Big Hair and Plastic Grass

Skylight Books Reading — Sunday, July 12!

 

Please join me and my fellow baseball author Jeff Polman at LA's Skylight Books this coming Sunday, July 12, for a lively late-afternoon reading and signing event. Jeff will be reading from his new novel, Mystery Ball '58: A Season-Long Whodunit, which takes place in San Francisco during the Giants' first season by the Bay. I will be reading from Stars and Strikes: Baseball and America in the Bicentennial Summer of '76, and our reading will be followed by a Q&A discussion that will touch upon, among other things, baseball in those particular seasons and how they compare to the current state of the game.

The event starts at 5:00 pm, and copies of both of our books will be available for purchase and signing. Skylight is one of LA's finest independent bookstores — and they hosted one of my Stars and Strikes events last spring — so I'm pretty stoked to do another event there. This will also be my last reading event in Los Angeles before I relocate to Chicago at the end of the month, so please come by, say hello, and get yerself a signed copy or three of my books while you still can!

Skylight Books is located at 1818 N. Vermont Ave. in Los Feliz. Call 323-660-1175 for more info.

 

Goose Gossage in '76: The Long and the Short(s) of It.

It's Hall of Fame reliever Rich "Goose" Gossage's birthday, which means it's time to repost one of my favorite photos of the 1976...

Despite having led the league in saves in 1975, Gossage was converted to a starting pitcher for the '76 season by new White Sox owner Bill Veeck and his new manager Paul Richards. The conversion was not a successful one; Goose went 9-17 with a 3.94 ERA in 224 innings, though he still made it to that summer's All Star Game as the lone White Sox representative (because, well, someone had to).

Goose served in relief only two times that year: April 17, when he blew a save and took the loss against the Red Sox at Fenway, and August 8 against the Royals at Comiskey, when he became the first (and, so far, the last) MLB pitcher to earn a save while wearing short pants — a Veeck idea that, depending on your perspective, may or may not have been more ill-conceived than putting Goose in the starting rotation.