Sports Biblio Digest, 4.7.19: An Early Spring Reader
News, Views and Reviews About Sports Books, History and Culture
Also In This Issue: The 1969 Mets; A Philosopher of the Ballpark; The Songbook of the Pastime; Another Moe Berg Film; An Ex-Pro Hooper’s Memoir; Trump on the Links; Muffet McGraw; Wright Thompson
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My azaleas are blooming, which means that not too far away from me, The Masters takes place next weekend. Spring is here in the northern Hemisphere, and with the beautiful flowers and plants (and suffocating pollen) some terrific books are also flourishing anew about baseball and so much more that are linked to below.
At New York magazine, Patrick Sauer looks at the spate of books about the 1969 New York Mets, including Wayne Coffey’s newly released “They Said It Couldn’t Be Done” (Crown Archetype). Like so many volumes about the Amazins’, Sauer finds that their improbable story only grows in appeal as time marches on:
“That team is frozen in time, encased in the bedrock on which this baseball-mad city was built. I knew the broad strokes, but I wanted a crash course in the day-to-day and the aftermath, then and now, and the looming anniversary gave me hundreds of pages’ worth. What I came to understand is that, while the outcome of the ’69 Series never changes, the lives of the players and those who follow them do. Records are broken, memories fade, players get older and then they die; their blunders and triumphs live on only in books.”
At the Los Angeles Review of Books, an interview with UC-Berkeley professor Alva Noë, a Mets fans as a youth and author of “Infinite Baseball: Notes from a Philosopher at the Ballpark,” just out from Oxford University Press.
At The Christian Science Monitor, several noted baseball authors list their favorite baseball books, including a 1982 classic by Daniel Okrent, whose work deserves such a wider look than it gets, especially in this newsletter.
From The New Yorker, Louis Menand on a new book trying to bridge the gap between scouting and scoring in baseball, and the long history between both that has caused plenty of tension between the two camps over the decades, including the present:
“Now that everyone in baseball has figured out how to use sabermetrics, we’re back to where we started, with the rich clubs lording it over the rest.”
Baseball historian John Thorn has written the foreword to “When Big Data Was Small,” Richard D. Cramer’s newly published book (University of Nebraska Press) about the analytics field he mastered long before the advent of what’s now known as sabermetrics. The book, Thorn writes:
“. . . recalls a seemingly simpler time when information science was finding its feet and so was he. His interests as a boy might have predicted the future of many an aspiring nerd, myself included: list-making; model-airplane building; Gilbert chemistry sets (and/or Erector sets); baseball statistics and simulations; antiquarian music (in his case Dixieland, in mine country blues). Finding reality not altogether satisfying, he suspected that Pythagoras might have it right — that in mathematics one might hear the music of the spheres.”
In May, a film based on the 1996 book “The Spy Behind Home Plate” will make its debut. It’s the latest film about Moe Berg, the catcher-turned-World War II officer for the OSS. Aviva Kempner, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, is the director of this documentary (and previously directed a film project about Hank Greenberg). The film will be shown in Washington, New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay area, Phoenix, Milwaukee, Boston, Denver, Atlanta and Minneapolis during a run through the middle of June.
With a new baseball season just underway, the Library of Congress has compiled a list of more than 1,000 songs about the pastime from its sheet music collections.
Ian Johnson, a former pro basketball player in Europe, has published “The Bounce and the Echo,” his effort to rediscover a sport he had become alienated from, and as a way to stave off depression and thoughts of suicide.
From the AP, more on Rick Riley’s new book about Donald Trump’s golf cheating, with vignettes from Mike Tirico and Oscar de la Hoya, and the author’s admission that he took up the book project due to the now-president’s years-long claim that he’s won more than a dozen club championships.
A Few Good Reads
Wright Thompson’s new collection, “The Cost of These Dreams,” has been published by Penguin Books, and he’s begun his book tour in his native Mississippi. The ESPN writer’s golf writing is directly connected to his attempts to understand his father, who was openly moved by Jack Nicklaus’ famous win at The Masters in 1986;
From The Atlantic, Caitlin Flanagan savages those behind the college admissions scandal that includes photoshopped celebrity kids feigning at being athletes in white upper-class sports so they could get accepted to Yale, Stanford and other elite schools;
On Sunday Notre Dame will try to repeat as NCAA women’s basketball champion against Baylor, sparked by a high-octane senior lineup and a coach in Muffet McGraw who’s galvanized many women by her pledge not to hire male assistants and her repeated insistence before ousting the Geno Auriemma-led UConn dynasty that there simply aren’t enough women in power, not just in sports, but across American society;
The U.S. women’s soccer team has filed suit against U.S. Soccer on pay discrimination grounds as it prepares to defend its Women’s World Cup title this summer in France;
Sports psychologists offer some book recommendations to help anyone in or outside of sports with developing self-awareness and a sense of purpose;
Students at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill are getting some text-book learning about a college sports scandal in their midst, from a professor who’s written a book about it;
Baseball’s skewed economics figure to remain turbulent following new contracts for Mike Trout, Bryce Harper and Manny Machado totalling $1 billion as the new season beckoned;
What we read about when we read about sports.
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The Sports Biblio Digest is an e-mail newsletter delivered each Sunday. You can subscribe here and search the archives.
This is Digest issue No. 161, published April 7, 2019.
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