From the category archives:
By James Bailey Each spring book stores are inundated with a new crop of baseball books. Nearly all are non-fiction. In fact, it’s hard to find baseball novels in your average book store, as most of them are released by small publishers who don’t typically land most of their titles in Barnes & Noble, etc. [...]
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By James Bailey When I received a copy of Billy Lombardo’s novel “The Man with Two Arms,” my first thought was “Rookie of the Year.” For those fortunate enough to have forgotten it, that was the inane 1993 movie about a 12-year-old Chicago boy who stars for the Cubs after elbow surgery allows him to [...]
Oh, Johnny, by Jim Lehrer Random House, 2009 Rating: 4 (out of 10) By James Bailey If you strip it down far enough, there’s an interesting premise underneath Jim Lehrer’s novel Oh, Johnny. An ignorant but gifted center fielder postpones a minor league career to join the Marines in 1944, falls in love, survives the [...]
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By James Bailey Last week’s book discussions (fiction and non-fiction) drew a lot of interest. Had we to do it over again, we’d tinker with the format somewhat to include more titles. With seven participants each naming one book, well, that leaves a lot of great titles out. We had a number of suggestions for [...]
By Bill Ballew and James Bailey Related: Join us for Hardball Cooperative’s new online book club, starting with Lawrence Ritter’s The Glory of Their Times. Read enough books and it becomes readily apparent that few have much of a lingering impact on either end of the spectrum. Fortunately there are exceptions to the rule, which [...]
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By James Bailey The Fade-away, by George Jansen Pocol Press, 2007 Rating: 8 (out of 10) There’s not a lot of baseball fiction hitting the shelves these days, at least not for adults. The vast majority of the baseball offerings from the major publishers are nonfiction works on ‘roided-out ballplayers (A-Rod, Manny, et al), veteran [...]
By James Bailey The End of Baseball, by Peter Schilling, Jr. Ivan R. Dee, Publisher, 2008 Website: www.EndofBaseball.com Rating: 8 (out of 10) You don’t have to be an expert on baseball history and the Negro Leagues to enjoy Peter Schilling Jr.’s “The End of Baseball.” But you might get even more out of it [...]
