In Scoring Position: 40 Years of a Baseball Love Affair

“In Scoring Position: 40 Years of a Baseball Love Affair” is a new book being released this week by Bob Ryan and Bill Chuck. Here is the official PR abstract for the book: A love letter to the game of baseball from one of America’s foremost scribes. Bob Ryan has scored every baseball game he’s […]
Sports Book Reviews

This is the time of year for sports book giving and getting. Below are top choices from your favorite critic THE PATS by Glenn Stout and Richard A. Johnson (HoughtonMifflin $35.00, 365 pages) gets my vote for the best sports book of 2018. Detailed, carefully crafted, filled with fun, facts, passion, timeless and fabulous photographs […]
Shoeless Joe and Ragtime Baseball

On July 16, 1889, Joseph Jefferson Wofford Jackson was born into a poor family in Greenville, South Carolina. He never learned to read or write. By the time he was six years old, he worked as a cleanup boy in the cotton mills. By age 13, he labored amidst the din and dust a dozen […]
Book Review: Dueling with Kings

Daily fantasy certainly seems to be everywhere. Perhaps not as much as it was two years ago when every other commercial during any sporting event seemed to be for FanDuel or DraftKings—the two behemoths of the Daily Fantasy arena—but it’s still fairly hard to avoid. Journalist Daniel Barbarisi became intrigued by the influx in daily […]
YANKEE QUIZ, PART III

By Harvey Frommer Welcome to 2018 and by popular demand, the third in the series of teasing, tantalizing, tough questions about the New York Yankees. Enjoy. And reminder, no peeking. If you get half the answers correct you are an All Star. Who founded “Yankeeland Farm” in Frederick, Maryland after his playing career […]
Talking Yankee Factoids, Trivia, Oddities

By Harvey Frommer With the “Baby Bombers” now part of the scene, with the Yankee future becoming brighter and brighter, with all the renewed interest in the franchise, herewith for your reading pleasure and edification some interesting sidebars that are part of the franchise history Yankees A reference with the name “Yankees” first appeared […]
Book Review: Heroes, Scamps and Good Guys

Professional sports in Cleveland has quite the colorful history with a number of interesting personalities who have provided entertainment through the years. In Heroes, Scamps and Good Guys: 101 Colorful Characters from Cleveland Sports History by Bob Dolgan, the author looks at some of the more interesting athletes to be involved in Cleveland Sports. As […]
Book Review: Baseball Before We Knew It

Our national pastime has a long-debated history. Was it really good o’ Abner Doubleday who invented the game? How ‘bout that Spalding character we keep hearing about and to this day has his name on baseball gloves in sporting goods stores? How was he involved? The New York Knickerbockers…weren’t they the first club? Aren’t they […]
Book Review: Omar!

For Indians fans of the 1990’s there was no one who defined the era more than Omar Vizquel. The gregarious shortstop awed fans with his plays with the glove, earning him nine Gold Glove awards by the time he published his auto-biography with Bob Dyer of the Akron Beacon Journal. As the book title eludes, […]
Book Review: The Book

While it may seem commonplace today, and even a requirement, to use advanced statistics to measure the success of baseball players, a decade ago, these methods weren’t nearly as widely accepted. While Bill James certainly did his due diligence, along with those at Baseball Prospectus (and many others), there was still a long tentative feelings […]
Book Review: A Deadly Game

As baseball novels go, the world is full of stories of a regular guy who all of a sudden makes it big or a kid with an amazing arm. Gary Lepper’s new work, A Deadly Game, breaks from that mold to provide baseball fanatics a murder mystery that keeps the reader intrigued from beginning to […]
Book Review: Our Tribe: A Baseball Memoir

Cleveland’s baseball team stinks, right? They are always not going to be any good, correct? There is absolutely no way they’re even going to make the playoffs let alone run of a streak of consecutive division titles. These were all things that many fans of the Indians thought in the early 1990s after experiencing decades […]
How to Keep a Score Book in Baseball

Baseball is one of the most intricate and intriguing games to watch. Once you’ve learned some of the nuances of the game (“the game within the game” if you will), then keeping score, while at the ball park, can often enhance your enjoyment of the game. Once you’ve kept score a couple times, it’s pretty […]
The True Story of Two Statheads Who Got to Run a Real Baseball Team

‘The Only Rule Is It Has to Work: Our Wild Experiment Building a New Kind of Baseball Team’ By Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller It’s the dream of fantasy baseball fans everywhere: you get to pick the roster, set the lineup, and decide on strategies—but with real players, in a real ballpark, in a real playoff […]
Book Review: The Manager’s Daughter

If you are looking for a summer page turner, look no further than The Manager’s Daughter. Author Matthew Kastel combines the topics of baseball and murder mystery flawlessly in this book that keeps the reader guessing right up until the end. The work follows the same mysterious cadence as The Da Vinci Code, as it […]
SABR is launching a digital library
The following post is an official press release from SABR – The Society for American Baseball Research is introducing a new publishing initiative this spring. The SABR Digital Library will be publishing new titles as well as reviving historical SABR publications that have gone out of print. Two books mark the inception of the library: […]
Baseball in the Garden of Eden, A Book Review
If you are someone who still whole heartedly believes Abner Doubleday is the soul person responsible for creating America’s Pastime, author John Thorn has some major news for you. In his new work Baseball in the Garden of Eden: The Secret History of the Early Game, Thorn examines many “myths” of the game so many […]
Book Review of Dropping the Ball by Dave Winfield
Dropping the Ball: Baseball’s Troubles and How We Can and Must Solve Them by Dave Winfield According to former all star Dave Winfield, if baseball keeps on the path that it is going right now, it will one day, in the not to distant future, reach a point where there are no longer any African […]