of three forces has changed offenses radically: technology, analytics and failed ballplayers turned private hitting tutors —t he veritable garage-and-basement indy start-ups of this disruption. Among them: a 71-year-old college dropout cum surfer, a former high school coach, a failed independent league player, a self-taught Internet baseball junkie and a .204 hitter who was released from Class A ball after just two seasons and four home runs. Not a major league at bat among them.”

That would be Wallenbrock, whom Verducci would later refer to in the story as the “Oracle of Santa Clarita.”

You can hang more than 10 Southern California angles on him. Once the hitting coach for Art Masmanian at Mt. San Antonio College. A guy who Dodgers special assistant and former MLB standout Raul Ibanez persuaded the team to hire as a consultant in 2016, and immediately sent Chris Taylor to work with. Taylor then connects with Robert Van Scoyoc, who would become the team’s hitting coach in the dugout. (The same Van Scoyoc who went 1-for-10 as a senior at Hart High in Newhall in 2005.)

That’s how the pages of this go up and down like the Dodger Stadium escalator between the field level and press box.

Through Wallenbroch came Doug Latta, a former Fairfax High guy from UCLA and Cal Lutheran who had a batting cage in Calabasas. That’s where Justin Turner came upon Latta, thanks to former Mets teammate Marlon Byrd, who stumbled onto him first.

Before swinging from the heels to take in all that’s in this compilation by the Wall Street Journal scribe Diamond, you need to get the visual on pages viii, which is pre-prologue and introduction and subsequent 16 chapters. The chart of the “Swing Kings Family Trees” looks like the Swiss Family Robinson of baseball, with who begat whom, what  influenced what, and how it all whiffs together into what we have created in today’s game — a repurposed attack at the plate that, simply put, involves more of a upper cut than chopping down at a pitched ball.

The results can’t be denied. Continue reading “Day 8 of (at least) 30 baseball book reviews for spring/summer 2020: How to get into the swing of things? Drop and drive with this Diamond gem” →