I didn’t grow up a Mickey Mantle fan. Not only was his career after my time, but other than some mentions on Seinfeld, he wasn’t present, or even mentioned, in the popular culture I consumed. As I dove deeper into baseball history, I never got the Mantle bug, so to speak. I accrued a cursory […]
Tag: racism
A Trip to the Library: Shadow Ball: A Novel of Baseball and Chicago
Baseball as fiction is always, in my opinion, hard for an author to pull off. The main reason for this is that the author doesn’t let baseball tell the story. Instead, they feel the need to insert some sort of extraneous element that isn’t really necessary to the story. Shadow Ball: A Novel of Baseball […]
Where Are the Managers of Color?
For over three years now I have had a certain topic sitting in my note of things to write about. For a while, I avoided the topic because while I thought it was worthwhile, I wasn’t sure if I was the one to write it. Then I kept putting the topic off because I wasn’t […]
A Trip to the Library: Whatever Happened to the Hall of Fame?
There comes a point when an author can overwhelm a book. I’m not talking about the author’s style or manner of prose, although both of those can be true. Rather, what I’m referring to in this case is when the personality of the author overwhelms whatever it is they are trying to write. In book […]
A Trip to the Library: The Dizzy and Daffy Dean Barnstorming Tour: Race, Media, and America’s National Pastime
On the trip home after passing my Critical Care Emergency Medical Transport Program my wife and I stopped at a humongous book store in Columbus, Ohio called The Book Loft. I, of course, beelined through all the fire hazard death trap tunnels of books to the baseball section. My wife’s gift for passing the aforementioned […]




