Fall Classic reads, Ty Cobb and England's greatest cricket icon
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This week the Sports Biblio blog posts were all about baseball, with the playoffs continuing and the World Series just around the corner.
I’ve been trying new-fangled ways of enjoying the old-fashioned tradition of listening on the radio. Tuning in on my MLB At-Bat iPad app has been a joy, even if Vin Scully wasn’t on the air for medical reasons. And there was the Dodgers’ early departure in the National League Division Series.
There’s just one drawback to this if you want to listen, and it's a big one. There’s a substantial delay between what you hear and what you see, with the audio at least a batter behind. I know people who don’t mind, but I find it very distracting.
I also wrote about a new baseball collectibles magazine, Baseball History & Art, that’s just gorgeous. I haven’t been into the vintage memorabilia scene, but this publication has piqued my interest at least in tracking the industry, which can be fraught with danger.
My newest book review is about the provocative new biography, “Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty,” by Charles Leerhsen. Sports celebrities we love to demonize today should be so lucky to have someone in the future dig through their past and see if what we thought we knew about them wasn’t exactly the truth.
Coming up this week on Sports Biblio: A tribute to Allen Guttmann, whom I regard as the foremost American sports historian.
Fall Classics, now and then
My favorite read of the week is a fantastic reconstruction of one of the greatest World Series—and baseball—games ever played.
Tom Verducci of Sports Illustrated goes long on Game 6 of the 1975 World Series, played 40 years ago this week, and which he says revolutionized how baseball is shown on television. “What the 1958 NFL title game did for pro football, Game 6 did for televised sports.” For better and for worse.
His late great, SI colleague, Ron Fimrite, was at Fenway for that game, and sports author John Kryk dusted off his classic piece and served it up on his Twitter feed. There’s a terrific book about the game, too, Mark Frost’s “Game Six.”
Doug Wilson, author of a new biography of Carlton Fisk, writes along the same lines for The Boston Globe Magazine, including the famous story of the left field cameraman fending off a legion of rats.
Wilson’s book, “Pudge: The Biography of Carlton Fisk,” gets a thumbs-up review from sports book blogger Bob D’Angelo. Wilson’s other books were bios of Mark Fidrych and Brooks Robinson.
It’s been 30 years since umpire Don Denkinger’s infamous call in another Game 6 of the World Series, 10 years after Pudge. At SI Longform, Dan Greene writes about that night in 1985 in Kansas City that helped gift the Royals their only World Series crown and screw the Cardinals, and how Denkinger has lived with it ever since.
The most infamous World Series of all is Lincolnesque, shrouded in an ever-growing pile of books and articles, and with four years remaining before its centenary. Oxford University Press has just published “The Betrayal: The 1919 World Series and the Birth of Modern Baseball,” by Charles Fountain.” Baseball book blogger Gregg Kersey says that unlike other books on this topic, Fountain “removes the Hollywood glamorization of the Black Sox scandal and gives the reader the actual facts about what happened.”
For The New York Times, Michael Beschloss remembers the other black player in the 1947 World Series. It was 70 years ago this week that Branch Rickey made baseball and American history by signing Jackie Robinson.
The New York Mets are in the World Series for the first time in 15 years in another amazin’ run. For the first time, Jason Fry and Greg Prince, the long-suffering duo behind Faith and Fear in Flushing, will have a World Series to blog about.
In April baseball writer Steve Kettman published “Baseball Maverick,” a biography of Mets general manager Sandy Alderson, and Will Leitch thought it “strangely worshipful.” Right before the Mets completed their sweep of the Cubs, Leitch talked with Kettman again for Sports On Earth about how this season and this team came together.
Here’s one last playoff link—or two—right up the Sports Biblio alley: How about public librarians in Kansas City and Toronto throwing some shade during the American League Championship Series? It was just as glorious as the games were riveting. Literary insults and baseball? I’ll have some more, please! The folks at the New York Public Library have taken notice.
Books in the works
He’s not getting any calls about being a manager, so Dusty Baker has been at work on “Kiss the Sky,” recounting what he saw at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, especially Jimi Hendrix;
Bob Costas is writing a memoir for HarperCollins with Mike Lupica.
Reads across the pond
Former Everton midfielder and manager Gordon Kendall, one of the true characters of English soccer, died last week at the age of 69. At The Daily Telegraph, Paul Hayward writes about a man who embodied “football’s old passion plays,” compared to today’s corporate Premier League soap operas;
A spokeswoman for Dutch soccer legend Johan Cruyff announced this week that he has been diagnosed with lung cancer. Cruyff, 69, was a heavy smoker for years and had heart bypass surgery in 1991;
Friday marked the 100th anniversary of the death of W.G. Grace, considered England’s greatest cricketing icon. "Gilbert," a novella based on his life, was published in June. Two biographies of Grace, reviewed by Alex Massie at The Spectator, are among the many tributes. Next month at the Lord’s Cricket Ground, the first-ever London Sports Writing Festival will be devoted to Grace, “his beard and his legacy.”
Off the Sporting Green
Give yourself time to read this terrific profile in The Sunday New York Times of NPR “Fresh Air” host Terry Gross and the art of opening up;
Brainpickings turned nine years old this week, an eternity for any website, especially one that packs the cultural heft of Maria Popova. She wrote this reflection and I must admit her approach and her Sunday newsletter inspired me as I prepared to launch Sports Biblio;
One of my favorite sites, Atlas Obscura, has the story of the first library in the world to be fully taxed, in Peterborough, N.H. Given the fragile state of public libraries today, it’s worth remembering how much of a treasure they provide for so little cost. If I ever become an activist for anything, it would be for this. I’m an absolute bleeding heart for public libraries and parks, and their future anywhere cannot be taken for granted.