Sports Biblio Digest, 4.17.16
News, Views and Reviews About Sports Books, History and Culture
In This Issue: Spring Sports Books, Harvey Penick’s Little Red Book at 25, The Diary of Myles Thomas, The Legacy of Vin Scully
Welcome to the Sports Biblio Digest, an e-mail newsletter delivered each Sunday. You can subscribe here and search the archives.
This is Digest issue No. 356 published April 17, 2016. The Digest is a companion to the Sports Biblio website, which is updated every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
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This week on Sports Biblio I posted a preview guide to sports books published between April-June in the United States, and there’s an incredible topical variety.
That’s due not only to the start of baseball season here in America but the unveiling of new tennis and golf seasons, as well as the arrival of cricket in the northern hemisphere and the Olympics approaching in August.
The selections I highlight reflect those converging seasons, and other issues, including progress for gay and transgender athletes, new translations of previous global releases and a handful of biographies.
One of the books that I found most interesting was Kevin Robbins’ new release about the making of the 1991 classic, “Harvey Penick’s Little Red Book.” It’s as much a biography of the legendary Texas golf instructor as a retelling of how Penick and the noted Sports Illustrated writer Bud Shrake collaborated on the project (Texas Monthly excerpt here).
As most best-selling sports books are, “Harvey Penick’s Little Red Book” is about so much more than sports, and that’s why Penick’s wisdom endures today, far beyond the limits of any fairway.
‘The Diary of Myles Thomas’ debuts
This week ESPN rolled out the first installment of a season-long historical fiction project based on a real-life pitcher on one of baseball’s greatest teams.
“1927: The Diary of Myles Thomas” is a real-time storytelling experiment, with the writings based on actual accounts of the New York Yankees season from The New York Times and the official archives of Major League Baseball.
The project includes 75 diary entries through the recreated perspective of Thomas, who was a journeyman pitcher on the famed “Murderer’s Row” Yankees teams of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. Other contributions include social media updates and postings on both ESPN and Medium platforms.
The writer and creator is Douglas Alden, an Emmy Award-winning producer and director, and official baseball historian John Thorn has been involved in the conception of the project.
The first installment, “Opening Day: The Fire Party,” includes a stunning photo of a young Barbara Stanwyck. “Double Indemnity” was almost a couple decades away from a Roaring Twenties that just got a lot more interesting to learn about with “The Diary of Myles Thomas."
Vin Scully’s Last Opening Day
Good piece from Craig Calcaterra at Hardball Talk on how many more baseball radio men could learn from Vin Scully, who was widely feted by the Dodgers and MLB this week on his final Opening Day:
“Get past his easy cadence, his turns of phrase, his legendary status and what are you getting from a Vin Scully broadcast? Or, what are you not getting? You’re not getting deep analysis usually. He’ll tell you how a guy is doing and he will drop in stat trends and things here and there, but that’s in service of a larger story, not the actual product he’s providing. He’s likewise not breaking down any one play in too great detail. He’ll say what’s happening, in casual baseball fan terms, as it happens and then he’ll talk about what just happened again if it was notable. But he will not analyze it to death. What’s going on is a ballgame, not a surgical procedure.
“He’s just talking to people. People who are not in the baseball industry and thus don’t have much use for a lot of what gets beaten to death during baseball broadcasts these days. He doesn’t 'stick to baseball,' as so many baseball people are told to do. Why should he? He’s broadcasting to thousands upon thousands of people every single night, all of whom have their own backgrounds and frames of reference.”
As James Walker wrote in “The Crack of the Bat,” baseball on the radio endures “so long as we need to hear the games we cannot see.” For some of us, this is our preferred manner of taking in the game.
A Few Good Reads
Sports logo master Todd Radom on the lavish baseball art of Graig Kreindler;
Bob Klapisch and Paul Solatoroff on the latest young pitchers to vie for the 100 mph club, including Yankees prospect Preston Jamison;
In honor of the forthcoming release of David Foster Wallace’s collected tennis essays, The New Yorker posted an adaptation of John Jeremiah Sullivan’s introduction about “the perfect game;”
It’s been 50 years since Eusebio starred for Portugal at the World Cup, and now there’s a musical tribute to him that Phil Town wrote about for When Saturday Comes;
There’s a sports book festival coming in May to the English town of Nantwich, and the guests include cyclist David Millar and Duncan Hamilton, author of the forthcoming “For the Glory.” The book is the story of sprinter Eric Liddell, immortalized in the "Chariots of Fire" film and who refused to run in the 1924 Olympic 100-meter heats because they took place on a Sunday, violating his religious beliefs;
On time and timelessness in sports, and the rush to “speed up” games like baseball and cricket. As Clemson professor Gregory Ramshaw writes:
“Isn’t the pleasure of sport that it is different from the rest of our industrial lives; that we can lose ourselves and feel something of our real selves and the real lives of others in a ‘day out’ at the ballpark, or cricket ground, or golf course? Shouldn’t sport be different than the rest of our industrial lives?”
Cricket on the Brain
Ramshaw also brought my attention to this piece on the fate of county cricket in Britain without television; earlier this week I wrote about wanting to finally dig into some essential reading about cricket, something I didn’t get around to a few years ago.