Why not pre-load their virtual bookshelf with some ebooks to get them started? Suggestions for baseball titles available in ebook form are welcome in the comments below, but here are a few of my own.

I got started thinking about this topic for obvious reasons: since I took the Publications position at SABR, I’ve been working to launch more digital books under the SABR umbrella. The first big one just went live and the timing is no coincidence. We wanted to make sure that “Can He Play?”– the definitive book on the history of scouts and scouting, produced by SABR’s Scouts Committee–would be live and available by the time all those holiday e-readers were unwrapped.

Some intro info in case you’re new to this, too. The three biggest players in the ebook device wars each comes equipped to buy from a dedicated online store, but you DON’T HAVE TO stick to that one outlet if you don’t want. Here are the setups the manufacturers want.

• Kinde: Amazon’s Kindle Store
• Nook: Barnes & Noble Nookstore
• iPad/iPod/iPhone: Apple iBookstore

But note that you can run the Kindle app on the iPad, for example. The Kindle store sells files in .amz format but files that are purchased elsewhere in .MOBI or .PRC format can be read by your Kindle, too. The iPad can also run other e-reading software that takes the ePub format, which the Nook also uses. (Basically, EVERYONE now uses EPUB except for Amazon.)

But let’s not rock the boat to get started. Assuming you’ll start with your “native” online bookstore before branching out. Here are some of the gems one can get:

MONEYBALL
by Michael Lewis
If you’re like me, you read this book back in 2003, then lent it to someone and never got it back. After seeing the movie, I wanted to re-read it. So I downloaded a new copy. The paperback costs $15.95. The ebook is about half that.
Kindle Store $8.29
B&N Nookstore $8.29
Apple iBookstore $8.29

BASEBALL BETWEEN THE NUMBERS
by Jonah Keri and the Baseball Prospectus crew
Many people have said that after Moneyball opened their eyes to the actual relevance of stats on the game and how they have been used and mis-used, the next book they read was Baseball Between the Numbers. Full disclosure, I’m working for Baseball Prospectus myself now, but I thought they were keen long before that (and that’s why I wanted to work with them).
The book only seems to be available in the Kindle store right now. I couldn’t find it on Nook or Apple. The Apple iBookstore is almost impossible to search, though, which is one of its biggest drawbacks. You have to know what you’re looking for. More on this later.
Kindle Store $9.87

THE CAPTAIN
by Ian O’Connor
This book about Derek Jeter came out this past April. I feel the publisher has priced the ebook a little high–and if you look you’ll see it’s priced differently at different stores! Curious, no? See the list below. At this point O’Connor probably needs to write a revision that includes him reaching 3000 hits, too, but they’ll probably wait until he retires to revise.
The hardcover list price is $26.
Apple iBookstore$12.99 ebook
B&N Nookstore$15.60 ebook (they sell the hardcover for $17.33)
Amazon Kindle Store$9.10 ebook (they sell the hardcover for $17.16)

THE LAST BOY: Mickey Mantle
by Jane Leavy
While we’re talking about great Yankees, if you’re a Yankees fan of a certain age and haven’t read this bio of Mantle yet, you probably should.
Nookstore $9.99
Amazon Kindle Store $9.99
Apple iBookstore $9.99

One of the coolest things about ebooks, though, is that they are just as easy to get from small publishers as from the big guys. Publishers who have almost no chance of making it onto what little physical shelf space is left in America’s shrinking book retail world can now reach readers through digital.

Here are some of the lesser known books I should mention:

PUMPSIE AND PROGRESS
by Bill Nowlin and several other researchers
Built around a biographical essay on the life and career of Pumpsie Green, the first African American to play for the Boston Red Sox, the last major league team to integrate, Pumpsie & Progress offers essays from a half-dozen authors on matters ranging from Jackie Robinson to the Red Sox of today. Because of a pricing glitch, this ebook was $14.20, but now it’s $9.99. Right now it’s only available on the Kindle Store, but Rounder Books may expand their ebook program in the future to other formats.
Amazon Kindle Store $9.99

In keeping with the theme, how about this one?

Curveball: The Remarkable Story of Toni Stone the First Woman to Play Professional Baseball in the Negro League
by Martha Ackerman
Amazon Kindle Store

Or how about this gem? I haven’t read it yet, but the professional reviews look very promising:

Playing with the Enemy: A Baseball Prodigy, a World at War, and a Field of Broken Dreams
by Gary Moore

I’ll just quote the BOOKLIST Review: “Gene Moore, from tiny Sesser, Illinois, was signed by the Brooklyn Dodgers at age 15 in 1940. After Pearl Harbor, the Dodgers arranged for him to be a member of a traveling U.S. Navy baseball team to entertain troops in the European theater. Eventually, the team was assigned stateside to guard a select group of German prisoners in Louisiana. The Germans had been captured when their submarine, the U-505 (now a featured attraction at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry), experienced mechanical problems in the vicinity of Allied warships. The story of the relationship that developed between the prisoners and their guards is a fascinating one. [Gene teaches them to play baseball. -ctan] … A moving profile of one, nearly unknown member of the Greatest Generation.”
Amazon Kindle Store $9.99

I discovered the above book, by the way, from a niche bestseller list on Amazon, which lists the top sellers for the Kindle on the subject of Baseball History. You can see that list here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/digital-text/159822011/ref=pd_zg_hrsr_kinc_2_6_last

And look what’s already cracked the top ten! The book I just worked on for SABR, the Scouts book, CAN HE PLAY?

CAN HE PLAY? collects the contributions of 26 members of the Society for American Baseball Research on the subject of scouts, including biographies and historical essays. The book touches on more than a century of scouts and scouting with a focus on the men (and the occasional woman) who have taken on the task of scouring the world for the best ballplayers available. In CAN HE PLAY? we meet the “King of Weeds,” a Ph.D. we call “Baseball’s Renaissance Man,” a husband-and-wife team, pioneering Latin scouts, and a Japanese-American interned during World War II who became a successful scout—and many, many more. The legendary Tom Greenwade and the development of the New York Yankees scouting system, interviews with former players Johnny Pesky and Fernando Perez about being scouted, and much more.

Amazon Kindle Store $9.99
B&N Nookstore $9.99
OmniLit $9.99 (.mobi, .epub, and .pdf all for sale here)

There’s much more to discover in the digital realm, so much more than the one-size-fits-all conglomerate chain bookstores could ever serve.

Hey, maybe I should do a Why I Like Baseball ebook…

YOGI BERRA: Eternal Yankee, by Allen Barra, $27.95 hardcover
I keep getting Berra and Barra mixed up. But indeed the subject of the book and the author are not related. Since the passing of Phil Rizzuto, Yogi is the last significant standard-bearer of a generation of Yankees. Tommy Byrne is gone, too, but Yogi is the one most recognized, most loved, most cheered in his appearances at the stadium. One really wonders how much longer he’ll be around, and something tells me I will want to read this book twice. Now, while I can still shake Yogi’s hand in Spring Training, hanging out in the shade waiting for batting practice to start, and again later (hopefully much later) after he does eventually go on to the big ballgame in the sky. It’ll probably feel quite different both times.

ROLLIES FOLLIES: A Hall of Fame Review of Baseball stories and Stats, Lists and Lore, by Rollie Fingers and Yellowstone Ritter, $14.95 paperback
This is a book I didn’t intend to pick up, but at BookExpo America I was on my way to a meeting and walked past the Clerisy Press booth–or almost did as the word BASEBALL on one of their banners caught my eye. Now, I thought I knew all the publishers of baseball books, from the university presses up to the big guys. So I stopped to pick up their catalog and the next thing you know I am talking baseball with two guys, one of whom, it turned out, was a descendant of the guy Crosley field was named for. We talked non-stop about baseball for a good 15-20 minutes, and at the end they handed me this book with the comment, “I’ve never met a woman, or anyone really, who knew as much about baseball as you do.” I told him it’s because I’ve read So Many Books about the sport. (Which is true.) The book looks to be a fun compendium of unique lists, anecdotes, facts… the last thing I’d call it is dry, which is why I’m hard-pressed to just say “facts.” The book is less like a lecture or even an interview with Mr. Fingers and more like a night out on the town with him. Nice mixture of history and modern stuff, too.

GAME SIX, by Mark Frost, advanced reading copy
Frost already has a track record as a NY Times bestselling author for “The Match” and “The Greatest Game Ever Played,” so tackling Game Six (the Fisk game) of the 1975 World Series seems a no-brainer. Especially given the success of Richard Bradley’s “The Greatest Game” about the 1978 “Bucky Dent’) game. I expect this to be gripping reading, but Game 6 is one I’ve written about a lot myself, so just like with Bradley’s book I expect to be nitpicking it a lot as I go. The great stories, just like the best myths and fairy tales, can be told over and over without losing anything in the re-telling. The publisher is banking on the Sawx making the postseason. The book has an October release date.

DIRTY WATER: A Red Sox Mystery, by Mary-Ann Tirone Smith and Jere Smith, $22.95 hardcover
This book is by a mother and son writing team and published by the small but focused “Hall of Fame Press,” based in Kingston, Rhode Island and the Scholar Athlete Hall of Fame. After their autographing I stopped by the publishers booth and encountered the authors again and we talked Red Sox for a good ten minutes. The book has a lovely package and I’m already predicting it will be a great Father’s Day gift in these parts. (Though not for my Dad. He is Yankees Only.) Mary-Ann has written mysteries for other publishers, and Jere writes a baseball blog, so she said it was a great chance to team up. I am looking forward to a fun read, as soon as I get time for it!

Finally, a baseball-related book…

TESTING THE ICE, by Sharon Robinson, $16.99 hardcover, illustrated children’s book
This is a children’s book by Jackie’s daughter, who has written several other books, too, but this one is a beaut. Yes, I actually read this one all the way through, since it is a kids book and so short enough for me to fit in. But I couldn’t stop turning the pages. The art is breathtakingly gorgeous, painted by Kadir Nelson, some based on historical photographs, but just incredibly interpreted. The two-page spread of Jackie sliding home in the 1955 World Series (Yogi Berra blocking the plate) is so amazing I find myself rooting for the Dodgers for a minute. (Yogi insists to this day that Robinson was out.) I’m not an artist so I lack the language to describe the richness of this art. It belongs in a museum. And how can you go wrong with a true story from Sharon Robinson’s childhood that makes a great picture book? This one is autographed to me, so I must go buy a copy for my nephews, Owen and Carson. And I will.

Thanks to all the publishers who make sure my To Read queue is never empty. In this batch, Times Books, W. W. Norton, Hall of Fame Press, Hyperion, Clerisy, and Scholastic. Actual reviews to come.

Cecilia Tan, WILBB: I think a lot of fans, and certainly the owners, are still in denial about the whole steroids issue. They just want it to go away and pretend it either never happened or that at least it’s “over” now. Do you see it going away any time soon?

Dale Tafoya: Well, I think steroid use in baseball has been significantly curbed, especially since MLB began dishing out these 50-game suspensions to busted players. But it would be naive for us to think that the game is completely clean, especially since there is still no HGH testing in MLB. From a historical perspective, it’s clear that a majority of premiere players, including pitchers, who played during the late-1990s and the early part of the millennium were using some sort of performance-enhancing drug. How many careers have mysteriously tumbled since MLB started its testing program? But I think most fans are getting somewhat fatigued about the controversy and won’t be shocked if other superstars are exposed. They are gaining a clearer understanding on how steroids were a big part of the game. Period. It would be interesting to see how much interest this controversy will generate 30 or 40 years down the line. Based on my research, 1996-2003 should be painted as the steroids era in baseball. This seven-year span in baseball should be considered a period when players used illegal supplements to illegally improve performance, altering records. This period should be isolated and not be compared to other years in baseball.

WILBB: A-Rod really seems to be a trouble magnet. You knew, somehow, if his name was one of the 104 supposedly anonymous positive tests, that it was going to leak. So of course it did. Do you think we’ll ever see the other 103 names? Do you think we should?

Dale Tafoya: I definitely think those names will be leaked soon and more top-tier players will be exposed and careers tainted. We have speculated for years that larger, beefed-up players like McGwire, Canseco and Sosa were the obvious juicers. But based on the names that have been linked with steroids in the past, juicers come in all shapes and sizes. Remember the slim and toned Luis Gonzales, who pulled a Brady Anderson and abruptly hit 57 homers in 2001, during the peak of steroid-use? Why did Mike Piazza’s numbers deteriorate after the 2002 season? What happened to Nomar Garciaparra? Steroids made a lot of money for a lot of players.

WILBB: Is steroids in baseball really something Congress should be spending their time on?

Dale Tafoya: Based on our country’s economic downtown, the epidemic of chemically-enhanced, million-dollar athletes playing baseball could be put on the shelf for a minute. But I must say that the Congressional Hearings in 2005, which included McGwire, Canseco, Sosa, Palmeiro and Schilling was riveting television and that footage will be a big part of MLB’s history. Palmeiro wagged his finger and McGwire refused to discuss the past.

WILBB: Why is steroids in baseball such a huge issue, whereas in football it’s hardly noticed?

Dale Tafoya: That’s a good question and I believe it has something to do with people’s perception about baseball: There was always a consensus that the ordinary-sized person––the overweight, the slim, the short people could just slide on a uniform and play the game. Because of the physical nature of football, fans understand that size and strength requirements. That’s just my theory; some may disagree.

WILBB: I’m curious how you got into being a sportswriter. What’s your story?

Dale Tafoya: I enjoy writing about my passions and one of them is baseball. Since I briefly played college baseball and passionately followed the sport for 25 years, I explored a career as a journalist. So I took journalism courses, read a ton of books on writing, read good journalism, and won some awards in college. I also grew up on good sports journalism in the Bay Area. Sports columnists such as Dave Newhouse, Bruce Jenkins, Ron Kroichick, and Glenn Dickey were great inspirations to my writing career. Then I wrote for a few local publications and websites, which helped establish a platform to write my first book.

WILBB: Was it difficult to decide to write a book like Bash Brothers? Have
you been accused of “bashing” the sport?

Dale Tafoya: The idea to write the book really sprung from my fascination with the Bash Brothers, Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire. Growing up in the Oakland area, little leaguers like myself idolized them as the duo who helped propel the A’s back into the playoffs. Their arrival in Oakland brought back the spotlight on the franchise. So there was some emotion attached to this subject, but as a journalist, I had to remain objective. Most of the feedback I’ve received, though, is that I was fair to Canseco and McGwire, especially since they refused to be interviewed for the book. The book details the inception of steroid use in baseball––dating back to the mid-1980s. Personally, I believe a few players had already dabbled with steroids before Canseco claims he began using in the winter of 1984. With or without Mr. Canseco, it was a culture that was going to seduce and ultimately overwhelm baseball. And it did. I began this project in 2004––before the 2005 congressional hearings––when some players were more willing to talk about Canseco and McGwire. In all, I interviewed over 150 former teammates, coaches, scouts, friends, lovers, trainers and journalists for this book, which was acquired by Kevin Cuddihy, one of the acquisitions editors at Potomac Books in April 2007. The book was originally scheduled to be released in the summer of 2008, but Potomac wanted to capitalize on the scandal and pushed it up four months.

WILBB: What do you think is next on the horizon for the steroids scandals?

Dale Tafoya: Well, if those 103 positive tests are released to the public and more superstars are uncovered, it’s obviously going to smear baseball and stir more controversy. I’m not sure what’s next, but nothing would surprise me, even if Bud Selig was one of the 103 on that list.

WILBB: From my perspective, the owners were willfully negligent in letting a whole drug subculture flourish in major league clubhouses. Now they at least seem like they want to clean up. Do they really? What about the players? Should players be policing themselves better?

Dale Tafoya: If players like Ken Caminiti and Jose Canseco hadn’t spilled the beans in 2002, which spurred a congressional probe and pressured MLB into implementing a mandatory steroid testing policy, we probably would still be seeing shattered home-run records and 50-year old players going for the Triple Crown. Back in 1987, Reggie Jackson told reporters that no player would ever hit 70 home runs. Well, a decade later, steroids enabled some hitters to reach and surpass that incredible mark. We just can’t legitimize that era of baseball. Don’t get me wrong: The home runs were real; money was real; attendance was real; but players, owners and executives were living a lie. It wasn’t real baseball.

Owners and players are only trying to clean up the sport after they’ve been caught. Owners and executives were aware of steroid use in baseball, but I’m not sure many of them knew how to address it, especially since that type of baseball was so profitable for them. Players were using steroids with minimal side effects. I can remember the thrilling home run chase in 1998, when McGwire and Sosa brought baseball back into the spotlight. Nine years later, 2009, we realize it was a lie. Those players were cheating and acquired an edge. They shouldn’t be considered greater––based on statistics––than past baseball greats such as Willie Mays, Ted Williams and Hank Aaron. Same game; but different era. The steroids era was about money and muscle.

WILBB: If you had a chance to sit down with Jose Canseco for a cup of coffee now, what would you want to ask him or say to him?

I sort of feel bad for the guy. He blew millions and is an attention-whore. But while growing up in the late 1980s, he was a player I modeled myself after. One fact about Canseco is this––after getting beaned, he never charged the mound. That big, muscular herculean figure was hit many times throughout his career, and he pointed, threatened and strolled toward the mound, but he never went after a pitcher. So my question would be: why? But he’ll probably say he did.

(Dale’s book Bash Brothers was published by Potomac Books. Click HERE to buy it through Amazon.com and a portion of the proceeds will go to support Why I Like Baseball.)

It’s not yet live on Fictionwise or the Kindle Store, but right now it can be bought directly from Ravenous as PDF, .prc (Kindle compatible), and Epub formats (compatible with lots of devices and software readers).

As the marketing pitch goes: “When Casey Branigan meets major league baseball player Tyler Hammond at a photo shoot, she finds the fun and excitement her life needs. As a manager in a big Boston design firm, Casey’s life has become lackluster – but her affair with Tyler promises to change that. Quickly caught up in the whirlwind that surrounds celebrity athletes, Casey travels all over the country to watch Tyler pitch. The sex is breathtaking and Casey loves the lifestyle fame and fortune affords. Tyler is on a winning streak, and he thinks Casey is the reason why. But Casey must decide for herself whether this is just a summer fling. Or is Casey starting a hot streak of her own?”

Buy it at Ravenous: here!

Meanwhile, I noticed my baseball-themed erotic short story, Baseball Blues, is also up for free download. So if you want a taste of things, check it out here. Yankees fans will easily be able to tell what real life player the male character is based on (and no, it is NOT Derek Jeter).

• The Greatest Game, by Richard Bradley
• It Takes More Than Balls, by Deidre Silva and Jackie Koney
• The Spitball Knuckleball Book, by Tom Mahl
• Bash Brothers, by Dale Tafoya

The Greatest Game: The Yankees, the Red Sox, and the Playoff of ’78
by Richard Bradley

There are some classic legends and tales that can be told over and over again in many different ways, and even though we know how they end, each telling is just as captivating. The Christmas story, the sinking of the Titanic, the Odyssey… and the story of how the Yankees and Red Sox did battle on that fateful October day in 1978.

Bradley is a fluid and captivating writer who has researched all the interesting backstories and the intriguing characters (like managers Don Zimmer and Billy Martin), and retells not only the events of the game, but also how the significance of the game fit in a highly turbulent era for baseball and the country. Free agency, race issues, changes in the media, all created a unique atmosphere that only increased the place of the game in the historical context. He brings in elements of each team’s history, both in relation to each other as rivals and each as a sociological force in their home city.

Let’s not forget that it’s fun to read about the game, too. Bradley recreates key moments with great clarity. The description of Mike Torrez throwing the first pitch to Mickey Rivers comes on the 11th page of the chapter on the “Top of the First.” A sample:

Rivers was an unconventional leadoff hitter in one way: in 555 at-bats that season he had walked just 27 times. He… loved to swing at first-pitch fastballs. In the first game of a late September series the year before against the Red Sox, Rivers had lined three hits on first pitches. The next night, Red Sox pitcher Reggie Cleveland had begun the bottom of the first by nailing Rivers in the ribs. The game was in the Bronx, and as Yankee fans began hurling beer and other unpleasantries in Cleveland’s direction, Carlton Fisk had trotted to the mound to ensure that his pitcher wasn’t rattled. “Let’s see the little bastard try to hit that first pitch,” Cleveland had told Fisk.

As third baseman Jack Brohamer moved two steps in on the infield grass in case Rivers should bunt, Torrez starting with a breaking pitch, thinking that Rivers would guess fastball and swing over the pitch. But Rivers took it low, for a ball.

“The Greatest Game” is a nice-looking hardcover and would make an excellent gift for any baseball fan who wants to re-live the intensity of that late-70s era. If you got them “The Bronx is Burning” (book or DVD) last year, this is your follow-up gift. The hardcover is still available from Amazon
and if you are low on cash, there is also a paperback editionwith a less dignified cover and the more lurid subtitle of The Greatest Game: The Day that Bucky, Yaz, Reggie, Pudge, and Company Played the Most Memorable Game in Baseball’s Most Intense Rivalry.

It Takes More Than Balls: The Savvy Girls’ Guide to Understanding and Enjoying Baseball
by Deidre Silva and Jackie Koney

This is for the baseball fans on your list who are just catching fire with their enthusiasm for the game. I would say it’s mostly for the female fans, because some guys would take offense at any book which purports to tell them the stuff they were supposed to learn by osmosis magically through the Y-chromosome just from hanging out in sports bars. But I will tell you, from hanging around in those selfsame bars, that a lot of guys don’t know the difference between a forkball and a split-finger fastball, nor that the foul pole is fair territory, nor why it is that after a manager calls for an intentional walk, he usually pulls that pitcher (instead of letting the next guy do it). I know these things because I’m a relentless student of the game, but The Savvy Girls have it all spelled out for you in their fun and informative book.

(By the way, if you have a male friend you think needs a book like this and he’d be offending by the implied attack on his masculinity that a “girl’s book” might bring, I suggest Zack Hemple’s Watching Baseball Smarter, which came out around the same time, and covers much the same territory as the Savvy Girls’ book.)

The Savvy Girls cover stats, history, game strategy, and just about everything else you can think of and they make it all entertaining to read, too, with anecdotes and examples.

A sample:

Sometimes successfully managing a team means holding your tongue. In 1987, when the oft-vocal Lou Piniella was managing the Yankees… New York was playing in Los Angeles and leading the game, 1-0. Pitching the game were two starters known for their craftiness and trickery, Tommy John for the Yankees and Don Sutton for the Angels. … Television cameras showed Sutton in the Angels’ dugout taking sandpaper out of his pocket. … [Steinbrenner] was incensed to see [obvious evidence of cheating]. He called Piniella to ask what the manager intended to do about Sutton “doctoring” the ball. Referring to the fact that the Yankees were winning, Piniella told his boss he wasn’t planning on busting Sutton…. “What it means, George,” Piniella said, “is that our guy is cheating better than their guy.”

Points off, girls, for saying the game was in Los Angeles, when the Angels have played in Anaheim since 1966, but you won’t find many errors in this book. (Buy it from Amazon.)

The Spitball Knuckleball Book
by Tom E. Mahl

This is a “coffee table” book that arrived in the mail recently, from a small publisher called Trick Pitch Press. It’s a lovely piece of work, possibly a labor of love, that details the history of baseball’s two most infamous pitches and the men who have thrown them. Biographies of the pitchers are divided into “The Legals,” (Eddie Cicotte, Urban Shocker, et. al.) the “Great Illegals,” (Gaylord Perry, Don Drysdale), “The Dry Spitter–The Knucklecurve” (Burt Hooton, Freddie Fitzsimmons), The Knuckleball (Hoyt Wilhelm, Jim Bouton, Tim Wakefield…). The biographies are copiously illustrated, with many, many photos of the various pitchers’ grips. An extensive section on how to throw the trick pitches, especially the knucklecurve, is included.

Author Mahl spent four years researching the book, and by all appearances self-published the book. (Buy it here.) That alone makes it a unique gift, as it doesn’t appear to be widely available in bookstores.

The book is not perfect. It needed a professional proofreader–for example, Pedro Ramos is listed in the caption on his bio as “Padro Ramos,” but even world renowned Sports Illustrated photographer Ron Modra’s book has caption misspellings in it (“Cal Rikpin” “Raphael Palmeiro”) so one cannot really say that the quality is lower on this book than on what one finds from the big presses. They also have amateur editing mistakes, like
Ramos played for a secession of awful Washington Senators teams in the late ’50s.” A good editor would have changed that mistake from “secession” to “succession.” But again, these kinds of mistakes are actually becoming all too common in publishing as a whole, as bigger presses cut corners.

Bash Brothers: A Legacy Subpoenaed
by Dale Tafoya

This is a book that was also in need of one of those copyeditors. Tafoya tries to be as colorful a writer as his brash subjects, Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire, but one gets the impression the book was written quickly and edited even more quickly. The result is dumb copyediting mistakes like the word “fanfare” appearing as “fan fare” and plain bad word usage like in this description of the rough-and-tumble playing and living conditions faced by McGwire in Dominican Winter baseball: “The luxuries and amenities he enjoyed in American eluded him.” Elude is a synonym for escape or dodge. The amenities ran away from him? I don’t think so.

The fact that there is a weak or shoddy sentence like this on nearly every page almost caused me to give up on this book. I started reading it only to put it down again many many times. But eventually it won me over as an important addition to the canon of baseball history. I wouldn’t give this one as a gift, because I wouldn’t be able to do it without issuing an apology for the seeming lack of editing, but I will recommend it to anyone trying to come to grips with “the steroid thing” themselves.

Every fan has to make their own decision where they stand on steroids, but no matter how you feel, you should be informed. It’s amazing how much information about what went on in the 1980s and early 1990s is already seemingly forgotten by commentators and columnists on the issue. The story of Canseco’s meteoric rise as a star in Oakland, his struggles in the minors and later his run-ins with the police, McGwire arriving on his heels in Oakland and the entire “Bash Brothers” phenomenon is all fascinating reading, and more importantly, quite relevant to all that is still going on with steroids and other performance enhancing drugs in MLB today.

Tafoya has done what seems to be fairly exhaustive research and interviews, and the book presents a fairly meaty picture of a tumultuous time in baseball that is already being shoved by some into the mists of forgotten history. Some of the facts are intriguing, like the A’s were one of the first teams to employ a conditioning coach who forced the players through stretching drills; now all teams do so. Others are ironic: the A’s 1986 Media Guide featured a photo of Canseco and the headline “The Natural.” Thomas Boswell called Canseco “the most conspicuous example of a player who has made himself great with steroids” on national television in 1988–twenty years ago. Tafoya’s book will be an incredible resource for historians and writers 20 and 50 years down the road who are still trying to make sense of it all. It is, in a lot of ways, a very raw resource, only one step removed from the transcripts and clippings that formed the basis of the research. So the bad word usage and the weak sentence construction in the end come off as almost forgivable for me, the way spots and graininess are in old movie footage. It annoys me that it didn’t receive the editing polish it should have, but I’m glad to have it on my reference shelf. (Buy it from Amazon.)

I’ve got a stack of books I’ve been working my way through which I’ll be reviewing here ASAP, partly in case anyone wants gift-giving advice for Yankee-loving family members this Xmas.

THE GREATEST GAME: The Yankees, the Red Sox, and the Playoff of ’78, by Richard Bradley
BASH BROTHERS by Dale Tafoya
a retrospective on Yankee Stadium
and a few others will all be reviewed soon!

I may have mentioned in earlier chronicles that one of the ways I judge how baseball-crazed a part of the country is, is by counting how many baseball and softball diamonds one can see when coming in to land at the airport. Coming in to Logan, for example, you can count literally a hundred fields from just a few minutes before landing. Orient Heights alone has a dozen. (Whereas the Dallas area… not so much.) Cleveland definitely counts.

The morning’s first session was by Jeff Katz, who has just written a book on his presentation subject: how the Kansas City A’s were essentially a farm club for the Yankees. (The book is The Kansas CIty A’s and the Wrong Half of the Yankees published by Maple Street Press.) This is not ground-breaking news–it’s common knowledge and was widely lambasted in the press during the era when it was going on (1954 to 1960). But Katz’s research uncovered some really wonderfully damning evidence, including letters of Walter O’Malley bitching about the situation, and such. If you’re not familiar with the story, it goes something like this. When Connie Mack was trying to sell the financially ruined A’s, a man name Arnold Johnson wanted to buy them. At the time, he had just bought Yankee Stadium and he stadium of the Kansas City Blues,the Yankees’ farm team in KC, from Del Webb. Some AL owners opposed the team sale to Johnson, including Calvin Griffith in Washington and one or two others. Mack even organized a syndicate to try to buy the team and keep it in Philadelphia. And Charles Finley was also interested in buying the A’s.

But the fix was in, and after a few fruitless meetings, the team was sold to Johnson, who then hired Del Webb’s construction company to rebuild the Blues’ stadium for a major league team. The entire font office of the A’s consisted of former Yankees employees. In the 5 years before Johnson had bought the team, the Yankees had made 28 trades, only two with the Philadelphia A’s. In the five years after he bought the team, the Yankees made 29 trades, 16 of them with Johnson’s KC A’s. And pretty much every trade was in the Yankees’ favor. When Enos Slaughter wasn’t doing that well, they dumped him in KC. Then when he rejuvenated and became KC MVP, the Yankees gt him back.. for the waiver price. Ralph Terry was sent to KC for 2 years for some seasoning, then brought back to New York when he began to excel. (Not mentioned in the presentation, but I will here: KC Is also where Billy Martin was exiled after the Copacabana incident.)

The relationship was so blatant that when the A”s traded for Roger Maris, various Yankees weer hear to remark in the clubhouse “We got Maris, we got Maris,” and although Clete Boyer was a bonus baby for the A’s, meaning he had o stay on their roster for a minimum of two years…. they gave him to the Yankees before that. Rumor also was that he ha been signed with “Yankee money,” and indeed in later years Tom Greenwade, the famous Yankee scout who signed Mickey Mantle, would talk about Boyer being one of “his” boys on the pennant winning clubs.

What put a stop to it was Johnson’s death in 1960, after which the team was sold to Charlie Finley. A photograph that appeared in the newspaper depicted Finley standing next to a schoolbus on fire with gouts of smoke pouring from it. Painted on the side of the bus were the words “Shuttle Bus To Yankee Stadium.”

I then made a last swing through the book dealers room. I was about to leave to go find some lunch while the banquet was going on when a friend gave me his banquet ticket because he decided to spend the time in the microfilm stacks of the Cleveland Public Library.

I sat with Merrie Fidler, author of a great book on the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (The Origins and History of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League). The cheesecake was quite delicious, and Mark Armour won the Bob Davids award for service to SABR.

The keynote speaker was Ron Shapiro, who is a motivational speaker who writes business how-to books, also a lawyer, and also one of the first baseball agents when free agency came along. He had close ties to the Orioles, was Cal Ripken Jr.’s agent, as well as Minnesota’s Kirby Puckett, and many others. He told a number of anecdotes about the Orioles of the late 70s and 1980s, including a hilarious one about Len Sakata that I can’t do justice to. Then he gave a 20 minute motivational talk on how to “Dare to Prepare,” which is the theme of the book he recently wrote (on mega sale right now through Amazon: Dare to Prepare, and a copy of which was given to every attendee of the luncheon. It was odd because it felt a little like a sales pitch, and yet he wasn’t selling us the book–we all already had a copy. I conclude that he really believes what he says and like an Evangelist loves telling others and helping others. As it turned out, I found a LOT Of what he said to be right on target to the turnaround my small publishing business is having (or hopefully having). It still seemed odd to preach it to a SABR audience, but, at least it wasn’t boring.

After that came a “roundtable’ which was really just a Q&A session with Ron’s son Mark Shapiro, the GM of the Indians, and Mike Veeck (son of Bill Veeck as in Wreck and the man once known as the creator of Disco Demolition Night, bu now better known as the genius behind the St. Paul Saints and the author of a how-to-succeed book himself called Fun Is Good.)

The questions ranged far and wide. Among the tidbits I jotted down because they are of interest to me, Veeck said that 46% of his minor league team fanbase is female, and that in Charleston, SC where he has a team they have worked a lot with the local community such that their African-American attendance is aruond 9%, which is twice the national average. Shapiro admitted he is not involved at all on the marketing side of things, but he acknowledged that although they want to please purists, the flat truth of the matter is that the team needs to appeal to “people who are not white 50-70 year olds.” Which I thought was a gutsy thing to say to a group like SABR which is, well, mostly white 50-70 year olds. But people seemed to respect his honesty, if not the answer itself. One member asked how Veeck would market SABR itself, which has a desire to be not just a haven for that demographic. Veeck said “I would use a photo of [names a member who is well known to the group and is a middle aged white guy], and caption it ‘We’re not just about beautiful figures.’” Which got a huge laugh. He went on to say emphasize what’s fun about SABR and people’s mutual love of the game.

I nearly forgot the other special event of the day from this morning, was the premiere of a new movie documentary, “Baseball Discovered,” which was made by MLB Advanced Media and which followed SABR member David Block on a trip to England in search of baseball’s ancestry. John Thorn is also prominently featured in the film, and after the one hour film was shown Block, Thorn, Tom Schieber of the Hall of Fame, and Sam Marchiano (the producer of the film for MLBAM) all spoke on a panel and took questions. The documentary is really great, and while in the UK making it, publicity about their filing led a woman in Surrey to bring forth an 18th century diary she had found in an old shed which clearly has the earliest recorded written mention of baseball, in the 1755 diary of one William Bray. And by wild coincidence, there is a Bill Bray pitching in the major leagues right now who is a relative of his! Not only that, Bll Bray pitched in the game LAST NIGHT for Cincinnati, which meant he was in town! MLBAM invited him to the premiere, too, and he got up and said a few words about how awesome it was to be connected to the history of the game that way. Really neat.

There is no DVD on sale yet. It will son be available on iTunes, will stream from mlb.com (www.mlb.com/baseballdiscovered/) and soon will be distributed (still being worked out).

I made sure not to miss David W. Smith’s presentation on the Importance of Strike One (art 2). He started this topic last year and continued it. Using Retrosheet pitch by pitch data, he analyzed over 3.4 million plate appearances and over 13 million pitches. Among the things he found: batters foul off a lot more pitches now than they did in previous eras, and that the path one takes to get the first strike or to 1-1 matters. Batters who swung and missed on the first pitch or the second pitch weer likely to do badly in he at bat even if they worked the count full later. He described perfectly the “first pitch dilemma.” The pitcher is suppose to “get ahead in the count” by throwing a strike, but if the batter puts the first ball in play, his chances of getting a hit are much higher than on later pitches in the at bat. So he has to throw a strike, but not give him anything good to hit. Hmm.

Then Pete Palmer and Dick Cramer repeated their 35 year old study on clutch hitting, but with using he more and better data now available, to see if Bill James’ assertion that perhaps clutch hitting does exist, we merely haven’t been able to isolate it from the statistical “fog” of randomness around it. The new conclusion for Palmer and Cramer was the same: clutch hitting probably doesn’t exist and that the fog is still really darn thick. David Ortiz really did have two extraordinary years in 2005 and 2006 though.

My brain was full at that point, so I did not see the last two research presentations, and went off to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum.

As it turns out, the museum is having a “Baseball Rocks!” exhibit, which was really neat and interesting, combining stuff from their own collection with memorabilia from the Baseball Heritage Museum, for an exhibit that could easily ave fit right in at the Cooperstown National Baseball Hall of Fame. It was basically a lot of juxtaposition of popular music artifacts like sheet music and 78 and 45 records with baseball memorabilia and text describing the importance of each thing. Like sheet music from the 1858 “Base Ball Polka”–the earliest known published baseball song–written by J. R. Blodgett, who played with the Niagara Base Ball Club of Buffalo, NY. Or the 1935 song, by Eleanor Gehrig and Fred Fisher, “I Can’t Get To First Base With You,” the cover of which showed Lou (smoking a cigarette and looking very Hollywood) with an inset of Eleanor and both of their signatures printed on. They also connected the emergence of black entertainers into the fledgling rock and roll in popular music with Jackie Robinson breaking the color line. Apparently Denny McLain played the organ at a professional level (he apparently had to do organ practice before baseball) and that George Thorogood played semi-pro ball before making it as a musician.

I finished off the night with friends and a beer at the Bier Markt, a place with a fantastically large selection of belgian beers, and also delicious pomme frite (fries) with flavored mayo belgian style to go with. Yum.

So, signing off from another great SABR Convention. Next summer will be in downtown Washington DC!

Now, when I left off today, in the mile of the day, I was running to try to catch a presentation on the “Mitchell 89.” That is, a study of the 89 players named in the Mitchell report and looking at whether taking performance enhancing drugs actually enhanced their performance. The study was undertaken by four researchers, Pat Kilgo, Jeff Switchenko, Brian Schmotzer, and Paul Weiss.

Among the fascinating facts their study seemed to uncover is the fact that players taking steroids appeared to enhance their offensive statistics by a factor of 12%, but if you cut Barry Bonds from the study, the effect is lessened to 7 percent. Still significant, but he was a big skew factor. Also, they found that the players reported to have taken HGH did NOT show any improvement in performance–in fact some measures were slightly negative. (This doesn’t mean HGH is harmful to performance, more likely that the guys taking it were doing it to try to recover from injury, and the effect of the injury is seen in the numbers.)

Andy Andres, a SABR member and a college professor who teaches both physiology and baseball statistics at Tufts, Harvard, and B.U. has posited from his studies that steroids ought to give between a 5% and 10% increase in offensive statistics, and that HGH ought not to, and interestingly this seems to bear it out. Further study is needed, but it was an interesting analysis.

Earlier, I was describing the beautiful Cleveland Public Library, was I not? They have an outstanding baseball photograph collection, which they ad a lot of on display to coincide with the SABR convention, and also some rare books and a collection of scrapbooks and memorabilia — great stuff. In the “Treasure Room” they had a bunch of the things on display that could actually be touched and looked through with care, including Henry Chadwick’s 1878 Our Boys Base Ball Rules for 1878 book, and The “Bull” Durham Baseball Guide 1910, which listed itself as “Published Annually by the Baseball Publishing Company, 2 Park Square, Boston.” They also had a selection of early novels mentioning baseball, including reference to Jane Austen’s 1798 book Northanger Abbey, which I JUST referenced in the Baseball Early Bird newsletter last week!

Not related to baseball, but equally fascinating to me were the exhibits in the library of Miniature Books (define as books from half inch by half inch in size up to 2″ x “3). The first well known one was made in 1475, just 20 year after Gutenberg’s Bible, the Officiam Beatae Virginis Maria. In WWI, a Scottish publisher produced a one-inch Koran that was issued to Muslim Allied soldiers in a metal locket case that included a magnifying glass. The other exhibit that caught me was one on Conlangs, or Constructed Languages, including not only Esperanto, but Elvish and Klingon. Folks I know tangentially, like Suzette Haden Elgin, whose Laadan language and “Linguistics and Science Fiction” newsletter are very familiar to me, fascinating to see. And fascinating to be reminded of the highly brainy and very geeky world I come from in science fiction/fantasy that is totally parallel to the one I know through SABR.

Next, a historical presentation by a SABR member from Japan, Yoichi Nagata. He presented on the Tokyo Giants’ north American tour of 1935, in which they barnstormed all over the western USA, plus a little Mexico and Canada. With pro baseball set to take off in Japan, the Giants (who were given that nickname by Lefty O’Doul, one f their major supporters in the USA), wanted to come to acquire American baseball skills.

Nagata was drawn to researching this tour because all records of the tour that were in Japan were lost during World War II. He had to used 102 local newspapers from all over North America to recreate all he results of the tour. He was able to recover 82 box scores and in the end, they had 104 games, only 31 losses and one tie, playing 74 different teams on the 118 day tour.

Among the facts I fond surprising, were that the Giants tam included one Russian-born player whose parents had fled the Bolsheviks to Japan when he was 3 years old, and one American citizen, a Nisei born in Hawaii.

During the tour they played 16 games against Nisei teams, going 14-2.

They also exhibited certain behaviors that charmed American fans, such as bowing to the umpires and forming a player “huddle” between innings. They also wore Chinese number characters on their backs. All three of these things, though, weer not usual for Japanese baseball–all were suggested by Lefty O’Doul as marketing ploys, and photographs featuring bowing, the huddle, and the numbers were sent out in press kits to all the newspapers.

In the end, the tour was not a financial success, but the team did acquire American baseball skills, so was considered an overall success, and thus was professional baseball launched in Japan the following season.

I’m amazed at the significance of this event culturally, and that Nagata was forced to come to the US to study it because of the devastation of the war.

The final research presentation of the day was Vince Gennaro’s talk on Free Agent Salaries. If you have not read Gennaro’s book Diamond Dollars, I recommend it. He explains in that book, among other things, why it is so key for the Yankees and Red Sox to spend as much on players as they do, and other factors that affect financial decisions in the game.

Here e described coming up with a model for predicting a player’s fee agent worth, adjusted for premiums of position (pitchers get paid more, middle infielders less), injury history (more durable player got a premium, injury-prone ones a discount), age, player quality, marquee value, and other factors. His study was only looking at the 2007 free agent class, but he is working on an expanded version that will cover 5 years and about 600 free agents to see if it holds up. By his model, Kaz Matsui is overpaid (valued around $3M, paid around $5M) while Cliff Floyd is getting $3M but is valued around $4.9M. He also noted that three guys who did not get jobs this season still carried value: Mike Piazza around 3.5 million, and interestingly, Barry Bonds $12.2 million. Barry says he’s been blacklisted. Has he?

Edit: Gennaro won the award for best presentation at the conference!

The final thing I saw before going off to the ballpark was Rick Wilber read from his new book published by McFarland & Company, entitled My Father’s Game. Rick is the son of major leaguer Del Wilber, but I know him as a science fiction writer. He and I and Eric Van (who runs the Readercon convention and works for the Red Sox) are about the only three people I know who crossover between the two sub-cultures.

Rick read some moving passages from his book, which deals with his perfect childhood as the son of a ballplayer, and his not-so-perfect adulthood where he was his father’s caregiver in the last stage of his life. I bought the book, and also Dorothy Seymour Mills’ book, A Woman’s Work: Writing Baseball History with Harold Seymour. Dorothy was Harold’s wife, and his major collaborator, though in the early years of his fame as a pioneer in baseball research, her contributions were not acknowledged. In those days, women were not allowed in the press box. You get the idea. Thankfully, Dorothy is well-recognized now!

That’s it for today. It’s one in the morning, and the first session I want to see tomorrow is at 9am, so I had better get to sleep.

Sorry again about all the typos. I’m writing this on the television web access thing in my room and it’s very hard to edit (or even see).