A crowdsourced almanac of charming baseball anecdotes.
Gray collects fans’ favorite memories of America’s pastime in this sports book, the second in a series.
There’s something about baseball that sticks in the memory: the smell of the concession stand, the crack of the bat, the electricity of a hometown crowd. It’s no wonder that those who love the game can recall, almost photographically, their favorite moments, even after the passage of decades. The author’s simple survey question—“what was your favorite game, or moment, relating to baseball?”—has elicited so many responses from fans that he has enough to fill a second volume. Collected here, the answers represent 370 respondents and reference almost every Major League Baseball team (including a few that no longer exist), along with quite a few minor league and college teams. Sam Schiff remembers seeing the very last game the Dodgers ever played for Brooklyn, including the final man ever to pitch for the Brooklyn iteration of the team: Sandy Koufax. Dave Rey remembers an entire crowd of traffic-delayed fans sprinting to AT&T Park so as not to miss Barry Bonds breaking Hank Aaron’s home run record. Evan Weiner remembers when the Houston Colt .45s, a new expansion team, pulled themselves out of their losing streak by hosting a “Voodoo Night” and hiring a local shaman to put a hex on the Philadelphia Phillies. Memories of classic rivalries, shattered records, and legendary (and forgotten) stars fill these pages, as do tales of friendship, family bonding, civic pride, and childish wonder. Gray lets the fans speak for themselves, which lends the book a wonderfully polyphonic style. The anecdotes read like well-practiced bar stories (which many of them no doubt are), like this humbling one from Steve Aaronson: “Moose Skowron and Mickey Mantle were in Skowron’s red convertible and, standing at the curb, I said…‘Oooh, Mr. Skowron, may I please have your autograph?’ He replied, ‘Get the hell out of here, you little pisspot.’ Mantle thought this was hilarious.” Baseball fans of every era will enjoy this collection of sometimes funny, sometimes poignant, always heartfelt memories.
A crowdsourced almanac of charming baseball anecdotes.Pub Date: July 13, 2022
ISBN: 9798885904650
Page Count: 406
Publisher: Palmetto Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An overstuffed, enjoyable jaunt through the NFL’s recent past.
Four decades of football, as chronicled by a well-known sportswriter.
Longtime Sports Illustrated gridiron reporter King takes a maximalist approach, devoting one chapter to each year from 1984, when he started writing about the NFL, to 2023, the last season he covered the league full-time. This lengthy professional memoir features anecdotes and commentary, an argument-starting list of names for his “Mount Rushmore of Pro Football,” a crossword puzzle, and informative tidbits on tactics and playcalling, as well as profiles of singular players and warranted criticism of league bosses’ handling of player health and sports gambling. King skillfully charts the NFL’s inexorable growth. When he started, snail-mail newsletters were must-reads. In today’s media landscape, streaming networks have spent $4.3 billion to broadcast 58 games. As the author illustrates, Paul Tagliabue, a relatively unheralded league commissioner, engineered the year-round fan experience, with “tentpole events like a draft with more fanfare, free agency, and a new TV channel.” Polls showed that baseball and football were equally popular in the ’80s, but, by 2024, football had four times as many fans. Yet King’s kitchen-sink approach results in some bloat. Nobody yearns for a minute-by-minute rehash of the Cowboys’ 1991 draft or a rundown of the “quotes of 2002.” But amid the overabundance, there’s ample charm. In his best chapters, King catches up with guys he wrote about years ago. An 80-something Hall of Fame coach sketches Xs and Os on a notepad. A retired player known for his creative trash-talking shares tricks of the trade. In a powerful chapter, King visits a lab and looks at the damaged brain of a player he voted for in Hall of Fame balloting. This dovetails with King’s number-crunching on per-game hits sustained by players, important analysis as the league considers expanding its schedule.
An overstuffed, enjoyable jaunt through the NFL’s recent past.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9781324123637
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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PERSPECTIVES
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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