"Baseball Timeline" and "Baseball Desk Reference"

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Copyright Š 2002
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"Baseball Timeline" and "Baseball Desk Reference"
Sports Book Review

by Harvey Frommer

A member of the Society for American Baseball Research
more info

From DK Publishers comes two of the most useful and authoritative books on baseball of the season. Both are fact filled, stat loaded, photograph enriched. In short, these volumes are baseball time machines and libraries rolled into attractive, user-friendly packages.

"Baseball Timeline" by Burt Solomon ( $50.00, 1,216 pages) is well worth the price -- and that's something I usually don't say about baseball books. But this one is so organized and information loaded, that DK Publishers could have raised the ante. Page 618, for example, has a column devoted to regular news and then in clear and attractive type goes through significant baseball dates in the sport's pre-season. This is a book with firsts, lasts, trivia, history. It is a keeper, the kind of book to keep near the TV when you are watching your favorite team do its thing.

"Baseball Desk Reference" by Lawrence Lorimer ($50.00, 608 pages), created in conjunction with the National Baseball hall of Fame and Museum, has all one would ever want in terms of significant baseball data. One of former Yankee manager Casey Stengel's favorite expressions was "You could look it up." "Baseball Desk Reference" enables you to look up the top 1000 players, player nicknames, roots of the game, songs, stories, quotes, jargon, official rules, etc. This book like its partner "Baseball Timeline" is a keeper.

"The Pirates Reader" edited by Richard Peterson (University of Pittsburgh Press, $27.00, 339 pages) is a must read for all followers of the Bucs. From Ring Lardner through Joe Garagiola to Dave Barry, John Sayles, Ralph Kiner. Donald Honig - it seems everyone has a say about the Pirates of Pittsburgh.

From Sporting News Books comes "The Scouting Notebook" in association with Stats Inc ($19.95, 703 pages, paper). Baseball fans will be elated to have the latest in this series -- a lode of reports, analyses, charts for every 2002 major leaguer and more than 300 of the minor league's top prospects. Organized, user friendly, the "The Scouting Notebook" is just the book to keep next to when viewing or listening to a baseball game.

For those with a special interest in old time baseball, and I mean old -- "Before the World Series" by Larry G. Bowman (Northern Illinois University Press, $32.00, 252 pages) is a look back. Its focus is on the 1880s and the first seven World Championship Series.

ť Harvey Frommer is the author of 33 sports books, including "The New York Yankee Encyclopedia, "Shoeless Joe and Ragtime Baseball," and "Growing Up Baseball" with Frederic J. Frommer. His "Rickey and Robinson: The Men Who Broke Baseball's Color Line" (Taylor) will be published in May. His "A Yankee Century: A Celebration of the First Hundred Years of Baseball's Greatest Team" (Berkley Putnam) will be published in paperback in October.

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