My thanks to The Sporkball Journals, who posted this bit of fiscal info a while back.
Don’t forget, if you have a minute, to add your comments about the Bookshelf on Blogged.com (Scroll down the links portion of the page). Thanks in advance.
I was home sick today and saw his 1987 movie Radio Days, which includes this scene:
A
s you know if you’ve been reading this blog for awhle, I find the words “greatest” or “best” annoying. Totally subjective.
“Complete” is also an oxymoron: until the very end of that particular item, how can something ever be complete?
Add to that subsequent “volumes” of books that have only been writen recently; how can there be that much more information to warrant and other edition (does not apply to statistical books).
From Texas Pages, which provides information about writers, books and events in the Lone Star state, the following announcement:
* Forced Out, by Stephen Frey (Atria, $24.95). Follows a baseball scout, player and mafia hitman as their destinies converge.
This social Web site allows you to read digitized versions of magazines such as Sports Illustrated and The Sporting News, among several non- baseball titles. You can post comments, send a particular article via e-mail, and other odds and ends. Wonder how long this will last. I remember another site a couple of years ago that did the same thing but was shut down for copyright reasons. Maybe the laws/attitudes have changed.
From New York Magazine
The perils of being a sports superstar in New York (or Los Angeles, I imagine), is that there are always gossip-inistas waiting to catch you doing something, whether it’s being out a bit too late (for a single person) and possibly playing some hanky-panky (kids, ask your parents) with another celeb. This one, from New York Magazine, got by me because I was on vacation. It’s particularly interesting because it was written by Will Leitch, late of Deadspin.com. Guess he’s moving to a fancier journalistic address.
In the words of the Bard, much ado about nothing.
While not strictly a baseball item, Soundcheck’s John Schaefer discussed Shea Stadium as a concert venue in this podcast, so it’s good enough for me.
Fans of Monty Python will recognize John Cleese’s signature tagline. It applies here because an unlikely source from Great Britain offers a podcast review of Field of Dreams.
One of my favorite (or favourite, in this case) podcasts is “Movies You Should See,” a weekly offering by a group of 30-something Brits who obviously enjoy producing their program. They’re a funny, raucous, off-color (colour) group who often go off on tangents when discussing new and classic films. The fact they they are so relatively young is quite interesting when they review older movies such as Twelve Angry Men or Psycho.
Their latest contribution is FoD, which I found especially interesting simply because you wouldn’t expect them to know too much about baseball. In fact they do get a couple of things wrong, such as stating that Shoeless Joe Jackson is a totally fictional character (there’s really no excuse for this; a simple Google search would tell them he was indeed real). Aside from a couple of other minor points, they do quite a credible job in analyzing the movie, and the bond between fathers and sons.
‘ave a listen, then:
By the way, perhaps it’s because of the subject matter, but this isn’t one of their best shows. Troll around the site; I’m sure you’ll find a movie on which you’d like to hear their comments.
As the great radio personality Harvey would say, “and now for the rest of the story.” WNYC has updated the Tim McCarver segment of the Leonard Lopate show from last Friday so here you go:
For some reason (there’s no context for it), The International herald Tribune published this brief profile of Vecsey, most recently the author of Baseball: A History of America’s Favorite Game.
From BookClubClassics.com, this list of fiction and non-fiction classics. No reviews, just links to Amazon.
Cynthia Crossen wrote this awkward analysis of Malamud’s classic for a couple of weeks ago, trying to put it in a modern context.
Guess what? You can’t.
The piece is subtitled, “The Hero of Malamud’s ‘The Natural’ Wouldn’t Make [sic] With Today’s Pros.” Some time ago, I interviewed the sons of the late Mark Harris author of Bang the Drum Slowly and other books in the Henry Wiggen series. They told me of a remake of the movie version was being considered, under the “leadership” of Eddie Murphy. Anthony Harris said he didn’t think it could be redone as a “modern-day” film because he doubted a player would compromise a multi-million dollar salary for the benefit of a teammate, as Wiggen did for his dying catcher, Bruce Pierson. Of course, we were talking about the 1970s, here. Free agency was just beginning to be a common occurrence with paychecks, even for superstars, “only” in the hundreds of thousands. I suggested any remake could simply be a period piece (although it’s hard to think of 30 years ago as a “period”).
Crossen’s second sentance reveals how little she knows about her subject.
They are as powerful and graceful as always, but none of them came to training camp never having played a game before.
Anyone who knows the story could tell you that Roy Hobbs did play the game and played it extremely well. A natural, you might say (duh). He just had an ill-timed accident as he was about to make his mark on the game, becoming “the best that ever was.” She makes it sound like that he just arrived from Mars, with no experience whatever.
Read her piece and tell me if you have any idea what point she’s trying to make.
Tim McCarver appeared on The Leaonard Lopate Show on Friday to promote his new book, Tim McCarver’s Diamond Gems. (Great, another book of anecdotes.)
For some reason, the segment was not made available when the others from the day’s show were. I wondered if it had more to do some diabolical desire on the part of the author or publisher’s , rather than some technical glitch. I left a comment on the program’s website about this and the answer was: “We are working to have the audio from this interview available. We hope to have the problem solved quickly.” So far, just under three minutes of the interview was posted. Hear it now. I’ll amend the entry later if they put up the whole thing:
In my "day job," I'm a writer/sports editor for a New Jersey weekly newspaper. I'm also the editor of the Bibliography Committee Newsletter for the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR).
I did a piece on the award-winning cartoonist and he was nice enough to "immortalize" me.
From the University of California press website
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