Category Archives: Warm Thoughts for a Cold Winter

Warm Thoughts for a Cold Winter: Mini-Camp

Thanks to confluence of various time-crunching factors, I was unable to post my week-daily Warm Thoughts for a Cold Winter story yesterday. So to make up for it, we’ll have a doubleheader today.

My first post will be short but sweet. The Mets have a mini-camp this week, with players like Johan Santana, Oliver Perez, and Daniel Murphy in attendance. What is a mini-camp? I don’t really know, but it seems a lot like high school gym class warmup exercises.

So a small portion of the Mets are in Florida, stretching, long tossing, and doing other calisthenics that only vaguely resemble baseball. At this point in the winter, it’s close enough for me.

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Warm Thoughts for a Cold Winter: The Fireside Book of Baseball

I received The Fireside Book of Baseball as a Christmas present, probably not too long after it was published in 1987. There were three earlier editions of the book, published in 1956, 1958, and 1968, respectively. The cover photo has a wide-angle picture taken at Shea Stadium during the 1986 World Series (if I had to guess, I’d say either game 1 or 7, since it looks like Ron Darling is on the mound). It’s an anthology of baseball writing, arranged alphabetically by author, and including all types of pieces. There’s reportage, profiles, biography, fiction, poetry, parodies, and even some cartoons and photos to accompany the action.

I dig this book out at least once every year, because it’s one of the best baseball books I’ve ever read, and probably ever will read. The Fireside Book‘s basic philosophy is, Here’s a buncha stuff about baseball. Enjoy! It’s not meant to be read in order, or all in one sitting. Just flip to a page, and chances are you will find something great.

Like “The Age of the Muffin”, a history of post-Civil War baseball by Robert Smith (not the cure frontman). Or Bill James, in a very un-Jamesian piece, probing the story of a mysterious gambling ring in an obscure Louisiana semi-pro league in the 1940s. Or an excerpt from the autobiography of Japanese home run king Sadaharu Oh. Or a poem comprised of the rules for a women’s softball league. Or an all-too-brief glimpse of Moe Berg in old age, the former major league catcher who doubled as a spy for OSS in the years before World War II.

It has contemporary accounts of famous games, with a heavy emphasis on the 1980s. Like Moss Klein’s account of game 5 of the 1986 ALCS, and The Curse of Gene Mauch. Or Murray Chass’s first-hand account of The Pine Tar Game (proving that he wasn’t always a crabby, bitter douche). Or the magnificent Roger Angell’s take on game 6 of the 1975 World Series.

It has fiction, like a chunk from Robert Coover’s The Universal Baseball Association, one of the greatest and least-appreciated baseball novels ever. And there’s excerpts from works of fiction that aren’t strictly about baseball, like William Kennedy’s Ironweed and Phillip Roth’s The Great American Novel.

There’s even transcriptions of legal documents, like the offical DH rule, and the motion to dismiss that struck down Charlie Finley’s sale of Rollie Fingers and Joe Rudi to the Red Sox in 1976 (and which contains a convoluted and fascinating dissertation on MLB’s antitrust exemption). And a poem consisting of the names and nicknames of 269 players both famous and obscure.

Some pieces have the traditional starry-eyed, childlike wonder associated with baseball. But there’s also plenty of failure in this book, too. And regret. And skullduggery. I like a book that can admit there are plenty of shitty, weird, and wrong things that happen in the game, without seeming cynical in the process.

Unfortunately, this book is out of print now. A fifth edition was published in 2000, but I have never seen it, so I can not vouch for its contents (plus, it too is out of print, so the point is moot). But if you ever spot the 1987 edition of The Fireside Book of Baseball in a used book shoppe or thrift store, snatch it up immediately. No price is too high.

Warm Thoughts for a Cold Winter: Steve Phillips (or Lack Thereof)

For other Warm Thoughts for a Cold Winter, click here.

Last night, I finally took a tour through my site’s stats for the first time since I did a ground-up reboot in December 2008. (My first “new” post was on December 7, a date which will live in infamy.) I was surprised by two things. The first was the amount of unique hits I’ve gotten since then (which I won’t reveal because I’m afraid it’s not actually a big number at all and you’ll all laugh at me).

For the first time, I saw concrete, non-anecdotal evidence that people are reading this thing. So thank you, mostly anonymous well-wishers. I am truly grateful. I’m pretty sure at least 55% percent of you aren’t pron bots, and those of you who are have been very tasteful about your Britney vids and bang buses.

So I dug deeper to suss out some other details hitherto unknown to me. For instance, the most often used term on this site is “Tom”, thanks to The Best Show Logs, which reference that name quite frequently. The four next most popular keywords are “scratchbomb”, “christmas”, “joe”, and “baseball”. Where does “joe” come from? Your guess is as good as mine.

phillips2.jpgBut what really knocked my socks their ass? The number one search term on this site since its reboot a year-and-change ago: STEVE PHILLIPS. Yes, that Steve Phillips. Ex-Mets GM, ex-Baseball Tonight “analyst”, current unemployment line occupant. I knew I’d raked him over the coals a time or two on this site, but I had no idea my not-at-all disguised contempt for him would be so popular.

Granted, this could very well mean nothing. Because I also discovered that the top three search terms of the last week were “rudolph the red-nosed reindeer”,  “danzig”, and “shaved dick”. This last one baffled me, but a quick Google search by the wife showed me that I have a post with one sentence ending with “shaved” and the next with “dick”. I sincerely hope this is the explanation, because if it isn’t, I don’t want to know what the real one is.

Nevertheless, seing Steve Phillips’ name so prominently featured caused me to grumble about his feckless, agenda-driven analysis. But then I remembered: We won’t have to see Steve Phillips at all this year!

Yes, now that the hair-helmeted philandering douchenozzle has been kicked to the curb by ESPN, we won’t have to hear him expound on how much he knows about baseball and how to build a winning team. You know, all those things he failed miserably at when he was the GM of the Mets. With Phillips gone, ESPN’s baseball coverage upgrades from Unwatchable to Merely Insufferable.

And who’s in his place at The Worldwide Leader this year? None other than Bobby Valentine, the genius manager who was run out of New York when he couldn’t cover up for Phillips’ failures. Oh sweet irony!

I don’t know about you, but this thought caertainly warmed me up this cold January morn.