Category: Uncategorized

The book:

“Game Faces: Early Baseball Cards from The Library of Congress”
The author: Peter Devereaux
The publishing info: Smithsonian Books/Library of Congress, 168 pages, $24.95, released in Oct., 2018
The links: At the publisher’s website,  at Amazon.com, at BarnesAndNoble.com, at Powells.com

The book:

“Baseball Card Vandals: Over 200 Decent Jokes on Worthless Cards!”
The authors: Beau and Bryan Abbott
The publishing info: Chronicle Books, 224 pages, $18.95, released March 5, 2019.
The links: At the publisher’s website, at Amazon.com,  at BarnesAndNoble.com,
at Powells.com. And we’ll even throw in: At Target.com.

The review in 90 feet or less

It is the best of baseball cards. It is the worst of baseball cards.

“Game Faces” is in the history section of book stores and on the publisher’s austere website.

“Baseball Card Vandals” is in the humor section of book stores and the publisher’s whimsical website. Often, right across from the shelves of sports books. Laughing at them. It’s based off a website of the same name, making this book a “best of” collection.

“Games Faces” had almost little to no publicity when it came out. Those in the know knew about it. It’s almost as if it was kept a secret.

“Baseball Card Vandals” is listed as a No. 1 best seller on Amazon.com under Antique and Collectible Sports Cards.

“Game Faces” gets into the famous T206 series of cards, which gave Honus Wagner a whole new cultural definition  and Wikipedia status  based on how much collectors valued this particular artifact. It continues to make headlines every time someone else plunks down millions for one in the marketplace.
Most often, it’s just known as “The Card.”

“Baseball Card Vandals” includes its own version of the Wagner card. Don’t get up in arms about it. Continue reading “Day 2 of 30 baseball book reviews for April 2019: Face it, the cardboard cards still have game” →

The book:

“Great American Baseball Stories”
The author: Edited by Jeff Silverman
The publishing info: Lyons Press Classics/Rowman & Littlefield, 252 pages, $16. Re-released in Feb., 2019.
The links: At the publisher’s website, at Amazon.com, at Powells.com

The book:

“The Great American Sports Page: A Century of Classic Columns from Ring Lardner to Sally Jenkins”
The author: Edited by John Schulian
The publishing info: Library of America/Penguin Random House, 421  pages, $29.95. To be released April 9.
The links: At the publisher’s website, at Amazon.com, at BarnesAndNoble.com, at Powells.com

The book:

“No Place I Would Rather Be: Roger Angell and a Life in Baseball Writing”
The author: Joe Bonomo
The publishing info: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 232 pages, $27.95, to be released May 1.
The links: At the publisher’s website, at Amazon.com, at BarnesAndNoble.com.

The reviews in 90 feet or less

The most humanizing writers, in the sports department or otherwise, have found to give baseball a voice that it might never find on its own. In the process, they can serve as a warm blanket during a long winter as a way to wait for the frost to melt and spring to finally arrive. Continue reading “Day 1 of 30 baseball book reviews for April 2019: How great thou art — and how how the wordsmiths got us through the murky offseason” →

In the course of messing around, we came across a video on YouTube.com recently that made us wonder if what we try to do every spring is worth being sprung on everyone else:

It’s really not that difficult if you’ve done it now, what, more than 10 years …
A dozen years? Jeez.
The 2019 edition of new baseball books is really more than 30 total as we find. The first couple days alone are combined entries, because of how they best relate and can be compared and contrasted.
A year ago, our baseball book colleague Ron Kaplan was nice enough to post a review of our review, saying one of “the big regrets was not following Tom Hoffarth’s excellent annual project of reviewing 30 baseball books in 30 days.” The home for this now is on this website, and it seems sufficient enough to find.
As we start this off we also found an excerpt from a column by the late, great Dan Jenkins, from his August 2018 collection: “Sports Makes You Type Faster: The Entire World of Sports By One of the Most Famous Sportswriters” (Texas Christian University Press, $32, 200 pages):
“There’s a poetry that certain baseball writers discover about our national pastime. The poetry results when the baseball writer transforms himself from a seamhead into a member of the literati. He will stop writing his tough, hard-hitting ledes — ” Chico likes to throw at white guys, his father mowed their lawns” — and lapse into describing a win stream as something ephemeral and a slump as a catharsis. His byline should read Ralph Waldo Spellcheck.”
Most of these books coming up, if written that way, will get marked down.  You can’t baffle us with your bullshit.
So starting April 1, we roll … activate spellcheck, please.