by Doug Glanville

Times Books

Was there a Doug Glanville-splosion a year or so back?  I feel like I remember Doug suddenly bursting onto the scene with a book and a bunch of TV appearances on CSN until he got his job with MLB Network or whoever.  Now he’s got a tie and a Twitter account and everything somebody needs to be successful in media.

But before all that, he was the spindly center fielder for the Philadelphia Phillies whose appearance in All-Star Baseball 2000 looked like a bony offseason scarecrow wielding a bat.  He glided through the post-Dykstra years, chasing down fly balls amidst a sea of increasingly pathetic teams we didn’t recognize because they didn’t have wild hair or swear on TV or go crazy, eventually.

Yet in the end, it gave Doug enough material to write this book, as well as the occasional “this-guy-right-here-this-is-the-guy” tweet.  Of course, he also played for other teams, but explain to me why that matters before the end of this sentence.

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by Charles J. Adams III

Arcadia Publishing

Charles Adams’ introduction crumbles from wistful statements and nostalgic head-nodding into a paragraph of self-congratulatory baseball puns.

In this section, he no better embodies how important the history of Reading baseball is to himself.  I am sure there are plenty of people who care right along with him, or are at least interested.  Or do weekly Phillies-only book reviews that nobody reads and are sick of reading various sportswriters’ accounts of them same five or six years of Phillies history.

I’m also sure that all of those people live in Central Pennsylvania.

But being unaware of certain histories is what can make them so intriguing!  Who wants to read about the same old thing over and over again, and if you’re a baseball fan, why wouldn’t you be into the history of a place nicknamed “Baseballtown, USA”? (more…)

by Mitchell Nathanson

McFarland

We spend a lot of time attacking Mets fans with words, rotten vegetables, and the occasional car part.  But for a long time, this seemed what many referred to as “pointless,” “unnecessary,” or “despicable.”  ”Pretty dangerous” was a popular term.  In 2007, we won the NL East for the first time since 1993, but what’s extra fun to remember is that for us to win it, the Mets had to crumble into one of the most crushing episodes of month-long defeat ever witnessed.  After that, our assaults had some backing–an epic collapse is an indefensible action in any argument, whether you’re shouting at a guy who just wants his kids to see David Wright play, or trying to figure out which car is David Wright’s for tire-slashing purposes.

An oft forgotten notion in these times of 21-9, four-ace baseball is that 95% of Phillies history is epic collapses.

This isn’t a baseball retrospective.

Its a ghost story. (more…)