Nov 08 2010 07:25 PM
No, this isn't one of my new forum awards, though it should be. The Casey Award is given out by Spitball Magazine, in honor of the best baseball book of the year.
This year's nominees:
[list][*]The Amazing Tale of Mr. Herbert and His Fabulous Alpine Cowboys Baseball Club: An Illustrated History of the Best Little Semipro Baseball Team in Texas by DJ Stout (University of Texas Press)
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[*]Cardboard Gods: An All-American Tale Told Through Baseball Cards by Josh Wilker (Seven Footer Press)
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[*]The Empire Strikes Out: How Baseball Sold U.S. Foreign Policy and Promoted the American Way Abroad by Robert Elias (The New Press)
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[*]Fifty-Nine in '84: Old Hoss Radbourn, Barehanded Baseball & the Greatest Season a Pitcher Ever Had by Edward Achorn (Harper)
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[*]The Immortals: An Art Collection of Baseball's Best by Dick Perez, text by William C. Kashatus (Brilliant Graphics)
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[*]The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood by Jane Leavy (Harper);
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[*]The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron by Howard Bryant (Pantheon);
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[*]Pie Traynor: A Baseball Biography by James Forr and David Proctor (McFarland);
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[*]Target Field: The New Home of the Minnesota Twins by Steve Berg (MVP Books);
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[*]Willie Mays: The Life, The Legend by James S. Hirsch (Scribner).
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I'm surprised to learn that I only own (and have only read) one of these, considering how many ballbooks got added to my library this year. Suffice to say that that one book (Cardboard Gods) was a walkoff grand slam. Chares Radbourn's 1884 used to fascinate me when I was a kid ("his arm was so sore, he couldn't lift his arm up to comb his hair"), but I remember as a kid always understanding that he won a nice, round 60 games that year. Sometime along the road to my adulthood, somebody adjusted the record and subtracted a win from his total.
Only, I can't find any record of the record being adjusted, and I'm left to believe either (1) I misremember my childhood, (2) I was a dummy in my childhood, or (3) I'm caught in some kind of W.P. Kinsella psychic time warp where I'm living in the same present as everybody, but remember a different baseall past.
I'm certain it must be (3). Anyhow, I'm very interested in the the Radbourn book.
In wonder Boys, protagonist Grady Tripp has a rival in Walter Gaskell, the head of his department. Gaskell is insufferable and humorless and a memoriabilia collecting Yankee fan, working on a marital biography of Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe tentatively titled The Last American Marriage. I've since learned that a good way to package nostalgia as serious history is to put "The Last... " in the title, as if your modest subject was in fact a turning point, a hinge of history. Bah. I'm therefore suspicious of items six and seven on the list. But I'm sure they're great.
Anyhow, when you're wondering what to buy me some day...