The Captain & Me: Out April 20!

It's hard to believe that The Captain & Me: On and Off the Field with Thurman Munson will be released a week from today. The passage of time has been so strangely blurred over the course of the last year, it seems like just yesterday that Ron Blomberg and I had our first phone conversation about collaborating on this project... but it also seems like about ten years ago.

In any case, I am incredibly excited to have the book finally coming out (via Triumph Books, who have done a marvelous job with everything from the cover art to promotion), and incredibly pleased with some of the reviews we've gotten for it so far — most notably in the pages of no less than the Wall Street Journal, where Ben Yagoda wrote that he "gobbled The Captain & Me up like a packet of Famous Amos chocolate-chip cookies." (Extra points for the period-appropriate pop cultural reference, Ben!)

So far, at least, the response makes me feel like Ron and I accomplished what we set out to do with this book — give people a better sense of who Thurman Munson was as a teammate and a pal, as well as shed additional light on what it was like to play for the New York Yankees during those promising-but-frustrating seasons in the first half of the 1970s. If you dig the Yankees, New York City, 1970s baseball, moustaches, delicatessens, mobsters, locker room japery, and heartwarming tales of friendship, I think you'll find much to enjoy herein. And for those of you who have asked if I was aware that The Captain & Me shares a title with a Doobie Brothers album, I was indeed; in fact, the Doobies were one of Thurman's favorite bands, which is something we get into in the book.

In a normal world, Ron and I would be up in NYC next week to do in-person signing events. While we still hope to be able to do some later this spring and summer, the sad fact is that it would be difficult/irresponsible to put on such events while the pandemic is still raging. So in the meantime, we've got a virtual Zoom event happening on April 21 with Bookends in New Jersey; Ron and I will be talking about the book, and all "attendees" will receive a copy of it with Ron's signature. Ron's a great talker, and it should be a lot of fun.

If you would like a copy of the book with my signature on it, the best way to do that at this point would be to buy a copy from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Booksamillion, Bookshop, or your local bookseller, and then send it to me with a SASE so I can sign it and get it back to you. Message me via the email link on this blog, and I'll let you know where to send it.

As always, I'd like to thank everyone who has supported and encouraged my writing over the years — especially all of you who bought Big Hair & Plastic Grass when it first came out, thus propelling me on this amazing journey. I hope our paths will cross again, sooner than later.