Since 2017 when the freshman House rep put on a Los Angeles Dodgers’ jersey, highlighted by a red No. 44 to represent her district, then ripped a pinch-hit, RBI-single in her first appearance before 25,000, Barragán continues to use baseball as a way of proving her worthiness.
This is no DEI seat filler. Her bio is pretty explicit in the ability to challenge and respond to situations.
Born in Harbor City as the youngest of 11, Nanette Diaz went to North Torrance High. While she played softball, she also petitioned the administration to be allowed to try out for the boys’ baseball team — and she made the JV squad.
With degrees in political science and public policy from UCLA and a doctorate in law from USC, she launched into a legal career. Involved in the Clinton White House in the Office of Public Liaison for African American outreach, Barragán eventually moved to Florida in 2012 to work on Barack Obama’s presidential re-election campaign and be part of the voter’s rights protection team.
By 2013, she circled back to the Hermosa Beach City Council, fighting against offshore oil drilling. Two years later, she was running for Congress after Janice Hahn vacated the seat.
After her debut in the Congressional Game in ’17, she was noted as one of three participants in the ’18 games — which marked the 25th anniversary of when Blanche Lambert Lincoln, Illena Ros-Lehtinen and Maria Cantwell were the first women played.
“A lot has changed in 25 years,” Barragán said, “but when it comes to this sort of thing, we need to acknowledge not much progress has been made.”
For the 2019 game, Barragán and good friend Linda Sanchez (CA-38) were the only two women players. Barragán invited the D.C. Girls Baseball Team as her special guest, taking pride int he fact her 44th District — Carson, Compton, Lynwood, North Long Beach, Rancho Dominguez, San Pedro, South Gate, Walnut Park, Watts, Willowbrook and Wilmington — includes the Compton Youth Baseball Academy, which hosts annual girls baseball tournaments.
With decisive victories in re-elections in ’18, ’20, ’22 and ’24, Barragán doesn’t hide her love of the Dodger blue, introduced to her by her father. She was at the Dodgers’ White House visits after their 2020 and ’24 World Series titles. Her official website has fashioned a branding for her that looks like the Dodgers’ logo.
With Sanchez as the captain of Team Democrat for the ’25 game, Barragán finds herself as the only woman on the roster. She is there with fellow Californian House members Pete Aguiliar (CA-33), Gil Cisneros (CA-31), Adam Gray (CA-13), Mike Levin (CA-49), Dave Min (CA-47), Kevin Mullin (CA-15), Raul Ruiz (CA-25), Eric Swalwell (CA-15), Derek Tran (CA-45), plus as U.S. senator Alex Padilla.
Four women are listed on the Republican roster — Lisa McClain (MI-09), Mariannette Miller-Meeks (IA-01), Kat Cammack (FL-03) and Iowa senator Joni Ernst.
The Shrine of the Eternals’ 2025 official ballot allows nine names to be filled from 40 eligible candidates. The top three will draw induction later this year into the Shrine as per rules of The Baseball Reliquary, which has done this now since 1999 years.
Of the candidates, six-and-a-half are women.
* Mamie “Peanut” Johnson is the only female pitcher in the Negro Leagues, after being rejected by the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League because of the color of her skin.
* Morganna Roberts was “The Kissing Bandit,” who turned a challenge by friends into a celebrity activity of running on to the field and planting a kiss on a player, manager, umpire or even the San Diego Chicken. It warranted numerous trespassing charges and even a stay in an Anaheim jail. She is still with us, at 78 years old, known as Morgana Cottrell. There should be a book on her … seems it would be rather robust.
Susan Sarandon shared top billing with Kevin Costner. Tim Robbins didn’t get that kind of attention — and Robbins and Sarandon married after this movie.
Fictitious work, that is, created by Ron Shelton for his 1988 movie “Bull Durham,” with the famous line: “Baseball is the only church that truly feeds the soul, day in and day out.” She gets her due in Shelton’s 2023 book, “The Church of Baseball.” Which we enjoyed reviewing and, in the process, creating a neat relationship with Ron.
* Janet Marie Smith is an architect and urban planner best known for Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore, but also for extensive upgrades done at Dodger Stadium over a 10-year period as the franchise’s executive vice president for planning and development. She should eventually write a story about her experiences. A title suggestion: “Built By Janet.”
* Helen Callaghan goes in as a co-entry with her son, Casey Candaele. They are the only mother-son combination to play professional baseball. Helen St. Aubuin was a star in the All-American Girls Professional League and the inspiration for “A League of Their Own” 1986 film. She had her son, Casey, at age 38 in 1961 in Lompoc, and he had a nine-year MLB career from1986 to 1997 in Montreal, Houston and Cleveland as an infielder and outfielder.
Alphabetically, Maybelle Blair is listed first among that female subset on the ballot.
Back by somewhat unpopular demand — maybe query a few authors whose books in the recent past I might have ended up splaying with an intent to de-boned, all in the name of honest criticism — the 2025 version of the newest spring/summer baseball book reviews returns for another attempt at education and entertainment.
It coincides with the start of the Dodgers-Cubs series leading off the ’25 MLB season in Japan. The clocks are being adjusted as we try to spin forward.
Here, as we have done since 2011*, reviews are more an exercise in empathy for those who open their veins to write these things in the first place, along with our attempt at explaining how the subject matter connects in our universe. Then, there’s an efficiency trying to cover more than a couple dozen new titles that have come into the marketplace since the end of the ’24 season.
This whole thing, initially focused on the insane premise of posting 30 reviews once day over the 30 days in a row in April, challenges us to stay current while also adding some context.
*Our memory is fading and we weren’t actually sure, but that’s the best guess, since we’ve got The Wayback Machine to find things we’ve posted going to the InsideSoCal.com platform that started in 2006.
This ’25 baseball book review project again deviates a bit from its original calisthenics stress test. We can’t do 30 in a row, but the target remains at least 30 reviews. All done by summer.
There’s also a new stipulation: No more links to purchasing books on the website named after a river in South America and empties into the Atlantic. Reviews are no longer posted on the social media site once known as Twitter.
Resistance isn’t futile. It’s long overdue.
Consider this: A book called “How To Resist Amazon And Why: Updated and Expanded — The Fight For Local Economies, Data Privacy, Fair Labor, Independent Bookstores and a People-Powered Future” by Danny Caine, owner of the Lawrence, Kansas-based Raven Book Store, sells for a reasonable $14.95 on the Microcosm Publishers’ website. As well as on Caine’s store site, a zine version for $3.
The website in question, meanwhile, not only offers this book that meticulously besmirches its existence, but has it at 40 percent off for those looking to prove everything the book points out.
From our storage unit, here’s what we plan to cover in ’25:
= “I Felt the Cheers: The Remarkable Silent Life of Curtis Pride,” by the former Angels outfielder who also played for Montreal, Detroit, Atlanta, Boston and the Yankees, and was a coach at Gallaudet, the world’s leading university for deaf and hard of hearing students and was also named Major League Baseball’s Ambassador for Inclusion.
The point it to let readers know these works exist, should you be tempted to pick them up for purchase without knowing their caveats. It’s also a way to uncover projects that otherwise might be off the radar. No fees attached. Enjoy.
Before the first reviews, a short Q&A:
Seinäjoki Library in Seinäjoki, Finland.
Q: What happens to all the baseball books collected during the course of the year to review?
A: Pay it forward, if that’s still a phrase. As in, donate them to the local library.
The 144-page book by Howard Liss released by Random House aimed at school kids interested in sports-related bios was first published in 1971.
Chuck Hildebrandt, a 63-year-old retired digital marketing exec living in Chicago, explained to the Detroit Free Press that he purposefully visited the public library in the Detroit suburb of Warren, Mich., while in town visiting family for Thanksgiving. The reason was to bring back a copy of “Baseball’s Zaniest Stars,” which he recalls borrowing from the city’s Walt Whitman Branch on Dec. 4, 1974, when he was a 13-year-old.
He had forgotten to return it. Fifty years later, he sought some closure.
Hildebrant said he came across it on his bookshelf about five years ago, noticed the Dewey decimal library sticker on the spine, and figured out what happened.
In December of 2024, he tried to give it back. The library declined.
“Some people never come back to face the music,” said library director Oksana Urban. “But there was really no music to face, because he and the book were erased from our system.”
Still, what would the fine have been for a return this late? More than $4,500 according to Hildebrant’s math. To be precise, it was $4,563.75 to be precise, if he had been charged the normal fees.
“I am still somewhat embarrassed so I want to make good on it in some way,” Hildebrant wrote on a social media post.
Hildebrant decided to start a GoFundMe.com fundraiser to see if he could match that $4,564 projected fine, and then donate it to Reading Is Fundamental, the nation’s leading children’s literacy non-profit since the 1960s that so many of us Boomer-types remember from our childhood as well.
To date, the effort raised more than $5,300 with more than 100 donations.
Maybe we can keep contributing. Or …
This book looked familiar, and my recollection must have been finding it at my own library when I was in middle school. The cover illustration of Casey Stengel taking off his cap and having a sparrow he kept hidden in his suddenly fly out was something I wouldn’t have forgotten.
In the book, it explains how Stengel, just traded from Wilbert Robinson’s Brooklyn Robins (pre-Dodgers) to the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1918, was back for the first time at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, playing right field. He noticed in the Brooklyn bullpen that former teammate Leon Cadore was able to scoop up a sparrow that landed. On his way to the dugout at the end of the inning, Stengel asked Cadore to give him the sparrow. When Stengel went to bat that inning, the fans gave him a rousing ovation. He stepped into the batter’s box, dropped his bat, bowed low and raised his cap — and the sparrow fluttered a moment and flew off.
“I always knew that Stengel had birds in his top story,” Robinson was reported to have said.
After reading the story about Hildebrandt — and realizing we are about the same age — I tracked down a New Jersey used book store called Between the Covers listed on AbeBooks.com (the one-stop used book store repository) and picked up a nice copy of “Baseball’s Zaniest Stars.”
It went for $20 (plus $5 shipping). I really did enjoy re-reading it from cover to cover this past winter. Simultaneously, I had been reading Andrew Forbes’ latest piece of fiction, “McCurdle’s Arm,” a 108-page novella released in August of ’24 by Invisible Publishing, and the two seemed joined at the spine.
Forbes’ ultra-creative use of 1890s quirky baseball prose told the story of Robert James McCurdle, who could have been a character in “Baseball’s Zaniest Stars,” along with Stengel, Bobo Newsom, Dizzy Dean, Babe Herman and Rabbit Maranville.
Re-reading that review recently was again somewhat as therapeutic as it was writing it four years ago. The cover illustrations were spectacular as well.
Armed with “McCurdle’s Arm” and star struck again by “Baseball’s Zaniest Stars,” I felt as if I was thrust back in time. No hurry for anyone to come to my emotional rescue.
So, with the start of this ’25 review, “McCurdle’s Arm” goes back on my shelf for safe keeping, and “Baseball’s Zaniest Stars” will go next to it, or I’ll deliver it to my local library with all the other books set to be donated this time around.
The hope is that everything will be fine, and there are no fines attached to anyone’s future enjoyment. And a RIF donation is forthcoming.
Artificial Intelligence and Sports Illustrated got together for a discrete hook up recently, and the tabloids had a field day.
So did the moral arbiters at our non-profit member station Public Broadcasting Service team.
“Sports Illustrated is the latest media company to see its reputation damaged by being less than forthcoming — if not outright dishonest — about who or what is writing its stories at the dawn of the artificial intelligence age,” PBS reported on Nov. 29, 2023.
“The once-powerful publication said it was firing a company that produced articles for its website written under the byline of authors who apparently don’t exist. But it denied a published report that stories themselves were written by an artificial intelligence tool.”
The truth is, SI’s reputation has been damaged for several years, and this particular misstep had nothing to do with AI converging with Synthetic Intelligence. We were a bit sympathetic to what was really happening.
Since 2018, SI’s content has been leased by the Arena Group, and it was responsible for these third-party product review AI “stories” way down at the bottom of the website. The crime really is that it was ad material disguised as content. The stuff was summarily taken down and perhaps the brand’s reputation was harmed.
It’s not like they were channeling Frank Deford beyond the grave to rewrite some of his most popular Ted Williams pieces. That would be a grave misstep on so many levels.
This was really some superfluous stuff in question.
The humans still left at the Sports Illustrated Union was mortified, and it was a moment to suggest that there’s a chilling effect on all major news corps that had been dabbling in AI software as a way to make up for lost employees. Still, this much ruckus wasn’t really pushed out when The Associated Press started using techbots to assist in its articles about financial earnings reports since 2014, and had also been used to aggregate short sports game stories. Usually there was a tag at the end that explained how that story was produced with a data-driven technology and readers were not in the “Twilight Zone” of their existence.
Our response to today’s story from @futurism reporting that The Arena Group has published AI-written stories by fake people under the Sports Illustrated name: pic.twitter.com/QcR4iGOi5w
The fall guy for all this was CEO Ross Levinsohn, and it’s just as well. Levinsohn, a former HBO exec who also worked at Fox Sports, Yahoo and then a crazy time as publisher of the Los Angeles Times despite its internal union outcry of his incompetency, had latched onto SI’s parent company, then known as Maven, Inc., which then sold off its soul to Authentic Brands Group and became part of a NIL scam to make people believe it was worthy of its name. Like, Chuck Taylor Converse. SI still had a magazine, cut back to once a month, and this suspect website with just a small portion of what used to be on the staff.
For those who remember, SI, which launched 70 years ago in August of 1954 as the first magazine to have more than one million subscribers, and in 1983 was the first full-color news weekly magazine highlighting fantastic photography — aside from its Swimsuit issue — has been though all sorts of self-inflicted wounding for a few decades.
Tom Hoffarth's The Drill: More Farther Off the Wall 