Baseball Books

Has anyone seen the new Bill James handbook? Coliseum Books on 42nd usually has it by now...

also, tips of books for someone who knows pretty much nothing about baseball, except for what i managed to glean from watching a few games on tv, would be appreciated.

Yes, it's good.

friend of a friend is putting out a graphic novel about satchel paige and jim crow...

http://www.cartoonstudies.org/books/paige/sample.html

the new Connie Mack bio by Norman Macht is sposed to be definitive.

I am enjoying that Neyer/James Book of Pitchers.

Got randyrolled yesterday.

Instead of the copy of Christy Mathewson's Pitching in a Pinch that I ordered, I got this.

http://www.amazon.com/You-Gotta-Have-Robert-Whiting/dp/067972947X

Oh! I just read about that book and "wa" in the Cubs spring program.

It said that cultural differences between Japan and America were responsible for the Giants' inability to retain Manasori Murikami after 1965. Apparently the MLB negotiators were more strict in their reading of the reserve clause, whereas the Japanese expected the "spririt" of the deal to prevail. The article was pretty brief but I gather that the "spirit" referred to was that NPB used to send "non-prospects" to the U.S. for seasoning, and when Murikami turned into an actual MLB prspect, they felt that he should go back to Japan, despite the literal meaning of the contract language. It sounds like Murikami (semi-) voluntarily returned to NLP, even though he technically could have stayed in the U.S. under his contract.

I guess it was only because Nomo found some sort of legal loophole in the standard NLP contract that allowed him to sign with the Dodgers in the 1980s. Perhaps that represented some historical cultural shift in Japan's attitude to contract. More recently they seem to have stood on the letter of contract (much to their profit).

It didn't explain the "posting" process that well. Apparently Fukudome didn't have to be posted like other recent Japanese players.

"Wa" (group harmony) is neat. Let us bury our tomahawks and have wa on ILBB.

Just read Summer of '49 -- was kinda hoping for a 50/50 split regarding Sox / Yankees nostalgia-tinted schmooze, & not back-in-the-day when-men-were-men Yankeeography action clumsily intercut w/ "these are fans!" anecdotes. (Unrelated: every time DH leaned on Triple Crown stats or W-L records, I rolled my eyes.) Some cool stories & quotes & stuff, but doesn't really seem to congeal as a book so much, and "the great DiMaggio" can go fart in a hat.

Also read excerpts of that O'Nan / King 2004 Red Sox diary thing a while back. Whatever interest I had in pro-RSN propoganda was totally squelched by that piece of shit.

NB: I hate everything. :p

the o'nan/king book was interesting early because that team did take a dip that looked like it would be their annual august swoon and o'nan totally starts ripping the team. but when they hold on and the playoffs it was too much even for me.

http://images.barnesandnoble.com/images/14260000/14268611.JPG

I read "Summer of '49" when I was fifteen or so. I found it a bit long-winded and boring. No need to revisit it, I guess? :)

apparently it's full of errors.

We're pleased to make two major announcements to the SABR membership and the baseball community at large:

1) SABR is now the publisher of The Emerald Guide to Baseball, and
2) SABR is making the PDF version of The Emerald Guide to Baseball 2009 available as a FREE download from the members-only section of the website (and be sure to direct friends and family to sabr.org so they can get a copy too).

Edited by acclaimed baseball historians (and SABR members) Gary Gillette and Pete Palmer, The Emerald Guide distills the 2008 season down to 586 fact-filled pages that contain the pitching, fielding, and hitting statistics for every player active in the major and minor leagues in 2008. The Emerald Guide fills the hole in the baseball record left by the 2006 demise of the Sporting News Baseball Guide and contains all of the same features and then some, such as team-by-team daily results, a directory of important contacts, and a synopsis of the just-completed season. A bound version of The Emerald Guide is available via print on demand at Lulu.com for $23.94.

Making the PDF of The Emerald Guide available fre to anyone with accesss to a computer is a direct way for SABR to fulfill its mission of disseminating the history and record of baseball. And you, our members, help the organization fulfill this mission each and every day. One of our objectives is for sabr.org to be bookmarked by everyone with a serious interest in baseball. The Emerald Guide offers a step in that direction.

SABR plans to publish The Emerald Guide annually. Gillette and Palmer also authored 2007 and 2008 editions of The Emerald Guide (co-published with Sports-Reference). Free PDF versions of these editions are also available from the SABR website.

Thank you for your commitment to SABR and its mission. We hope you enjoy The Emerald Guide to Baseball 2009.

Sincerely,

John Zajc, Executive Director

http://sabr.org/sabr.cfm?a=cms,c,2766,36,0

fwiw, i third (?) bellisarius and felicity's recommendation of you gotta have wa. it provides a lot of interesting history of japanese baseball even if it's bit dated at this point. it would be interesting to see a new edition taking into account ichiro, matsui et al on one hand and bobby valentine on the other.

anybody have an opinion on that somewhat recent dimaggio bio? i think the author was richard cramer?

huh. how about that...

http://www.amazon.com/Samurai-Way-Baseball-Impact-Ichiro/dp/0446694037/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1236859004&sr=1-4

has anone bought the Fielding Bible II? Froma BP interview with author John Dewan:

The one thing I'd bring up that was kind of fun, was the analysis of Nate McLouth and Carlos Gomez; McLouth won a Gold Glove, and Gomez didn't. Carlos Gomez had the most defensive misplays in center field, which is a characteristic of young players that we've found; other young players up there are Delmon Young, B.J. Upton, and his brother, Justin Upton. All of these players have more defensive misplays. But Carlos Gomez covers so much more ground, that it just shows through on the number of runs saved. The difference that we found between Nate McLouth and Carlos Gomez was amazingly straightforward. Simply, Gomez is covering ground in deep center field, where fielding a ball is much more valuable, than Nate McLouth, who covers more ground in shallow center field, where making a catch means that you're saving a single. Gomez, meanwhile, is saving doubles and triples. It looks to be that the biggest problem for Nate McLouth is that he should play deeper. He has good skills and a lot of good fielding plays in our system, but when we break it down between shallow, medium, and deep, which is something we did in the book this year, he's plus on shallow balls, and minus on medium and deep.

also measures Varitek as worst recent Boston catcher, lol

Yeah that was weird though cuz it sort of seemed like the return of CERA which seems very suspect.

The Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) is pleased to announce the winners of the 2008 SABR-Sporting News Awards: Ron Selter for Ballparks of the Deadball Era; Andy Strasberg, Bob Thompson and Tim Wiles for Baseball's Greatest Hit; and Jim Walker and Rob Bellamy for Center Field Shot: A History of Baseball on Television. The winners will receive their awards on Saturday, August 1, 2009, in Washington, DC, at the JW Marriott, Pennsylvania Avenue during SABR's annual convention.

The Sporting News-SABR Baseball Research Award recognizes outstanding baseball research published in the previous calendar year in areas other than history and biography. The Award is designed to honor projects that do not fit the criteria for The Seymour Medal or the McFarland-SABR Baseball Research Award. The Sporting News sponsors the $200 cash awards that accompany the honor.

Ballparks of the Deadball Era is Ronald Selter's comprehensive study of Deadball Era-ballparks and park effects, in which he shows the extent to which ballparks determined the style of play. Organized by major league city, this fact-filled, data-heavy commentary includes all 34 ballparks used by the American and National Leagues from 1901 through 1919.

In Baseball's Greatest Hit, Strasberg, Thompson, and Wiles present the complete story of the third-most frequently sung song in America: “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” The book features countless photos and illustrations, providing a pictorial history of the song’s influence on the game and American culture. A bonus CD is also included, which features many rare and classic recordings of the song from artists such as Dr. John, the Ray Brown Trio, Carly Simon, and George Winston.

In Center Field Shot, Walker and Bellamy trace the sometimes contentious but mutually beneficial relationship between baseball and television, from the first televised game in 1939 to the contemporary era of Internet broadcasts, satellite radio, and high-definition TV. Ultimately, the association of baseball with television emerges as a reflection American culture at large.

Baseball America's top ten of '09:

http://www.baseballamerica.com/today/majors/book-guide/2009/269330.html

http://www.amazon.com/Big-Hair-Plastic-Grass-Baseball/dp/0312607547/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1266884385&sr=8-1

Thanks, Matos WK.

dude's got a blog too!

http://www.bighairplasticgrass.com/

http://bats.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/01/baseball-historians-get-their-own-hall/

Anyone read this?

http://www.amazon.com/Empire-Strikes-Out-Baseball-Promoted/dp/1595581952/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1269999008&sr=8-3

Started Fifty-Nine in '84 last night. It's pretty decent so far. A little too fond of sounding like a 19th c. newsman at times.

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ebooks/free_ebook.html

Anyone have this coffee table book?

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/multimedia/photo_gallery/0711/neil.leifer.baseball.book/content.1.html

Fifty-nine in '84 was weirdly obsessed with the existence of hookers and the possibility that Hoss Radbourn's true love had been one

The Bullpen Gospels is basically a feel-good Ball Four. You get mentions of baseball groupies and drinking, but none of the gory details. Damn, I need to read Ball Four again.

Haven't read it but I'm guessing it's solid.

Beyond Batting Average
Over the past few decades, a multitude of advanced hitting, pitching, fielding and base running measures have been introduced to the baseball world. This comprehensive sabermetrics primer will introduce you to these new statistics with easy to understand explanations and examples. It will illustrate the evolution of statistics from simple traditional measures to the more complex metrics of today. You will learn how all the statistics are connected to winning and losing games, how to interpret them, and how to apply them to performance on the field. By the end of this book, you will be able to evaluate players and teams through statistics more thoroughly and accurately than you could before.

http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fStoreID=873874

RFI: a basic baseball book for my GF. I feel like I need to introduce slash stats before I can get all wonky. Also, she watched a little of SNBB w/ me last night and, say what you will abt J morgan, having super slo-mo shots of swings is v v educational.

basic as far as analysis or history goes?

Allen Barra, a Birmingham native, has a history of Rickwood Field out:

http://www.baseballamerica.com/today/majors/book-guide/2010/2610530.html

just finished The Bullpen Gospels last week. not a bad read. i preferred the lighthearted stuff over the more serious bits.

http://www.insidesocal.com/tomhoffarth/archives/2010/09/ball-four-more.html

Haven't read the piece yet, but thanks for the link. Along with James's and Kael's books, and (its influence long since dissapated) The Catcher in the Rye, no book ever influenced me more. Read it at just the perfect time, when I was the 12th guy on my high-school basketball team, cracking wise about the despotic coach and some of the lunks ahead of me. I was booted off the team within a year or two of reading Ball Four; not sure if that would have happened without a nudge from Bouton.

has anyone read "'78" by bill reynolds?

no.

John Thorn has an early-days history coming in March:

https://baseballeden.com/Home.html

im reading '78 right now. BF got me eight men out for xmas, that's next.

David Ulin of the LA Times picks his all-time favorites:

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/books/la-et-0331-baseball-books-20110331,0,7729658.story

"The Long Season" by Jim Brosnan (1960). Ten years before "Ball Four," Brosnan published the first (and still best) baseball diary

I've never heard of this book!

Was there nothing good written after 1983?

I liked the Bronsan book when I read it years ago, but I find it surprising that anyone would list it rather than--or at least alongside--Ball Four, unless you object to Bouton's book for the same reasons Bowie Kuhn and Mickey Mantle did.

This is perfect -- I was just hunting for a good baseball book list (and couldn't really find one anywhere).

Ball Four is a tough read - the narrator is so, I don't know, unlikeable (and not a good writer, though why should he be). Have read about a third and have put it into the "not right now" pile.

I didn't read B4 til a couple years ago and found it immensely readable.

I've only read two of the books on that list in their entirety.

ie, Malamud and Angell.

tho I miiiight have read the Breslin book on the Mets a very long time ago.

the coover book is great but not really about baseball

I will say, if the Braves know who leaked the Arcia comment, that reporter may have won the battle and lost the war. Good luck getting anybody to open up to you in the future.

That sounds like an important distinction I didn't acknowledge.

Alex Cora was asked about this

Alex Cora was on Baseball Tonight with @Buster_ESPN and while he didn’t touch on too much with the Red Sox, he did talk about giving teams bulletin board material.

He alluded to the whole Eduardo Rodriguez situation in 2021, but the best part was his story from 2007.

After Ryan… pic.twitter.com/GVskWI32nq

— Tyler Milliken ⚾️ (@tylermilliken_) October 12, 2023

This continues to roll on. The reporter was named as Cespedes BBQ’s Jake Mintz. First this happened:

"And then some jackoff comes in at the end of the season that gets a credential, God only knows why. And the clubhouse is a sacred space." Alanna Rizzo went off on Jake Mintz's clubhouse reporting on MLBN's "High Heat" Thursday. pic.twitter.com/6dooqeLPnh

— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) October 12, 2023

1) He yelled the phrase when cameras and recorders were rolling. I have audio. Had he done it at a slightly different moment, a camera sending an interview live to the truck might have caught it. Would you be eviscerating that network? Or would you say,

— Chelsea Janes (@chelsea_janes) October 12, 2023

Shouldn’t say that with cameras around?

2) Suggesting you shouldn’t report something said in the presence of MORE THAN A DOZEN reporters because it “wasn’t meant to get out?” is suggesting reporters should be protecting players from themselves. That’s not our job. It’s theirs.

— Chelsea Janes (@chelsea_janes) October 12, 2023

Statement from the BBWAA pic.twitter.com/X6ThJPk6CK

— BBWAA (@officialBBWAA) October 13, 2023

In that post above, I still never really explain why I give a pass to Bouton but not to the reporter. I realize that it comes down to personal bias, that--fairly or unfairly--I value what Bouton does (writing a book) more than what the reporter does (writing an article, game report, whatever). Ball Four changed sports books, and I think it was extremely important in the evolution of how we view athletes; quoting Arcia in the clubhouse led to a memorable postseason moment (not the HR itself but the staredown) but has no intrinsic value otherwise. So it's basically a biased value judgement in the end.

I was also thinking that Ball Four is so great, it divides people in unexpected ways. In one respect, Bouton and Bill James were trying to do exactly the same thing: demystify a lot of silly things people believed about baseball and baseball players. Yet the most memorable comment I've ever encountered from James on Ball Four is "Jim Bouton is a loudmouth." I'm surprised he either can't see or won't acknowledge his affinities with Bouton.

I've never seen the TV series, but I'm guessing that it's something close to what the book would have been if Bouton had held back and not crossed that line of privacy: Wacky Expansion Team. Still entertaining, but changing nothing. Similar to how I avoided The Bad News Bears for 20 years because I assumed it would amount to Wacky Little League Team and little more. Instead, it's a surprisingly harrowing argument that adults should never be allowed to coach kids baseball.

Posnanski is 1000% on the reporter's side.

https://open.substack.com/pub/joeposnanski/p/friday-rewind-the-hunger-games?r=1jtu0&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

Spent the morning in the library basement helping move boxes for the upcoming town book sale. The guy who organizes the moving always lets me take a few baseball books. Found a hardcover of Bouton's I'm Glad You Didn't Take It Personally--library stamp but in excellent shape, what I assume is a first edition. Also Harold Rosenthal's The 10 Best Years of Baseball: An Informal History of the Fifties. He's got the wrong decade, but looks interesting.

Unlikely I'll ever read it, but found a copy of this at the town book sale (hard to find a good image online):

https://i.postimg.cc/VkxpDQVN/leflore.jpg

Published in '78, right after his .325/212-hit season with the Tigers. He followed that with two more good ones, then stole 97 bases for the Expos in 1980--three more and he would have been only the third guy to steal 100 after 1900. (Henderson stole 100 the same year, Vince Coleman a few years later.) LeFlore was out of the game after the '82 season; his Wikipedia entry says it was soon revealed that he was five years older than he claimed. Received MVP votes in four of his nine seasons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_LeFlore

I would love to read a book about the most successful ex-con in baseball history! I didn't know that they made a movie based on his life too.

He's still alive. Not being too far from Detroit, I thought to check today to see if it was autographed. No luck. (He and Fidrych both played in the '76 All-Star Game.)

Read Bouton's I'm Glad You Didn't Take It Personally for the first time in years. Very worthy follow-up. Still a few things that are dated, of course--two songs they sing on the bus, in particular--but a great chronicle of all the fallout from Ball Four and the end of Bouton's career (and beginning of his TV career). One chapter is letters received about Ball Four, including one from Ruth Ryan: "...both Nolan and I enjoyed it very much." Another chapter, "Sanctity of the Clubhouse," addresses issue raised above. There's a part involving Doug Radar that I want to quote but can't find at the moment.

Bouton's working for ABC at this point:

I had a great time with the Astros. They made me feel most welcome, and there was a marvelously nutty interview with Doug Rader, the third baseman, who suggested Little Leaguers should actually live one a diet of bases, pitchers mounds and bubble-gm cards.

Bubble-gum cards?

"Oh, yes. They have lots of information on them about hitting and pitching."

Anybody read Evan Drellich's Winning Changes Everything? A friend writes that it's

_a look at the Luhnow-era Astros that offers: a) a case-study reckoning with two decades of league-wide Moneyball cloning; and b) a sobering portrait of Alex Cora in his Houston days (a drunkard and a lout, according to Drellich)._

Pitcher usage was a common fight between them in 2012, Luhnow’s first season of play with the team. Late in games, managers have to deploy their relievers in a way that positions the team to win while also protecting those pitchers’ health. Sometimes relievers throw on multiple days in a row, increasing fatigue and the chance of injury. Even if a reliever does not enter a game, just warming up in the bullpen can be taxing. Luhnow wanted Mills to use his better relievers more frequently.

“What if his arm isn’t feeling well?” Mills said. “We can’t do that, because we’re going to kill this guy.” “What do you mean we’re going to kill this guy?” Luhnow said. “He can’t throw four or five days in a row,” Mills said. “Well, he can, if he only throws an inning here, two-thirds of an inning here, or whatever,” Luhnow said. “No, he can’t. Because he has to warm up,” Mills shot back. “We just can’t walk up there and get this guy to come in the game. He has to warm up; his arm has to get hot.”

never heard of this!

The Celebrant, by Eric Rolfe Greenberg

I have two copies of Thomas Klise’s wild and wildly out-of-print 1974 novel, The Last Western, and my friend Maria gave me both of them. It’s a strange, shaggy, ambitious book—one of those classic Catholic Social Apocalypse/Baseball novels, whose protagonist both pitches in the Major Leagues and becomes the pope, among other things; we talked about it at The Awl back in 2012. As it is not the social baseball novel that I’m writing about here, I will move on from it beyond encouraging you to seek it out. The reason I bring it up has more to do with Maria’s practice of buying a copy of the book whenever and wherever she finds it, and then giving that to someone she thinks would get something out of it. This seemed strange to me at the time, and I told her as much, but it makes more sense to me now. If you are going to love a book that’s hard to find, and want other people to love it, too, that is what you will have to do. And so, at least until Defector Classic Editions comes into existence and publishes a deluxe new edition of the book, I am committing to doing it when and wherever I find a copy of Eric Rolfe Greenberg’s 1983 novel The Celebrant, the book I most enjoyed in 2023.

The Celebrant is easier to find than The Last Western, if nothing else; first editions are expensive and seem decently rare, but you can get copies of the most-recent printing, from 1993, from the University of Nebraska press and on Amazon. And I imagine it would still work if you got it that way, but there was something about how I found it that felt auspicious. Some friends had recommended it years earlier, and critics had praised the book widely when it came out decades before that, but the fact that it had fallen so far out of the conversation—it’s the only book that Greenberg ever published; he doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page—made it seem all the more significant when it finally turned up on a shelf at The Strand. If you can get a Lost Classic on Amazon, it feels less lost, somehow, and maybe even like less of a classic for being on there alongside all the self-published anti-vaccine claptrap and knockoff HDMI cables. The thrill of discovering it, right in its place and where it had never been in any of my previous visits, felt more like what I’d imagined.

However lost it was, The Celebrant is indeed a damn classic. The Last Western concerns the end of everything—a whole world collapsing under the weight of human cynicism, malaise, jealousy, greed, unbelief, and all the other 1970s American Classics. The Celebrant, which is set around the turn of the 20th century and tells the story of a Jewish immigrant family and their complicated personal and professional relationships with baseball in general, the New York Giants more specifically, and the iconic Giants ace Christy Mathewson in particular, is more a novel of beginnings than endings. It is a story about how baseball has made people into Americans, which it always has, and how fraught and complicated and implicating a thing that is. There is a lot of baseball in it, and Greenberg writes it elegantly and expertly; the turn-of-the-century details are carefully wrought; there’s nothing showy about the language, but the steakhouses and train carriages and ballparks are described in evocative and graceful ways. It feels real enough—crowded and smoky and half-drunk, or starched and fancified and lonely—that Greenberg’s detours into more debauched and dreamlike corners are made all the more disorienting.

It is a commanding performance, all told, and Greenberg’s stuff is all the more effective for how well he controls it, and how meticulous he is about setting up what needs to be set up, and how comfortably he changes speeds. As good as the baseball writing is, and as colorful as the color is, what has stayed with me about The Celebrant is how deftly Greenberg navigates the concentric and contradictory layers of reverence and awe and unreality and devotion that make fandom so simultaneously deranging and enriching a lived experience. The Kapinski family comes closer to these icons—to Mathewson, especially, and to the Giants’ irascible manager John McGraw—than they are strictly comfortable with, and ultimately perhaps closer than they can strictly handle. You’re not supposed to do business with your gods.

If what follows is tragic, it is mostly so in the same accumulative way that stories told over sufficiently long periods of time tend to be. Everyone is pushed and pulled by the forces that always push and pull people, and also by the abiding and All-American subsuming of the small by the large, and the past by the future. It’s a smaller book than The Last Western in a bunch of ways, if just as worthy of rediscovery. Both have to do with belief, but if The Last Western is about the crisis of a world without it, The Celebrant is about the strange and shifting shapes that belief can take, and the lonesome places our devotions can take us. - David Roth

Posnanski's Why We Love Baseball has won the 2023 Casey Award for best baseball book of the year. It's his third Casey. How do I know all this? Joe, the world's greatest self-promoter--i.e., the world's most exhausting self-promoter--has a column about it today.

Winners and nominees (launched in 1983):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casey_Award

Bought this at a flea market--$10, still shrink-wrapped; a bit too much in that setting--only because I didn't know it existed until today:

https://i.postimg.cc/fR9xWtBY/kirk.jpg

Came out in '97, two years after Gibson retired and nine years after his famous HR. Oversized hardcover, almost a coffee-table book--surprised he got someone to publish it (he pretty clearly wasn't headed for the HOF). Also surprised the cover photo is him as a Tiger, and not what you'd assume would be on the cover.

Fine player, though--one of three or four Tigers who probably would have been a better pick for MVP than Willie Hernandez.

What's he got to say about his famous homer?

Big-deal acquisition today: Martin Levin, who used to edit Innings, a short-lived Toronto monthly I wrote for, gave me his copy of the 1977 Baseball Abstract, the first one.

https://sabrweb.b-cdn.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/1977-Bill-James-Abstract.jpg

I don't know how many copies James self-published--my guess is 100. (The '78 edition, also self-published, sold 250 according to Wikipedia.) I've been trying for 20 years to get a copy, and I've never so much as seen one for sale online, whether eBay or Abe or anywhere. So I don't know what it's worth, but I'm guessing quite a bit.

(Martin also told me that he's donated some stuff to Cooperstown, including the half-dozen or so issues of Innings. Somewhere in the deepest catacombs of the library there, yes--I'm in the HOF!)

wau

I feel it's like owning a copy of the Magna Carta. I'm somewhat biased.

Damn that's incredible clemenza.

I missed a line in that Wikipedia entry: the first edition sold 75 copies (one of whom was presumably Martin)...I posted about this in Facebook. Half of me was thinking "You shouldn't be attracting attention with something this rare." The other half was laughing at that half: "Haven't you learned yet--no one cares about this stuff. Criminals are busy stealing cars--they're not combing Facebook looking for Baseball Abstracts."

So cool!

Amazing clem, congratulations on your acquisition (and your unofficial HOF induction)!

On the induction, thanks. On the other...Jesus, this is embarrassing...it's a reprint. When Martin gave me the book, I took a quick look and put it right in a bag. Looked exactly like the '78/'79/'80 editions I already have: card-stock cover, a little faded, hand-stapled. I was posting yesterday from a coffee shop on my way home; found the image above online.

So how did I figure out that it's a reprint when I got home? It required a lot of detective work:

https://i.postimg.cc/jSN0FyPy/reprint.jpg

(Thought about posting this in the absent-minded thread--yes, I actually managed not to notice that. If I had bought it online, I'd be looking at the expensive-stupidity thread, created by me for me.)

I don't even have the heart to revisit the Facebook post, where I tagged Martin. Still excited to have it, but obviously not quite where I was yesterday.

Let me now tell you all about the Picasso I bought on eBay last month.

Sorry to go on about this...As I suspected, the reprints are pretty rare in and of themselves:

https://picclick.com/Vintage-Bill-James-Baseball-Abstract-Set-1977-1978-262998858206.html

If that's accurate, this person sold the first five for $2,500, with the '77 and '78 editions reprints; I've got the '77 reprint and originals for '78-'81 (which Mike Saunders--Creem, Angry Samoans--gave to me years ago), so presumably the value would be comparable.

The story of the '77 reprint is pretty interesting according to that link: "reprints are just as rare as they were only produced (allegedly by Bill James' wife) upon written request." I don't know if that's how Martin got his or if he bought it second-hand.

Ordered a copy of this today:

https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/andy-mccullough/the-last-of-his-kind/9780306832598/?lens=hachette-books

Honestly, it was mostly to support the one book store in town--I try to order something every month or two. I don't think it's something I would have bought otherwise, although at least it's a biography rather than an autobiography.