Are you ready for some baseball?

Sorry, wrong theme song...

After getting 2 feet of snow dropped on us, it doesn’t seem quite right to be thinking about this summer’s baseball season, but on Wednesday pitchers and catchers report to spring training, there’s still plenty of time to load up the netflix queue with Ken Burns’ baseball documentaries, and there’s some nice off-season listening to be done over at the Baseball Historian podcast.

I’ve got a baseball library at home, or more precisely, an 18” x 18” shelf in the bathroom that’s packed top to bottom and two deep with baseball books—as soon as I can convince my girlfriend that we don’t really need those towels, I plan on expanding to another shelf. I’ve got it decorated with the New Yorker cartoon in the picture above, and there’s a little label on the front of the shelf that says “BASEBALL” as if there were any doubt.

I’ve got some really great books in there, and some really (no, REALLY) awful ones, but so it goes… Overlook doesn’t have too many baseball books in the backlist. Actually, we have only one that I’m aware of, but it’s a wonderful little novel by Brian Shawver called The Cuban Prospect. (Looks like we’ll be able to see some real life Cuban prospects thanks to the state department finally getting their act together for the World Baseball Classic.)

At any rate, The Cuban Prospect is actually less a baseball book than it is a meditation on fame, failure, lost chances and last resorts. The plot concerns a minor league journeyman whose career peaked at “mediocre.” With his career washed up, he enlists as a minor league scout to have a chance at second hand fame—discovering genuine talent. All this leads him to a secret trip to Cuba to help a promising left-handed pitcher defect to the US. I didn’t really know what to expect—it was the author’s debut novel, but he surprised me enough to land a spot on the front row next to George Plimpton’s The Curious Case of Sidd Finch.

Some extracurricular reading:
Yard-Work: parody blog entries from MLB stars (check the archives. Rickey Henderson and Lou Pinella are both particularly good.)
The Dugout: parody chatroom sessions from MLBers (extensive, hilarious archives available here, too).
Deadspin: They're still busy exorcising the football season right now, but the baseball should start flowing any day now.
Roger Angell from the New Yorker: Some great baseball pieces here, including this one on the Mets.

There was a time when I would be wary of saying this, due to a former Overlooker's maniacal obsession with Derek Jeter, but among those of us who admit to following baseball in the office we have a clear majority of Mets fans. Even Peter sides with the Dodgers (Brooklyn, not L.A., naturally).

So, that said, let's go Mets!

--John Mark