Bill Jordan of BaseballReflections.com critiques Dave Winfield’s “how-to-fix-it” title.

Upshot:

Overall, Winfield presents a very interesting argument and while some of his proposed bandages to this problem may be a bit much, especially at this time, he may be pointing the baseball world in the right direction. While his issues may have to take a backseat at this point, it would be very easy for MLB to start promoting the game in some of Winfield’s suggestive ways.

Branch Rickey: Baseball’s Ferocious Gentleman has been awarded the Seymour Medal as the best baseball history or biography of 2007.

Also recognized as “finalists” were Connie Mack and the Early Years of Baseball by Norman Macht and Playing America’s Game: Baseball, Latinos, and the Color Line by Adrian Burgos, Jr.

Author Lee Lowenfish will receive the honor at an Awards Breakfast during the 2008 SABR convention on Sunday, June 29 in Cleveland.

The Seymour Medal, named in honor of Dr. Harold Seymour and Dorothy Jane Mills (formerly Seymour), is awarded to the book judged the best work of baseball history or biography in the preceding year.

You can read the press release, which links to previous Seymour winners, here.

But the story on these books — Anatomy of Baseball, Branch Rickey: Baseball’s Ferocious Gentleman, and Baseball’s Greatest Hit: The Story of Take Me Out to the Ball Game – did not appear in the Sunday Book Review section, but rather these Big Apple-centric titles appeared in “Reading New York” on May 11.

It just occurred to me why Cait Murphy’s book, Crazy ‘08, has been receiving so much renewed attention. It’s the 100th anniversary since the Cubs won their last World Championship.

Duh. (Click on the picture to go to the Crazy ‘08 Web site.)

Pirates vs. Yankees, October 13, 1960, by Jim Reisler (Carroll & Graf)

I thought I had addressed this book when it came out, but evidently I was think about Reisler’s previous book, A Great Day in Cooperstown: The Miraculous and Unlikely Beginning of the Baseball Hall of Fame.

To me, “Best” is on a par with “Greatest” and one should be careful in its use. Sure, the seventh game of the ‘60 series was one for the books, dramatic and exceedingly happy for a town that had not enjoyed such success in many decades. And I’m sure there are many who witnessed the come-from-behind victory and did decree it as the “best game ever,” a conceit that has been popping up more and more of late.

To be honest, I read this one when it first came out and do not remember details, other than looking at it with suspicion based on Reisler’s previous work. My problem is in the craftsmanship more than the title.

As he did in A Great Day, Reisler makes several egregious factual errors. In A Great Day, the largest commission was attributing a quote to a player purported to be at the opening of the Hall who had been deceased long before the event.

Several reviews I’ve read on this book forgive Reisler and his editors the typos and over-sentimentality, but my philosophy is that if these are errors we’ve caught, what have we missed? What are we taking on faith versus what is not true (see the dead man’s quote above)? Perhaps I’m being overly harsh? I must be, since it was deemed worthy of consideration as a finalist for Spitball Magazine’s Casey Award, but that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Other reviews for The Best Game Ever:

• PopMatters.com
• Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Nov. 11, 2007
• From the NY Times Papercut blog, Feb. 4, 2008, on the whole “greatest/best” debate

This list appeared on the SABR listserve (?).

Thanks, to Greg Spira for compiling this extensive collection. Some of these review may be duplicate of what I’ve already posted and I have made no changes in style or contents to his list.

Bruce Dancis’ annual overview of lots of baseball books in the Sacramento Bee

Katherine Powers’ review of four new baseball books in the Boston Globe

Allen Barra reviews 5 new baseball books for the SF Chronicle

A round-up of some of the new baseball books by the Chicago Sun-Times

A review of several new baseball books from Christianity Today

A review of Milton Jamail’s Venezuelan Bust, Baseball Boom:

A review of “Your Brain on Cubs,” which is not really about the Cubs

A review of Fay Vincent’s “We Would Have Played For Nothing”

Another review of the same book

And another, this time from Steve Wulf for the Wall Street Journal

A review of “Yogi: The life and Times of an American Original”

A review of “The Code,” about baseball’s unwritten rules

A review of a number of books focusing on baseball’s dark side

A review of Chief Bender’s Burden

A review of Richard Bradley’s new book on the Bucky Dent game

Another review of that book, this time from the Washington Post

A review - well, a supposed review- of Peter Morris “But We Didn’t Have Fun”

A real review of that book from Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post

Another review of “But We Didn’t Have Fun,” this time from the Providence Journal

And yet another review of But We Didn’t Have Fun from AM New York

A number of baseball books reviewed by Steven Cooke of the Hartford Courant

A review of the new Yankee Stadium books

Another set of reviews on the new Yankee Stadium books from the New York Daily News

A review of Jose Canseco’s Vindicated

A sort list of 5 new worthwhile baseball books

A review of Michael Holley’s new book on Terry Francona

A review of the Bill James Gold Mine 2008

Another review of that book from the Daily Herald

A review of Baseball’s Greatest Hit, a history of Take Me Out of the Ball Game

A new review of last year’s Soul of Baseball

A new review of last fall’s Playing with the Enemy

An enthusiastic critique of this graphic novel by Comicstory-arc.com. And another from Publisher’s Weekly.

Here are some samples from the book.

If the reviewer had trouble with this, wait ’til he gets a hold of Derek Gentile’sBaseball’s Best 1,000. Imagine being that final player who made the cut. He can still say he was considered better than the other 19,000 or so players who qualified under Gentile’s guidelines. I’ll be doing a review of this one soon.

I especially get a kick when I find references to baseball books from outlets that have essentially nothing to do with the game. Case in point, this review of Lee Lowenfish’s “excellent” biography from the Greater New York blog.

Born in 1919, Raschi won 120 games for the Yankees during their juggernaut years, averaging 20 wins from 1948-51, including three straight 21-victory seasons. He also pitched briefly for the Cardinals and K.C. Athletics. Not bad considering he didn’t become a major leaguer until 27, and didn’t join the rotation full-time until he was 29.

The Amazon Report on Vic Raschi:

Reynolds, Raschi and Lopat: New York’s Big Three and Great Yankee Dynasty of 1949-1953

Would you pay $400 for a book of baseball photographs?

One thousand bibliophiles did. Some didn’t even blink when the price rose to $700 for Ballet in the Dirt: The Golden Age of Baseball, a coffee table collection of lensman Neil Leifer’s best work, published in late 2007 by Taschen Books.

Leifer, 65, got his start as an amateur shutterbug as a teenager on the Manhattan’s Lower East Side at the Henry Street Settlement, working for his high school newspaper.

“What was a hobby somehow developed into a profession. I certainly never planned a career as a photojournalist; it just happened,” he told NJ Jewish News in a telephone interview. “One day I woke up and realized people are paying me to do something that I thoroughly enjoyed. I was a rabid sports fan and in addition I had really gotten the photography bug. I loved seeing my pictures printed with a photo credit. So the idea that someone would send me to a World Series or a heavyweight title fight or a championship football game, and pay me to do something I enjoyed doing — you pinch yourself and say, ‘How did I get this lucky?’”

Leifer grew up in household in which Sid Gordon, then a member of the New York Giants, was revered as the greatest ballplayer in the city. But, Leifer said, he was not as impressed as the rest of his family. “Any baseball fan knew Sid Gordon was at best a mediocre ballplayer; he wasn’t Mickey Mantle or Willie Mays or Duke Snider.” The fact that Gordon was Jewish had no influence on Leifer’s allegiance. “I am very proud to be Jewish and I certainly have no negative feelings whatsoever about Jewish athletes, but I also don’t have a great affinity for them.”

One of his signature shots involves one of those athletes. It occurred in 1965 at a game in which the San Francisco Giants’ Juan Marichal clubbed the L.A. Dodgers’ Johnny Roseboro over the head with a bat. Sandy Koufax, who was on the mound for the Dodgers, put himself in harm’s way when he moved to intervene in the scuffle, an act Leifer caught on film. Leifer had been assigned to cover the game by Sports Illustrated to concentrate on the pitching duel between Koufax and Marichal, two of baseball’s best. He was shooting in color and ran out of film so he switched to his back-up black-and-white set-up and caught the surreal moment.

“I didn’t know what happened until I saw the film and the news that night,” he said. “I became a lot more aware when the event was over and Roseboro was taken away bleeding. It happened so fast I don’t remember having any reaction other than the fact that I ran out of film on it.”

Like many of his photographic contemporaries, Leifer’s favorite sport to cover is boxing. “Muhammad Ali is exactly a year older than I am. My career and his career paralleled each other perfectly so I happen to be lucky enough to begin my career when the greatest athlete of our time was beginning his.”

Leifer said working with the ex-champ was easy because Ali enjoyed posing for the camera. “The initial attraction to Muhammad was he made you look good. When you went out to take pictures of Muhammad, you came back with twice as many pictures as anyone expected. He was that cooperative and available and giving.” Leifer cited two other iconic but notorious sports figures as favorite subjects: Pete Rose and O.J. Simpson, whom he considers “two of the great bad guys of all time…. But my job wasn’t getting close to most of the athletes. Most of the time I covered events and you didn’t even meet the subjects you were [shooting].”

He is among a handful of photographers with a reputation hefty enough to command such a high figure for a book. “They published 1,000 copies and I’m happy to say it sold out,” he said.

Leifer is now working on a similar project for Taschen on football. No word on the cover price yet.

(This article appeared in the March 6 edition of NJ Jewish News.)

From the Chicago Sun Times, this report of a local TV documentary on the WGN-Cubs 60-year relationship. An accompanying book, Cubs Forever, is due out from Triumph Books this spring.

This leads to an observation on the recent trend towards “copy-cat” books that use the same format tailored to each team. For example, in addition to the book on the Cubs, Triumph has published similar editions for the titles The Chicago-based company also has a series on “_____” Essentials: Everything You Need to Know to be a Fan for several major league clubs, as well as “______” Forever, which takes a more nostalgic look at a particular ball club’s history (including the Cubs). Their latest “series” is The Good, The Bad & The Ugly: Heart-Pounding, Jaw-Dropping, and Gut-Wrenching Moments from _______ History. So far this imprint includes The Indians, Pirates, Tigers, Twins, and Reds.

Naturally, such specific titles are more suited to fans of the teams in the title rather than general followers of the game, although Triumph is one of the better sports-centric publisher.

PinstripesPA reviews Haunted Baseball by Dan Gordon and Mickey Bradley, while Tailgatecrashers post this piece about The New Ballgame: Baseball Statistics for the Casual Fan, by Glenn Guzzo.

As the days go by and more attention is paid to the use of amphetamines and other drugs associated with easing ADD/ADHD, Jim Bouton’s Ball Four will enjoy a renewed interest. Bouton broke the code of the lockerroom by writing about drug use way back in 1970.

How long ago did this book come out? Last October?

I was at Barnes and Noble on Tuesday and saw it on the remainder table for $3.98.

Further proof that the general public considers old timers like Tommy Lasora out of touch. Listen to him on a recent B&N podcast of Meet the Authors and judge for yourself. It’s available at iTunes.

Lots of “Bits and Pieces”

With little beside the steroids business going on during this off-season, there’s lots of time to read and many bloggers are posting reviews, including.

• Baseball Between the Numbers: Why Everything You Know About the Game is Wrong, Cobb: A Biography, and Is This a Great Game or What, all from Sawxblog.com
• Rob Neyer’s Big Book of Baseball Blunders, from Bleacherbums.wordpress.com
• Branch Rickey: Baseball’s Ferocious Gentleman, from KansasCity.com
• A promo for Glenn Stout’s The Cubs: The Complete Story of Chicago Cubs Baseball on the author’s Web site
• The Hardball Times 2008 Annual, from AmazinAvenue.com, a Mets blog
• The NY Times‘ Murray Chass writes about Fay Vincent’s forthcoming We Would Have Played For Nothing in his Jan. 27 column
• The Jewish Press included this review of Dana Brand’s Mets Fan
• Jonathan Mayo, who covers the minor leaguers for MLB.com (and has a book on Roger Clemens coming out this spring), weighs in on two books within his purview.

Patrick Smith’s 2007 memoir, Extra Innings takes a honest and amusing look at life on the senior circuit. No, not the National League, but the amateur baseball leagues that fill the towns across the country.

Smith, a resident of Baltimore, took some time to answer a few questions about the nuts-and-bolts of working with McFarland on his project.

Bookshelf: How did you come to pick McFarland as your publisher?

Patrick Smith: I pitched the idea to [them] when I saw them at a pop culture conference in New Mexico a few years ago. (My wife is a professor of that kind of thing and I was along for the ride.) They liked the idea and encouraged me to pursue it. Meantime, I talked with a literary agent about it and she really liked the idea, so I kind of left McFarland.

But the more time I spent with the agent, the more frustrating the project became. So, after about a year of New York agent hassles, I got a note from McFarland asking if the book was still happening. So, without an agent, I signed with [them] and delivered it six months later.

Bookshelf: Who was your editor at McFarland and what was that experience like?

Smith: I worked mostly with Natalie Foreman. at McFarland. I had very little contact with anyone editing the book. Since it was my first book, I didn’t know what to expect. I did a fair amount of pestering and was pretty much always told “take it easy. Everything’s under control.” So I sat politely. [But] the McFarland people really love baseball, which made working with them fun. At various times throughout the process, I’d get these wonderful and inspiring letters from Robert Franklin, the president of the whole outfit. He’d say things like “let’s have fun with it.” It seemed such a departure, after all that business with the agent.

Bookshelf: Did you find they did a lot of editing, compared to the original manuscript?

Smith: I’d say very little editing was done. And that kind of bugged me. I sent the manuscript to a couple close friends to read before I submitted the final to McFarland. They did most of the substantive editing. I can see a word or two here and there that [they] changed, but that’s about it. The book also has a handful of typos in it; that drives me nuts. I can’t catch all my own typos.

Bookshelf: I noticed some of the language was “saltier” than your routine McFarland title. Was there any point where you were at odds with your editor about something you wanted in that she wanted out, or vice versa?

Smith: Saltier, indeed. I daresay I set a McFarland record for “F-bombs.” To their great credit, they never blinked and never asked me to tone it down. The salty language comes mainly from the dialog. A first-person book where the narrator swears a lot when talking to the reader is, to me, tiresome. I thought the language was important to the book’s tone. But I didn’t want it to drift into territory where the words no longer had an impact. And, to a lot of the anecdotes, the language is really key. The scene in which the head groundskeeper at Memorial Stadium completely tears my head off wouldn’t be the same without the awful language.

Bookshelf: How would you rate the overall publishing experience?

Smith: …Since this is my first book, I have nothing to rate against. I was so thrilled to be published at all that McFarland could have waterboarded me and I’d have thanked them for it. In hindsight, there are things I’ll change next time — more contact with the editor, for example — but really, [they were] great.

Bookshelf: Do you have another baseball book in you?

Smith: I have another book in me, but I don’t know if it’s baseball. The next one will have a little baseball in it, but it’s not a “baseball book.” But I’m really enjoying writing about baseball and the Orioles on www.bugsandcranks.com. That started as kind of lark and has turned into something kind of big.

Extra Innings: The Joy and the Pains of Over-30 Baseball

by Patrick Smith

McFarland, 2007

As an, ahem, over-30 athlete myself, I could emphasize with Smith’s funny and thoughtful memoir of those of us still in love with playing a kid’s game; knowing better, but afraid to give it up, afraid to capitulate to he onset of AARP-dom.

Smith participated in a baseball league, rather than softball, like most of us post-college geezers. He gives short shrift to those who play in slow-picth leagues: where the challenge in that he wonders (on behalf of those of use who have played the fast-pitch game, I take umbrage, but only so far). The pitchers in his circles can still bring it at 80 miles per hour, and probably with a lot less control, making things dicey for batters who have day jobs they have to take into consideration.

Anyone who has participated in adult town-sponsored athletics will be able to relate to Smith’s story: the teammates who take the competition way to seriously, and the slackers who don’t take it to heart at all. The worry about being able to perform to one’s own standards, which gets more difficult with each passing year; the question one asks while standing in the outfield on a 90-degree day with his team on the down side of a blow-out: why am I doing this? Why do I put up with these clowns week after week? Don’t I have anything better to do with my time?

The long answer is “no.” For whatever psychological reason (that’s an entry for another time), these weekend warriors, who tolerate all sorts of indignities and injuries, cannot bear to part with this game of their youth.

It takes the length of the book for Smith to explain that baseball is a great teacher.

Baseball is, far more often than not, a spectacular, perfect disappointment….making small successes feel that much better and make large successes feel otherworldly. It’s like the guy who hits himself over the head with a hammer because it feels so good when he stops.

Extra Innings is an entertaining look at boys insisting on remaining boys, to a degree. But Smith, perhaps to round out the books, includes a good deal of unrelated topics, including his less-than-stellar academic career and a stint on the Baltimore Orioles ground crew, the latter of which could have stood alone as a theme for a book.

This is a departure for McFarland, a publishing house that usually sticks to scholarly treatises on “serious” topics. It certainly is the most profane, but in being so is the most realistic. I could easily see any one of these guys fitting on my old team. Perhaps that why I quit in search of a fresh start with a new gang of colorful characters.

I had an opportunity to pose a few questions about Harvard Boys with the father and son writing team of Rick and John Wolff, about life in the minors, parental advice, and the process of putting the book together. Their responses, via e-mail. :

Bookshelf: John, knowing what your dad went through, the difficulties he had, and the odds against an MLB career, why did you want to go through the same thing?

John Wolff: The difficulties in minor league baseball certainly add up and prevent many ballplayers from reaching their major league dream. Even though he didn’t make it, I respected my dad for trying and I wanted to do the same. I thought I could maybe pick up where he left off.

Not making it to the major leagues leaves any professional baseball player with a sense of inadequacy. However, when a ballplayer signs a contract there is a part of him that truly believes that he is going to be the one that defies the odds. I was drafted in the 47th round, which means that my odds of making the big leagues were less than slim to none. That being said, there was still a part of me that truly believed I could be the player who goes against the odds. I had to give it a shot.

Bookshelf: Did you rely a lot of your father’s experiences, or did you want to do things totally on your own?

JW: I tried as best as I could to build from my father’s experiences. I knew that I had to be a smart ballplayer because my talent would only take me so far. Ultimately, my father and I have different personalities and we were different players, so our experiences turned out to be very different.

I did enjoy doing things on my own and trying to be my own person. However, it was always nice to know that when I messed up I could always go back to my father and he would understand.

Bookshelf: Did your father offer a lot of unsolicited advice or was he respectful of wanting you to make your own decisions…and mistakes?

JW: The only time his advice was unwanted or unsolicited was usually immediately after a tough ballgame. As with any player, I didn’t enjoy recapping all my mistakes right after a game when my emotions were still running high. It usually took me a few hours … to calm down and then think about how to improve on my errors or strike outs. As it turned out, once I calmed down I ended up asking him for a ton of advice about how to handle the ups and downs. And in my short career, I had plenty of “downs.”

Bookshelf: What was it like, growing up as the son of a pro player? Did that put any extra pressure on you as a young athlete?

JW: I think it put some good pressure on me. I loved the idea that my dad played professionally when he was younger and I wanted to be just like him. It made me work hard to get better and reach the same level he did.

However, it was frustrating at times when his old teammates would tell me how much better or faster my dad was than me. I worked very hard to improve my foot speed but I was not blessed with the ability to fly like my dad on the base paths.

Bookshelf: I noticed that most of your entries could be considered “PG.” Was that a conscious decision? I’m sure you could have been more “earthy” if you had chosen.

JW: Yes, I tried to keep the book fairly PG. There were a lot of stories that were left on the cutting room floor. As you could imagine, the stories about drugs, girls, steroids, and other hot topics might have tainted the true message of the book. I wanted the book to be a positive story and depict the challenges of chasing a dream that was just slightly out of reach. I didn’t want to focus too much on the dark side that has been the in media so much very recently.

Bookshelf: Rick, How long have you been doing The Sports Edge?

Rick Wolff: I started the show on WFAN in February, 1999. 

Bookshelf: Were you extra cautious not to be too interfering because of a) the show, and b) your experience as a player. I’m sure you must have had at least a few frustrating experiences with youth coaches. How did you handle that?

RW: Yes, just like any other sports parent, I have encountered all sorts of frustrating situations with youth coaches over the years with my own kids. In truth, I have always tried to deal with coaches in a spirit of respect and cooperation. But I know first-hand how emotional parents can become when it comes to their kids in sports.

Bookshelf: Did you offer unsolicited advice to your son, or did you let him make his own mistakes?

RW: When John was very young, I would try and show him the basics of how to field a groundball, swing a bat, etc, but as he got older, he was able to find his own way. John was one of those rare kids who was extremely self-motivated and always wanted to improve his game.

Bookshelf: I’m very interested in the process of creating Harvard Boys. How did this project come about?

RW: Back in the mid-1970s, I kept a diary of my own minor league experiences, and that diary eventually became a book called What’s A Nice Harvard Boy Like You Doing In The Bushes?….It didn’t take too much creativity to see if John wanted to keep a diary of his first year in pro ball. But instead of writing it in letters home, he did via e-mails. It was great fun.

Bookshelf: How did you handle the writing? Did John start off and Rick added his comments? Some other way?

RW: John wrote the book day-to-day, and I added my comments and reflections as we went along.

Bookshelf: Who was your editor? Was he knowledgable about the game? Do you think that is an important factor? Can you think of specific example of how he improved something you had written and, conversely, something he suggested that you disagreed with?

RW: Mark Weinstein was our editor, and he did a terrific job in helping us shape the book. For example, we had a long discussion as to whether having two different voices in the book would work, and ultimately Mark, John and I agreed it would. We also had conversations about just how much detail and specific names would go into the book, and we were able to come up with compromises. In short, the editor played a significant role.

Skyhorse Publishing, 2007

Rick Wolff hosts a straightforward radio show about youth sports on WFAN in the New York market. Many is the time I almost reached for the phone to put in my two cents on the topic of the day or ask advice concerning my own child’s situation.

So it was with great curiosity that I read Harvard Boys, written with Wolff’s son, John. I wondered if it might be a case of “Do as I say, not as I do”; that the senior Wolff preached fairness and inclusion on the show, but when it came to his own, he might whistle a different tune.

What a refreshing surprise, then, to have the son take the lead, telling his story of the struggles of the low affiliate player trying not only to improve and rise in the hierarchy, but simply to survive. It’s hard to remember that these kids — many not out of their teens at these levels — are on their own for the first time, trying to eke out a reasonable existence  with little money or “grown up” skills such as managing money or even doing laundry. One of the constant in minor league towns seems to be a constant boredom away from the field. The hours are lousy, the temptations, many. Keeping focus can be difficult. The juxtaposition of the generations is also noteworthy. If John and his cronies were constantly frustrated with their off time, how on earth did Rick and his contemporaries survive in an era before iPods, X-Box, and e-mail?

As John Wolff points out, most of these guys were superstars in youth leagues, high school, and college. But sports has its own trickle up theory; now comes the separation.

While John’s is the primary voice of Harvard Boys (and what are the odds of that whole  scenario?), Rick adds his commentaries, always supportive, never “I would have done it this way” (remember Karl Malden in Fear Strikes Out?).For most of the book, John seems to be progressing nicely, but, as he points out, none of that matters if you’re not on “the organization’s” radar.  The future franchise players  need teammates to play with, but the majority of these supernumeraries never makes it past the first couple of years.

We also realize the concept that “Man plans, God laughs.” It only takes a pebble on the infield to set the stage for a career-ending injury (although in John’s case it was shoulder problems). Thank goodness for that Harvard education.

The book is told in a “PG” manner. There’s no mention of drugs (recreational or performance-enhancing) or sex, which, in this TMZ day and age is amazing. And, at least for this reader, it didn’t detract anything from the story. I guess there are two guys out there who realize this is still a family-oriented game for the fans.

Edited by Michael G. Long. Times Books, 2007.

By now, everyone — baseball fan or not — knows what a remarkable man Jackie Robinson was. In addition to his superior ability on the diamond and the responsibilities inherent in being the first African-American to break baseball’s notorious color line, he continued his work for civil rights long after retirement. The correspondence with politicians, religious and  leaders, and just plain folks in this collection is evidence of the remarkable man who broke the stereotypes of the inarticulate dumb jock, regardless of race, as well.

Robinson was as unafraid to face down a letter-writer as he was a pitcher and he didn’t care if the views he expressed were popular or not. In response to a lengthy screed written by Malcolm X in a 1963 piece in The Amsterdam News, he unreservedly chastised the Black advocate as he defended his choices in his relationships with white businessmen such as Branch Rickey and the management of Chock Full O’Nuts, where Robinson was employed after leaving baseball.

One problem I have with books of this nature lies is the admittedly difficult editing process. Long, an associate professor of religious studies at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvanua, acknowledges the shortcomings of the process. How far does one go to get the point across, how much of the original letter — with its grammatical mistakes and misspellings — to include? One can never truly get into the mind of the original writer, who one might assume often self-edited his work, if only in his mind.

Rickey chose Robinson as “The First” because he knew he would be a “good citizen.” First Class Citizenship is an admirable memorial to Robinson as a far-ahead thinker on the battlefield of sport as well as the larger battlefield of the struggle for civil rights.

And not this one. Mind you, The Stark Truth was definitely interesting and thought-provoking, but the best? anyway, Tom Morgan of the Connecticut-based Voices newspaper chain thinks so.

Since my mother’s family comes from Montreal, I’ve always considered it a second home. So while you fans up north were ignoring Nos Amors, forcing them to move to DC, I was always fascinated with the team, especially since all the written material came out in both French and English versions. Very cool. I still have an instructional book that utilized old ‘Spos Ron Brand and John Bateman as “models.” Kind or ironic. Those who can, play; those who can’t, make instructionals.

So it was with a sense of nostalgia that I read this piece from the Montreal Gazette about former coach Mel Didier and his new memoir.