Baseball Books

Unlikely I'll ever read it, but found a copy of this at the town book sale (hard to find a good image online):

https://i.postimg.cc/VkxpDQVN/leflore.jpg

Published in '78, right after his .325/212-hit season with the Tigers. He followed that with two more good ones, then stole 97 bases for the Expos in 1980--three more and he would have been only the third guy to steal 100 after 1900. (Henderson stole 100 the same year, Vince Coleman a few years later.) LeFlore was out of the game after the '82 season; his Wikipedia entry says it was soon revealed that he was five years older than he claimed. Received MVP votes in four of his nine seasons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_LeFlore

I would love to read a book about the most successful ex-con in baseball history! I didn't know that they made a movie based on his life too.

He's still alive. Not being too far from Detroit, I thought to check today to see if it was autographed. No luck. (He and Fidrych both played in the '76 All-Star Game.)

Read Bouton's I'm Glad You Didn't Take It Personally for the first time in years. Very worthy follow-up. Still a few things that are dated, of course--two songs they sing on the bus, in particular--but a great chronicle of all the fallout from Ball Four and the end of Bouton's career (and beginning of his TV career). One chapter is letters received about Ball Four, including one from Ruth Ryan: "...both Nolan and I enjoyed it very much." Another chapter, "Sanctity of the Clubhouse," addresses issue raised above. There's a part involving Doug Radar that I want to quote but can't find at the moment.

Bouton's working for ABC at this point:

I had a great time with the Astros. They made me feel most welcome, and there was a marvelously nutty interview with Doug Rader, the third baseman, who suggested Little Leaguers should actually live one a diet of bases, pitchers mounds and bubble-gm cards.

Bubble-gum cards?

"Oh, yes. They have lots of information on them about hitting and pitching."

Anybody read Evan Drellich's Winning Changes Everything? A friend writes that it's

_a look at the Luhnow-era Astros that offers: a) a case-study reckoning with two decades of league-wide Moneyball cloning; and b) a sobering portrait of Alex Cora in his Houston days (a drunkard and a lout, according to Drellich)._

Pitcher usage was a common fight between them in 2012, Luhnow’s first season of play with the team. Late in games, managers have to deploy their relievers in a way that positions the team to win while also protecting those pitchers’ health. Sometimes relievers throw on multiple days in a row, increasing fatigue and the chance of injury. Even if a reliever does not enter a game, just warming up in the bullpen can be taxing. Luhnow wanted Mills to use his better relievers more frequently.

“What if his arm isn’t feeling well?” Mills said. “We can’t do that, because we’re going to kill this guy.” “What do you mean we’re going to kill this guy?” Luhnow said. “He can’t throw four or five days in a row,” Mills said. “Well, he can, if he only throws an inning here, two-thirds of an inning here, or whatever,” Luhnow said. “No, he can’t. Because he has to warm up,” Mills shot back. “We just can’t walk up there and get this guy to come in the game. He has to warm up; his arm has to get hot.”

never heard of this!

The Celebrant, by Eric Rolfe Greenberg

I have two copies of Thomas Klise’s wild and wildly out-of-print 1974 novel, The Last Western, and my friend Maria gave me both of them. It’s a strange, shaggy, ambitious book—one of those classic Catholic Social Apocalypse/Baseball novels, whose protagonist both pitches in the Major Leagues and becomes the pope, among other things; we talked about it at The Awl back in 2012. As it is not the social baseball novel that I’m writing about here, I will move on from it beyond encouraging you to seek it out. The reason I bring it up has more to do with Maria’s practice of buying a copy of the book whenever and wherever she finds it, and then giving that to someone she thinks would get something out of it. This seemed strange to me at the time, and I told her as much, but it makes more sense to me now. If you are going to love a book that’s hard to find, and want other people to love it, too, that is what you will have to do. And so, at least until Defector Classic Editions comes into existence and publishes a deluxe new edition of the book, I am committing to doing it when and wherever I find a copy of Eric Rolfe Greenberg’s 1983 novel The Celebrant, the book I most enjoyed in 2023.

The Celebrant is easier to find than The Last Western, if nothing else; first editions are expensive and seem decently rare, but you can get copies of the most-recent printing, from 1993, from the University of Nebraska press and on Amazon. And I imagine it would still work if you got it that way, but there was something about how I found it that felt auspicious. Some friends had recommended it years earlier, and critics had praised the book widely when it came out decades before that, but the fact that it had fallen so far out of the conversation—it’s the only book that Greenberg ever published; he doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page—made it seem all the more significant when it finally turned up on a shelf at The Strand. If you can get a Lost Classic on Amazon, it feels less lost, somehow, and maybe even like less of a classic for being on there alongside all the self-published anti-vaccine claptrap and knockoff HDMI cables. The thrill of discovering it, right in its place and where it had never been in any of my previous visits, felt more like what I’d imagined.

However lost it was, The Celebrant is indeed a damn classic. The Last Western concerns the end of everything—a whole world collapsing under the weight of human cynicism, malaise, jealousy, greed, unbelief, and all the other 1970s American Classics. The Celebrant, which is set around the turn of the 20th century and tells the story of a Jewish immigrant family and their complicated personal and professional relationships with baseball in general, the New York Giants more specifically, and the iconic Giants ace Christy Mathewson in particular, is more a novel of beginnings than endings. It is a story about how baseball has made people into Americans, which it always has, and how fraught and complicated and implicating a thing that is. There is a lot of baseball in it, and Greenberg writes it elegantly and expertly; the turn-of-the-century details are carefully wrought; there’s nothing showy about the language, but the steakhouses and train carriages and ballparks are described in evocative and graceful ways. It feels real enough—crowded and smoky and half-drunk, or starched and fancified and lonely—that Greenberg’s detours into more debauched and dreamlike corners are made all the more disorienting.

It is a commanding performance, all told, and Greenberg’s stuff is all the more effective for how well he controls it, and how meticulous he is about setting up what needs to be set up, and how comfortably he changes speeds. As good as the baseball writing is, and as colorful as the color is, what has stayed with me about The Celebrant is how deftly Greenberg navigates the concentric and contradictory layers of reverence and awe and unreality and devotion that make fandom so simultaneously deranging and enriching a lived experience. The Kapinski family comes closer to these icons—to Mathewson, especially, and to the Giants’ irascible manager John McGraw—than they are strictly comfortable with, and ultimately perhaps closer than they can strictly handle. You’re not supposed to do business with your gods.

If what follows is tragic, it is mostly so in the same accumulative way that stories told over sufficiently long periods of time tend to be. Everyone is pushed and pulled by the forces that always push and pull people, and also by the abiding and All-American subsuming of the small by the large, and the past by the future. It’s a smaller book than The Last Western in a bunch of ways, if just as worthy of rediscovery. Both have to do with belief, but if The Last Western is about the crisis of a world without it, The Celebrant is about the strange and shifting shapes that belief can take, and the lonesome places our devotions can take us. - David Roth

Posnanski's Why We Love Baseball has won the 2023 Casey Award for best baseball book of the year. It's his third Casey. How do I know all this? Joe, the world's greatest self-promoter--i.e., the world's most exhausting self-promoter--has a column about it today.

Winners and nominees (launched in 1983):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casey_Award

Bought this at a flea market--$10, still shrink-wrapped; a bit too much in that setting--only because I didn't know it existed until today:

https://i.postimg.cc/fR9xWtBY/kirk.jpg

Came out in '97, two years after Gibson retired and nine years after his famous HR. Oversized hardcover, almost a coffee-table book--surprised he got someone to publish it (he pretty clearly wasn't headed for the HOF). Also surprised the cover photo is him as a Tiger, and not what you'd assume would be on the cover.

Fine player, though--one of three or four Tigers who probably would have been a better pick for MVP than Willie Hernandez.

What's he got to say about his famous homer?

Big-deal acquisition today: Martin Levin, who used to edit Innings, a short-lived Toronto monthly I wrote for, gave me his copy of the 1977 Baseball Abstract, the first one.

https://sabrweb.b-cdn.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/1977-Bill-James-Abstract.jpg

I don't know how many copies James self-published--my guess is 100. (The '78 edition, also self-published, sold 250 according to Wikipedia.) I've been trying for 20 years to get a copy, and I've never so much as seen one for sale online, whether eBay or Abe or anywhere. So I don't know what it's worth, but I'm guessing quite a bit.

(Martin also told me that he's donated some stuff to Cooperstown, including the half-dozen or so issues of Innings. Somewhere in the deepest catacombs of the library there, yes--I'm in the HOF!)

wau

I feel it's like owning a copy of the Magna Carta. I'm somewhat biased.

Damn that's incredible clemenza.

I missed a line in that Wikipedia entry: the first edition sold 75 copies (one of whom was presumably Martin)...I posted about this in Facebook. Half of me was thinking "You shouldn't be attracting attention with something this rare." The other half was laughing at that half: "Haven't you learned yet--no one cares about this stuff. Criminals are busy stealing cars--they're not combing Facebook looking for Baseball Abstracts."

So cool!

Amazing clem, congratulations on your acquisition (and your unofficial HOF induction)!

On the induction, thanks. On the other...Jesus, this is embarrassing...it's a reprint. When Martin gave me the book, I took a quick look and put it right in a bag. Looked exactly like the '78/'79/'80 editions I already have: card-stock cover, a little faded, hand-stapled. I was posting yesterday from a coffee shop on my way home; found the image above online.

So how did I figure out that it's a reprint when I got home? It required a lot of detective work:

https://i.postimg.cc/jSN0FyPy/reprint.jpg

(Thought about posting this in the absent-minded thread--yes, I actually managed not to notice that. If I had bought it online, I'd be looking at the expensive-stupidity thread, created by me for me.)

I don't even have the heart to revisit the Facebook post, where I tagged Martin. Still excited to have it, but obviously not quite where I was yesterday.

Let me now tell you all about the Picasso I bought on eBay last month.

Sorry to go on about this...As I suspected, the reprints are pretty rare in and of themselves:

https://picclick.com/Vintage-Bill-James-Baseball-Abstract-Set-1977-1978-262998858206.html

If that's accurate, this person sold the first five for $2,500, with the '77 and '78 editions reprints; I've got the '77 reprint and originals for '78-'81 (which Mike Saunders--Creem, Angry Samoans--gave to me years ago), so presumably the value would be comparable.

The story of the '77 reprint is pretty interesting according to that link: "reprints are just as rare as they were only produced (allegedly by Bill James' wife) upon written request." I don't know if that's how Martin got his or if he bought it second-hand.

Ordered a copy of this today:

https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/andy-mccullough/the-last-of-his-kind/9780306832598/?lens=hachette-books

Honestly, it was mostly to support the one book store in town--I try to order something every month or two. I don't think it's something I would have bought otherwise, although at least it's a biography rather than an autobiography.