This is from an e-mail blast by A Cappella Books (3/22/10). A Cappella is the little indy bookstore in Little Five Points with the mighty heart.

The Boys of Summer

We started our publishing imprint, everthemore books, to re-issue such titles as Rodger Brown's Party Out of Bounds and Paul Hemphill's The Nashville Sound. With Peter Case's As Far As You Can Get Without a Passport, we ventured into publishing original works. And, now, just in time for baseball season, we have published another entirely new title, Ball Crazy by Atlanta writer Hal Jacobs.

Hal is a former contributor to the book pages of The Atlanta Journal Constitution (remember those?) who has helped others write books, but this is his first. Though unlike our other titles, the new book doesn't deal with the world of music, we think it fits into our catalogue nicely. Ball Crazy is a personal, thoughtful, finely-written account of a topic that could be easily dismissed as mere hobby or entertainment, but in Hal's hands, it is more of a consideration of conflicting and irrational passion, the kind of stuff that often makes us crazy.

Ball Crazy is available now in the store and online. Saturday, April 17 will be the book's official launch, around the corner from the scene of the story, Medlock Park, at Eagle Eye Books in Decatur.

Talking about baseball

A few years ago I heard that Emory University professors Dana White, Urban Studies, and Peter Dowell, American Culture, were teaching a popular undergraduate class on baseball. Although my book wasn't about professional baseball or really its history or impact on American society, I asked if I could sit in. They were happy to oblige. It was quite a treat. Each class they would enter the room like two dignified umpires and regale the students with stories of Ted, Joe, and Hank. Students would talk about seeing games with their fathers and grandfathers. I began to see what a difference it makes to have the game passed down from one generation to the next. The game becomes fuller, more magical, steeped in others' memories and imagination. In 2009, I interviewed Profs. White and Dowell, and produced this video ("Take Me out to the Ballgame") for iTunesU (you'll need the free iTunes application to view it).

That father-son connection in baseball books

An article in Publisher's Weekly ("Baseball Gets Healthy: Back to heroes, sluggers, and family," by Michael Coffey, 3/8/2010) gives an overview of upcoming baseball books, saying "the sport and its fandom are returning to what has marked the game since its inception in the 19th century: hero worship and an appreciation of the game itself and its role in the American family."
In the comment section at the end of the article, I added a few thoughts of my own.

I enjoyed your round-up of great baseball books and am already looking forward to picking out a few on the list. I would also add another category of baseball nonfiction to the list: books about the father-son connection in youth baseball. While surveying the landscape in preparation for writing my own recently published book (Ball Crazy: Confessions of a Dad-Coach), I came across several accounts that stand out. One of the best known is CBS News correspondent Bill Geist’s bestselling Little League Confidential: One Coach’s Completely Unauthorized Tale of Survival (1995). Geist offers a humorous look at the ups-and-downs of a Little League season based on his nine years of coaching experiences. In Joy in Mudville: A Little League Memoir (2000), former Crawdaddy editor and political writer Greg Mitchell chronicles a season of Little League in Nyack, New York, providing rich play-by-plays of games and the emotions behind them. In The Way Home (2001), literary agent Henry Dunow writes about coaching his seven-year-old son’s team on Manhattan’s Upper West side, reflecting on his experiences of growing up in a postwar Jewish household with a literary father who had little patience with baseball. Most recently, Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy in Senior Year (2007) focuses on the older player who is trying to keep it together before playing college ball. My book takes a different perspective than these -- it follows a brief summer season of my 12-year-old son's all star team in the new era of travel ball tournaments and from my perspective as someone who grew up playing sandlot baseball in a vacant field (and never dreamed of enrolling his sons in an "over-organized" youth baseball association). My experience teaches me the value -- and joy -- of passing down the game from one generation to the next. [Hal Jacobs - 2010-10-3 10:56:26 EST]

Official book launch - April 17th

Eagle Eye Book Shop in Decatur will host the "official" book launch on April 17th. From 3-5pm, we'll serve ballpark hotdogs outside the store & sign books inside. And from 5-6:30pm, we'll have wine & cheese. Your choice... hotdogs or wine.