Vinny Spanelli is a fatherless 17-year-old Phillies fan who goes to quirky Baker Bowl almost daily to watch his lowly favorite team. With his best friend Benny and Brooklyn girlfriend Rachel, he spends the season traveling out west, being the Phillies batboy, and getting into more humorous misadventures than you can count. Written in the language of the time, with occasional dispatches from Tigers beat reporter Calvin J. Butterworth, it’s a fun coming-of-age saga told through the colorful, re-imagined world of 1924 baseball.
Six baseball-crazy inmates escape from a Squallpocket, Maine hospital via a mysterious time warp and experience a wild, funkified, and re-imagined 1977 baseball season. Red Sox fanatic Carlton “Buzz” Gip shares the narrative duties with Mikey from Philly, Dodgers old-timer Sherman Wayman, Reds groupie Crazy Amy Gulliver, Bronx brother Friendly Fred and midwest schizophrenic Lester Creech (who roots for four teams at once). No Astroturfed ballpark or 1977 cultural icon (Star Wars, Groucho Marx, Elvis Presley, John Lennon) is left unattended. Meanwhile, Squallpocket’s reputable psychiatrist Dr. Sheila Grossinger and Seamus Headley, a corporate spook masquerading as the ward’s cryptic “sweeper”, are hot on the group’s trail…
Snappy Drake, once a star-crossed Pacific Coast League pitcher, now ushers seats at Seals Stadium in the first season the newly arrived Giants play in San Francisco—and discovers a dead body in his section on Opening Day. Determined to find who’s trying to frame him for the murder (and subsequent ones), Snappy dons his best amateur sleuth cap and plunges into the search for the mad killer. An amusing spin on 1950s paperback pulps, Mystery Ball ’58 travels coast-to-coast and from one end of the Bay Area to the other, encountering colorful Beatniks, mobsters, corrupt city officials and Liz Doomis, a smart, fetching femme fatale reporter, while a heated National League pennant race tightens up around them…
TWINBILLTwo unique “replay novels” for the price of one! First, back in 1938, Hank Greenberg’s season-long correspondence with a 10-year-old baseball fan living in Nazi-endangered Austria is dramatically recounted in Dear Hank. Then, in The Bragging Rights League, journey into a history-flipped 1941, when a team of ragtag white ballplayers like DiMaggio, Williams and Foxx have to “prove themselves” in the all-black major leagues, where Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, Oscar Charleston and others reign supreme.
Hi Jeff – Did you provide that great photo of Roberto Clemente signing autographs for Expo fans while sitting on top of the dugout? The year was 1970. Was this your photo? Do you know its history?
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