Category: Uncategorized

The book:

“The Legendary Harry Caray: Baseball’s Greatest Salesman”

The author:
Don Zmida

The publishing info:
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, $34, 352 pages, released April 12

The links:
At the publisher’s website, at Amazon.com, at BarnesAndNoble.com, at Powells.com

The review in 90 feet or less

Using the Dodgers’ annual trip to Wrigley Field as a news hook, as noted in the Day 23 review, there will likely include a recorded version of Harry Caray singing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” during the seventh inning stretch.
That’s still a stretch in our book.
The guest singers who have stepped in to do it since Caray’s death in Rancho Mirage just before his 84^th birthday as spring training approached in 1998 are able to make the song live and personal. Like, when Bob Costas and John Smoltz did it Tuesday night (and avoided singing they would “root, root, root for the Cubbies.”).
Keeping the artificial spirit of Caray alive with the recording … not necessary.
But the process of recording anything that is attached to the life of Caray, things can get a little hairy.
The Baseball Hall of Fame resident in the broadcasters’ wing — getting there 13th in line — isn’t someone you may recognize by the portrait used by the Cooperstown-based website. Instead, there is this cartoon version from his 13-year run with the Cubs that too often defines him.
That brings us to Zminda, a Chicago native now L.A.-based SABR member who spent decades working at STATS LLC in publications and research. The Northwestern grad has several important books published on the game, and decided to jump into this one when the publishers came asking one day if he had any projects he wanted to work on upon his 2016 retirement.
What do we need to know about him after knowing there were books done that include Caray’s own sorta biography (“Holy Cow!” with Bob Verdi, from 1989).
After his death, we remember “I Remember Harry Caray,” by George Castille with Rich Wolfe and a forward by Jack Brickhouse in 1998, plus “Where’s Harry?: Steve Stone Remembers 25 Years with Harry Caray” by Steve Stone in 1999. Eventually came “Harry Caray: Voice of the Fans” by Pat Hughes, with a CD of calls, from 2007.
We can even throw in there as a dessert topping: “The Harry Caray’s Restaurant Cookbook: The Official Home Plate of the Chicago Cubs” by Jane and Michael Stern in 2003. Continue reading “Day 24 of 30 baseball book reviews for April 2019: Everyone’s still wild about Harry? Let’s not get carried away” →

The book:

“Ten Innings at Wrigley: The Wildest Ballgame Ever, with Baseball on the Brink”

The author:
Kevin Cook

The publishing info:
Henry Holt & Company, $30, 242 pages, to be released May 7

The links:
At the publisher’s website, at Amazon.com, at BarnesAndNoble.com, at Powells.com

The review in 90 feet or less

The Dodgers’ annual venture today into Wrigley Field for a three-game series against the Cubs comes with its own crazy history to lean upon and laugh.
October, 2017: Kiki Hernandez hits three homers in the decisive 2017 NL Championship Series Game 5. We can read that sentence three times and it still makes no sense.
June 2015: Adrian Gonzalez reaches over a tarp roller along the first base line to make a catch, but a dad holding his baby in his left arm reaches out to grab the ball with his bare right hand. Fan interference prevailed.

May, 2000: Nineteen Dodgers players and coaches are fined or suspended after a fan reaches into the bullpen down the first-base line, grabs the cap off the head of Chad Krueter after hitting him in the head, and then the team roster went into the stands to chase him down.
August, 1982: Six years before they put lights in the park, the Cubs have to suspend a game in the 17^th inning against the Dodgers because of darkness. So, they picked it up the next day. Ron Cey gets kicked out in the 20^th inning. Tommy Lasorda has no more position players. Pedro Guerrero moves from right field to third base, and Fernando Valenzuela grabs a glove and heads to the outfield. Bob Welch ends up playing in the outfield as well, and the Dodgers claim a 2-1 win in the 21^st inning in a game listed as six hours and 10 minutes. And not one home run.
Add to that: Jerry Reuss got the win pitching four innings of one-hit shutout relief. After resting a little bit, he pitches the first five innings of the next game and gets another win. Nine innings in one day, two wins, no complete games. You can’t make that up.

Was it as silly as the game play at Wrigley 40 years ago  — May 17, 1979 – when the Philadelphia Phillies prevailed in a 23-22 decision that needed a 10^th inning to sort it all out and create a line score that reads like a couple of random phone numbers from suburban Chicago and somewhere in Canada (area codes included)? Probably not.

Continue reading “Day 23 of 30 baseball book reviews for April 2019: Another Wrigley moment from 40 years ago” →

With all the dollars and sentiments expended each year on the newest shipment of Yankees-related and rebranded baseball books, how does one make educated purchases?
If you live in New York, apparently you buy ’em up.
In Southern California, it’s a cluster mess.
We liken it to walking into a Yankee Candle store. The nose knows which ones might be a little more spicy than the others, but mostly … old and musty.
As the Yankees hobble into Orange County tonight for the first of a four game series and practically everyone of importance on the injured list – they’ll be back in late August for a weekend series at Dodger Stadium, perhaps feeling better – here are the best, OK and worst of what’s out there this season when it comes to pride-fullness Yankeeness:

The book:

“Inside the Empire: The True Power Behind the New York Yankees”

The authors: Bob Klapish and Paul Solotaroff

The publishing info: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Books, $28, 256 pages, released March 26
The links: At the publisher’s website,  at Amazon.com, at BarnesAndNoble.com, 
at Powells.com

The reviews in 90 feet or less: The book jacket promises this to be along the lines of an HBO “Hard Knocks” look at how the Yankees operate, behind the scenes, as Klapish and Solotaroff “pull back the curtain” on the completed 2018 season.
There are plenty of unnamed sources quoted, making this far more a journalistic endeavor that seems to be necessary in getting to some truths. Klapish, a longtime New York reporter at the Post and Daily News, and Solotaroff, a best-selling author, have one thing in common: Their work has appeared in Rolling Stone and Men’s Journal. The way this is written makes it something that is best suited for either publication, but there’s enough material to make it into a couple hundred pages of phrase-turning pleasure that you don’t often get in one of these kind of projects. Continue reading “Day 22 of 30 baseball book reviews for April 2019: The pridefulness of the Yankees … and all the fallen trees sacrificed for more (better?) history” →

The book:

“Ballpark: Baseball in the American City”

The author: Paul Goldberger
The publishing info: Knopf (Doubleday/Penguin Random House), $35, 384 pages, to be released May 14
The links: At the publisher’s website, at Amazon.com, at BarnesAndNoble.com. Also at the author’s website.

The review in 90 feet or less

We bring two points of reference here:

First, in 2016, Dr. Chris Kimball, the president and CEO of Cal Lutheran, invited us to a special history class he carved out to teach that spring semester. “U.S. History Through Baseball” was his passion for a 30-session class. On the day we attended, the lesson plan focused on William Cammeyer, a businessman who, in 1862, bought a six-acre vacant lot in Brooklyn and converted it from an outdoor ice-skating pond into a baseball field called Union Grounds. It was a residue of how business was starting to spring up in that New York borough – the predecessor to Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field, which was the predecessor to the Dodgers moving to L.A. after trying to get a domed stadium approved.

Kimball had an entire class do a term paper about on stadiums –  a way for them to relate to a ballpark from whatever part of the country they grew up and may have been attached, and then do more research more about it. Kimball, a Boston native, had an affinity for Fenway Park but also talked about his interest in reading more about the old Shibe Park in Philadelphia, where an urban historian described how that section of the city grew and then declined around the life of the ballpark.

A year later, we came across a book by Jerald E. Podair called “City of Dreams: Dodger Stadium and the Birth of Modern Los Angeles,” and included it high up in our annual book reviews.

Podair, a professor of history and American studies at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisc., devoted all sorts of research into declaring: “Dodger Stadium made downtown Los Angeles possible. Downtown Los Angeles in turn made modern Los Angeles possible.” This, after the construction of the L.A. Aqueduct (1913), City Hall (1928), the Coliseum (1923) and Union Station (1939) gave that central core specific definition, Dodger Stadium’s opening on April 10. 1962, with its modernistic form and accessibility, “began the process of change … the gateway that transformed downtown.”

In beginning work on this unique project, Goldberger, a 68-year-old Pulitzer Prize–winning architecture critic from Yale and contributing editor to Vanity Fair, admits he drew much insight from Podair’s book when it came to the part where he would discuss the evolution of Dodger Stadium.

In much of his Chapter 6 titled “Leaving The City,” Goldberger gets into how ballparks built or rebuilt in the twentieth century were “dense, lively, curious mixes of the eccentric and the grand. They were disheveled, scrappy and for the most part good natured places, constructed on the premise that there was something valuable in the notion of even so expansive a public space as a baseball park being tightly woven into the urban environment. Baseball parks were a part of the urban fabric because, up until the middle of the twentieth century, everything was part of the urban fabric.”

While Goldberger recounts the motives behind the O’Malleys moving to Los Angeles, buying Wrigley Field in L.A., deciding to use the Coliseum as a home stadium in ’58 while allowing the A.L. expansion Angels to use it as their home field in ’61 as both awaited the construction of Dodger Stadium, we are more enamored with his professional assessments of the Southern California-based landmarks that have undergone several remodels but remain true to their usefulness. Continue reading “Day 21 of 30 baseball book reviews for April 2019: The urban and rural co-existence of ballparks, from the architectural critic view” →