Sports Biblio Digest, 7.19.20: Support Your Favorite Baseball Authors
News, Views and Reviews About Sports Books, History and Culture
Also In This Issue: Baseball and Haiku; Baseball’s Ultimate Road Trip; Black Athletes and Anti-Semitism; Untold Stories of Black Tennis; Earl Weaver; From Recruiting to Campaigning; The World Cup’s First Hat Trick; Fear and Loathing on the Bosporus; Cricket Books; Remembering Barry Jarman
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When the pandemic began to set in and events of all kinds were cancelled en masse, including book festivals, a reader got in touch to suggest that I profile sports book authors whose chances to promote their new books were being shattered.
He’s an author himself, and a good number of subscribers here are as well, and at the time I made a mental note to tackle what I plan to be a continuing project.
With Major League Baseball’s truncated 60-game season scheduled to start this week, I thought I would link to some new baseball books to get things rolling.
One of the immediate results of our public health crisis was the creation of the Pandemic Baseball Book Club, which features 22 baseball book authors (you can buy their books there too, via Bookshop, of which Sports Biblio Digest is an affiliate) and hear them on their podcast.
To celebrate Opening Day, they’re giving away signed copies of their books and some other swag as part of a Grand Slam Giveaway, for which they’re drumming up support on their Twitter feed.
As we’ve also mentioned here before, longtime Los Angeles sports media writer and sports book maven Tom Hoffarth has expanded his usual 30 Baseball Books in 30 Days extravaganza to include 50 new titles, all reviewed and featuring Q & A’s with a good number of the authors.
July is also the month for the annual convention of the Society for American Baseball Research, which is conducting a virtual book exhibit and holding other special Zoom events through next Sunday.
As part of that promotion, the University of Nebraska Press is discounting baseball books in its catalog by 40 percent and offering free shipping. That offer is good through Aug. 15.
The longstanding Ron Kaplan’s Baseball Bookshelf is a vital source of new baseball book releases, bestseller lists, reviews, memorabilia and more. There you can order his definitive “501 Baseball Books Fans Must Read Before They Die,” published by Nebraska in 2013.
While I’m kickstarting this project with baseball books, I'll be contacting authors of all kinds of sports books in the coming weeks, learning more about how they chose their subjects and how they go about their work.
Writing sports books is a labor of love, and I want to show appreciation to individuals who do the vital work of preserving the great stories of the games we play, love to watch and cherish, and who explain their importance to our culture.
I’m not sure how this is going to unfold, but it’s important to get started. The task of plumbing for a deeper understanding of sports has been endangered for years with technological (and now generational) changes in the media, and the industry is reeling even more from the economic devastation of COVID-19 lockdowns.
In producing a newsletter that champions the yeoman writers, authors, photographers, announcers, artists and others who engage in what I call “the imagination of sports,” I want to hear from you, and tell your story too.
Stay tuned for more about this project, and send your suggestions to sportsbiblio@gmail.com. This newsletter is always better when readers tell me what’s on their mind.
A Few Good Reads
As baseball camps were set to rev up, Cubs beat writer Mark Gonzales of the Chicago Tribune gave this reassessment of Earl Weaver’s lauded 1984 book, “Weaver on Strategy,” saying his approach to the game holds up very well in the age of advanced statistics;
Since 2002, Jim and Andrea Siscel of Lynnwood, Wash., have traveled to 323 major- and minor-league ballparks, calling it a great way to see North America. But with only two more to visit in their epic journey, that feat will have to be put on hold, at least for this year, as their plans have been waylaid by COVID-19. They’ve chronicled their travels at the Baseball Road Trip blog;
The Sacramento River Cats, like other teams in the minor leagues, won’t be having a season, but longtime team announcer Johnny Doskow will be making a book appearance with his newly published “Goodnight Em: Baseball and Life Through Haiku.” If you order on his website, you can get an autographed copy. Doskow, who grew up in southern California listening to Vin Scully and Chick Hearn, is profiled here in 2006 by Sacramento magazine;
Before former Auburn football coach Tommy Tuberville romped over former senator and U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions in the Alabama Republican Senate primary runoff this week, sports writer Rick Cleveland had this look at one of the game’s biggest job-jumpers, who stayed on The Plains long enough to beat Alabama six years in a row in the Iron Bowl—and then Nick Saban showed up. Tuberville, who spent shorter spells at Texas Tech and Cincinnati, got more than 60 percent of the vote in a big Donald Trump state with the president’s endorsement. In trying to get his old job back, Sessions won only three of 67 counties, and couldn't even capture Tuscaloosa, home of the Crimson Tide. In November, Tuberville faces Democratic Sen. Doug Jones, who in 2017 scored an epic upset (in partisan terms) to fill the rest of Sessions' term in what had been a very safe seat for him;
Seven years after upsetting Chelsea in the English FA Cup final, Wigan Athletic Football Club has descended into financial administration, up for sale after massive overspending and mismanagement that was too much to overcome with shutdowns related to COVID-19. The club has been deducted 12 points, the standard penalty for financial malfeasance. After a 2-2 draw with Charlton on Saturday, Wigan is 13th in the Championship, one level below the Premier League, 15 points ahead of Barnsley on the bottom. If Wigan finishes in the relegation zone, the punishment will be applied at the start of next season;
It wasn’t many years ago that Istanbul’s big three soccer clubs—Besiktas, Fenerbahce and Galatasaray—could go toe-to-toe with some of the best clubs in Europe. They’ve combined to win all but one Turkish first division title since 1984, but that stranglehold will end this season, and they also may be shut out of the Champions League. But the Super Lig is facing what looks to be long-lasting financial and organizational problems, including struggles with youth development. From 2014, SB Nation on the surreal Istanbul derby between Fenerbahce and Galatasaray;
After DeSean Jackson of the Philadelphia Eagles and former NBA player Stephen Jackson tweeted out anti-Semitic messages, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar railed about what he thinks is a double-standard in the African-American sports and celebrity worlds caught up in Black Lives Matter: “Given the New Woke-fulness in Hollywood and the sports world, we expected more passionate public outrage. What we got was a shrug of meh-rage;”
While DeSean Jackson has apologized and said he would agree to visit Auschwitz with a Holocaust survivor, Stephen Jackson pushed back at Charles Barkley for agreeing with Kareem when he said “I don’t understand how you beat hatred with more hatred;”
Jezebel interviews Cecil Harris, author of the recently published “Different Strokes,” which chronicles the rise of Venus and Serena Williams, and he laments how much he thinks Althea Gibson has become overlooked in the history of black tennis;
With live sports slowly grinding back into action, here’s an updated look at the increasingly perilous state of American sports media, written by Bryan Curtis for The Ringer before more layoffs at Vox Media, including many SB Nation long-furloughed writers. Heaven forbid if there’s another shutdown, or if college football and NFL seasons are shortened or cancelled.
Sports History Files
It was 90 years ago this month that the first soccer World Cup was played in Uruguay, and it was a player on an unheralded U.S. team who notched the competition’s first hat trick. Bert Patenaude of the soccer hotbed town of Fall River, Mass., was only 20 years old when he scored three goals against favored Paraguay in the quarterfinals, but his accomplishment wasn’t recognized until 2006 by FIFA, which had long asserted one of those goals came off the foot of a teammate.
Retro Sports Files
From 1978, Sports Illustrated looks at the then-emerging world of recruiting in women’s collegiate basketball, which was governed by the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women. The all-female organization had an education-based philosophy that ultimately collapsed from encroaching interest by the all-male NCAA, and from women's coaches eyeing greater exposure and resources as basketball grew into a legitimate spectator sport.
I’ve written before about this fascinating, but overlooked piece of Title IX history (and here), best treated in “Playing Nice and Losing,” which is highly critical of the AIAW, running counter to familiar narratives. In 1982, SI served up an epitaph of sorts, just as the NCAA era for women’s sports began, with a bombshell report of an abusive women’s hoops coach who exploited the AIAW’s self-reporting "honor" system.
Sports Book News
At CricketWeb, Martin Chandler rounds up a plethora of cricket books, many new and upcoming titles, plenty to get through the next two or three pandemics.
Also out is a limited-edition of the latest Gideon Haigh offering, “Cricket in Mind." Only 214 copies are being published—reflecting the highest Test score for the Australian legend Victor Trumper—and they’ve all been sold out. Here’s Haigh discussing his work in a recent interview, explaining how he finds stories and why he thinks the process of everyday journalism could “very easily be replaced by Artificial Intelligence.”
At Five Books, Prashant Kidambi, history lecturer at the University of Leicester and author of the 2019 book “Cricket Country,” offers his best books about Indian cricket with a very thorough look through the long lens of history, society and culture in his native land.
Based on “sheer quality,” Kidambi rates Ramachandra Guha’s “A Corner of a Foreign Field” on the top of his list. It was written by an historical sociologist who deeply explores race, religion and caste against the backdrop of the nation and the sport. As Kidambi writes:
“You get a real sense of how cricket became Indianized, how it became politicized, and how it became this extraordinarily popular sport. It’s narrated in a very readable and subtle way.”
Passings
Barry Jarman, 84, was an Australia Test captain, wicketkeeper and pioneering international referee in a venerable cricket career that spanned more than four decades. Here’s a video tribute from the Australian Broadcasting Company.
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The Sports Biblio Digest is an e-mail newsletter delivered on Sunday. You can subscribe here and search the archives. This is Digest issue No. 210, published July 19, 2020.
I’d love to hear what you think about the Digest, and Sports Biblio. Send feedback, suggestions, book recommendations, review copies, newsletter items and interview requests to Wendy Parker at sportsbiblio@gmail.com.