Mark Richardson — Mickey Rawlings is a baseball player. He’s also a sleuth. He does not solve murders because he has a yen to be a detective. Rather, he has murders thrust upon him–murders which neither the police nor anyone else seems to want solved. And that leaves Mickey to solve them. Rawlings is a major league utility infielder whose skills are good enough to … Continue reading Baseball and Murder Mysteries
Mark Richardson — Marty Appel, author of Munson, the acclaimed biography of former New York Yankees catcher Thurman Munson, has done it again. This top-notch profiler of Yankees past has given us what may prove to be the baseball book of the year with his new work, Casey Stengel: Baseball’s Greatest Character. It is an extensive in-depth look at the “Ol’ Perfessor,” one of the … Continue reading Baseball’s Ol’ Perfessor
Bob Bates — Mark Richardson’s moving essay entitled “My Mom, Baseball, and Me,” published previously on Wise Guys, is my motivation for posting this baseball poem I wrote about someone very dear to me. The poem is a combination tribute and eulogy to Jeanette “Jeanie” Sotka Hofmeister, who married my cousin Daryl “Sonny” Hofmeister in 1954. In his baseball-playing days, Sonny was a slugging outfielder … Continue reading Jeanie’s Hope
Bob Bates — In his epic tour de force, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams has his all-knowing, all-wise Grand Computer named Deep Thought delve into the answer to the great Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. As Deep Thought assesses and ponders (in deep thought), tensions rise and suspense builds until, voila! Deep Thought authoritatively “with infinite majesty and calm” announces: “42”. Cosmic non sequitur … Continue reading 42
Mark Richardson — My late fall/early winter reading has recently focused on classic fiction, Tolstoy and Mann, but I have found time to squeeze in three baseball biographies, and all three are worthy of note. Biographies have always been at the forefront of the game’s literature, but in recent years there seems to have been an explosion of life stories of the diamond’s greats. This … Continue reading Lefty, Scooter, and Hankus Pankus: Three Baseball Legends
Mark Richardson — I came to baseball, or baseball came to me, as a very young boy. My dad was never much of a baseball fan, at least until he was in his 60s and he discovered the entertainment that was Harry Caray’s broadcasting, but my mom was an avid Chicago Cubs fan all her life. Her grandpa (my Great-grandpa Cashore), her dad (my Grandpa … Continue reading My Mom, Baseball, and Me
Mark Richardson — I made my first visit to Wrigley Field as a 12 year old boy in 1968. I entered through the street gate and found myself in a large, dank cement enclosure that resembled somebody’s basement, writ large. There were concession stands selling food and souvenirs all along the walls, and stands set up in the center selling scorecards and pencils. We went … Continue reading Wrigley Field
Mark Richardson — “Moe could speak twelve languages, but he couldn’t hit in any of them.” Such was the scouting report on Moe Berg, the subject of Nicholas Dawidoff’s The Catcher Was A Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg.” Berg was a notoriously poor hitter, a defensive wizard behind the plate who played in the major leagues for fifteen years , and most … Continue reading A Carefully Crafted Life
Mark Richardson — We are all aware of Ernest Hemingway’s expression of affection for Joe DiMaggio in The Old Man and the Sea, of Phillip Roth’s extensive and extended baseball metaphors in The Great American Novel, and of Bernard Malamud’s employment of the national pastime as a conveyance for his morality play The Natural, but baseball’s appeal to the literati predates these classics by decades. Before he was America’s … Continue reading Baseball and the Literati: Runyon, Lardner and Farrell
Ron Berger — I share Mark Richardson’s interest in nonfiction baseball books (see Wise Guys, February 17, 2016) and thought I’d take the opportunity to also share a few that I’ve read over the last 14 years. But first some personal background. My bonding with baseball began in 1959, when I was eight years old. The year before the Brooklyn Dodgers had moved to my … Continue reading For the Love of the Game
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