Baseball Auto-Bios

[Edgy MD]

Obviously these things have niche appeal, and their publishers probably expert at printing up just enough for their market size and laser-marketing on the only potential readers, but I've always felt for the editor-guy whose got to come up with a title for a guy who has got notability but not much of a hook beyond that.



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I'm not sure I want to be converted to a whole manifesto, but hey, Matheny never had a losing season among his seven with the Cardinals. (Not so much with the Royals, but that's a tougher gig.(



My big takeaway when I saw this is that I had always been spelling his last name wrong.



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You didn't know you wanted this book until you saw it, right? You see "Molina" and you figure "Which one?" No matter which you guessed, you were wrong.



I'm thinking about how he is there wearing Cardinals pants all those years ago, when I realize ... HOLY SHIT! This book is claiming to be a New York Times bestseller! Are these lists getting more granular than just "Fiction" and "Non-Fiction" or have I missed this book becoming a phenomenon?



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I always like how this title makes it sound like he just snuck up on you. "OMAR! You SCARED me!"



I was going to make a crack about how Bengie Molina is in a v-neck undershirt on the cover of his book, but I figured he was probably raising those sons in challenging circumstances and doesn't have a whole lot of photos from back in the day, so why be a dick? But what's Omar!'s excuse?



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I'll be honest and admit I'm always at least a little bewitched by a cover designed to look like a period baseball card. Blomberg's previous book was called Designated Hebrew, deftly playing on the fact that the two things anyone knows about him are that (1) he was Jewish and didn't hide it, and (2) he was baseball's first DH. But apparently not all the material got into there. We're now 32 years past Munson's death, "The Captain" has long had a very different meaning in Yankeeland, and Blomberg's Yankee run ended a la Ed Lynch, with his tenure coming to an end just as the Yankee dynasty was coming to its fulfillment, but some publisher decided there was still milk in that cow.



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Others may feel differently, and that's OK, but you were to ask me how many different windows into Paul O'Neill's family I need, my only response would be "How many do you got?"

[MFS62]

Blomberg is very active on Facebook (and probably other platforms) and on his podcast, leading the charge (I didn't want to say "Crusade") to get Munson into the Hall of Fame. He hawks Thurman for the Hall shirts and caps along with his book at his personal appearances and on-line.



Later

[Edgy MD]

I wish Blomberg used his model-in-front-of-a-fan shot from his 1976 Topps card when his career was over and nobody knew it yet.



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[Johnny Lunchbucket]

Neither here nor there but just read Lyle's THE BRONX ZOO and can't really recommend it as highly as the reviews I'd seen would suggest. Reading several 70s baseball books this year--finished Mike Stroposhire's Texas Rangers book, which started off pretty good but went off the rails. Okrent's NINE INNINGS is terrific tho, for a 44-year-old book, still very relevant to the current discussion of baseball as a business and as an unknowable thing but to its participants.