PSA for the PBBC, August 20, 2021

Headnote: One of the thing I like about the Pandemic Baseball Book Club is that it’s a kind of “one stop shopping.” Instead of posting about various authors, projects, and events, all I’m doing here is cutting and pasting their weekly newsletter. Do take a moment to read the author Q&A. I find them particularly interesting as they discuss the arduous process of bringing their projects to press.

By the way, here are “Bookshelf Conversations” I’ve had with some of the authors associated with the PBBC:

Visit the PBBC for the latest batch of authors with new books coming out this year.

Our very own Bryan Hoch (who in addition to having written The Bronx Zoom also covers the Yankees for MLB.com) attended last week’s Field of Dreams Game in Iowa … and had an adventure along the way.

It started with this …

… and evolved to this:

Bryan had 22 hours to make a 16-hour drive, and did NOT want to miss the ballgame. “This may be the stupidest thing I’ve ever done or the greatest thing. I don’t know,” he wrote on Instagram.

People began to worry …

… with updates coming fast … and furious.

Bryan stopped in Amherst, Ohio, for a 90-minute nap at 4 a.m., with a 15-minute refresher snooze in Genoa, Ohio. There are more tweets about Starbucks and photos from Indiana, a video update with 250 miles to go and a shot from the Iowa state line.

Spoiler alert: He made it.

SI.com ended up covering his trip, as did Bryan himself, offering extensive detail in the aftermath. Nothing, however, beats the cheerleading he received from his own kids back home.

Now that we’ve learned about at least one facet of Bryan’s day job, why don’t we find out something about his book?

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ASK AN AUTHOR
Bryan Hoch
The Bronx Zoom: Inside the New York Yankees’ Most Bizarre Season (Triumph Books, June 8, 2021)

What’s your book about?
It’s a book about baseball, and also about 2020. It traces the entire, crazy year through the lens of the New York Yankees, with overlapping storylines involving the COVID-19 pandemic, New York City, the Black Lives Matter/social justice movement and the contentious presidential election. We all have stories about how the last 18 months changed and shaped our lives; I wanted to show the human side of how Major League Baseball and its participants dealt with a season unlike any other.

Why this book?
I’ve been on the Yankees beat for MLB.com since 2007, and more than any other season, 2020 was a year in which baseball and real life collided. We usually look to sports as a distraction from what is going on in the daily news cycle, but sports and news were inseparable last year. Baseball players are creatures of habit, and I found it fascinating to examine how these finely tuned athletes dealt with a season in which they literally had no idea what tomorrow might bring. In a way, I lived it along with them—I was with the Yankees when play halted on March 12, and was one of the few people permitted in the ballpark when workouts and games resumed.

What did you learn through research?
Looking back on a year in which media access was severely limited due to the pandemic, I realized that my day-to-day reporting during the season was much thinner than I knew at the time. (This is a good argument about why it matters to our readers that we get clubhouse access back!) Only by peeling back the layers and reconstructing the season with players, coaches, executives and others was I able to glean a true sense of what was going on behind the scenes, and how the team bonded over simple things like table tennis, pop-a-shot basketball and rowdy bus rides to the ballpark. Baseball teams are generally tight units, but I feel like the 2020 Yankees will be forever bonded by their shared experience during the pandemic. Years from now, at Old-Timers’ Day, these guys will be swapping stories about that weird year that they played in empty ballparks, when they stayed in vacant hotels and had to take spit tests every day before putting on their spikes.

How long did the book take?
I started compiling information when baseball headed north for the summer-camp restart in early July, and continued to take notes when the season got underway. There was no guarantee that baseball would be able to pull off a 2020 season, and it looked very shaky at times—especially when the Yankees were sequestered in Philadelphia for days on end, “rained out” under sunny skies while MLB tried to figure out to do in the wake of the Marlins coronavirus situation. Several Yankees players told me that they expected the league to shut down at any moment. I thought that if they were able to pull off any type of season, shortened and strange as it might be, it would be a human story worth telling.

What’s the most memorable interview you conducted?
The three-headed trio of Gerrit Cole, Scott Boras and Brian Cashman was terrific in reconstructing the contract negotiations that took place before the 2020 season. Pitching in New York was Cole’s boyhood dream. He’d become Cashman’s white whale, and I was thrilled to unearth so many little details about their meeting in Newport Beach, Calif. I love the image of Cole and Andy Pettitte chatting one-on-one for about 20 minutes as every other participant in the meeting stood by and observed awkwardly while these two craft masters swapped notes. The Yankees rolling out a red carpet for Cole’s nine-year, $324 million contract was one of the last “normal” events before the world stopped in March.

How did this process differ from your other books?
The great majority of my interviews for this book took place over Zoom or telephone due to the pandemic. It was a means to an end, as it was during the baseball season, and I missed the flavor of the face-to-face interaction. One of the wildest experiences reporting my book on the 2009 Yankees, MISSION 27, was riding in Alex Rodriguez’s limo through the streets of Manhattan as he traveled to meet Jennifer Lopez at 30 Rockefeller Center. That was great color, but it was impossible to get that kind of stuff last year. In some ways, I treated it like historical research, even though the games had taken place only a few weeks earlier. I leaned upon photographs, game video and some behind-the-scenes content provided by sources to tell the story of the year.

Buy The Bronx Zoom.

***

NOW UP AT PBBCLUB.COM
Brad ‘n Andrew Open Some Cards

Authors Brad Balukjian (The Wax Pack) and Andrew Forbes (The Only Way is the Steady Way) seize on the conceit of Brad’s book, in which he opens a pack of baseball cards and then tracks down every player in it. When Andrew’s book came out in the spring, his publisher procured a bunch of old packs as a means for promotion, but for various reasons they never got used. So Andrew and Brad did what comes naturally: They opened them.

Learn what they do with them! Learn about some players! Learn just how steady Andrew’s internet connection can be! All this and more in a Very Special Episode from the Pandemic Baseball Book Club.

Watch it here.

***

EMMETT ASHFORD (1914-1980)
By E. Ethelbert Miller

I call balls and strikes the way
John Coltrane plays “My Favorite Things.”
Folks come to the games to hear the sound
of my music. Some batters stand in the box
like bass players who don’t know how to play.

If I’m not behind the plate
I’m dancing in the infield calling runners
out and safe like James Brown sliding
across a stage. I’ve had managers run
from dugouts only to protest and scream

“Please, Please, Please.”

E. Ethelbert Miller‘s new collection of baseball poetry, When Your Wife Has Tommy John Surgery, will be released by City Point Press on Sept. 7.

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WHAT THEY’RE SAYING ABOUT US
In researching his Japanese American ancestors, Chris Komai discovered that Rob Fitts‘ Issei Baseball recreated his grandparents’ world. Read about it at Discover Nikkei.

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WHAT ELSE WE’RE DOING
Dan Epstein wrote about the Marx Brothers for the Forward.

Danny Gallagher wrote about George Selkirk of Huntsville, Ontario—the player who replaced Babe Ruth in right field for the Yankees—for the National Post.

In addition to opening packs of old baseball cards, Andrew Forbes made a list for Shepherd (a new-ish book recommendation site) about books that place baseball in a broader historical context. (He says that the list could have included 100 books, but he was asked to limit it to five.)

Lincoln Mitchell wrote about California’s recall election for CNN.

Eric Nusbaum‘s Sports Stories covers female bodybuilding in Pumping Iron 2. Go subscribe.

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WHERE WE’VE BEEN
Andrew Maraniss did a podcast interview with Wax Ecstatic.

Danny Gallagher chatted about how the cancellation of the 1994 season affected the Expos on This Week In Sports History.

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WHERE WE’LL BE
Dan Taylor will join the National Baseball Hall of Fame’s Virtual Author Series to discuss Lights, Camera, Fastball on Sept. 16 at 2 p.m. EST.

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GET SHOPPING
You have totables. Get this tote bag and start toting.