BASEBALL ON STEROIDS!
I
TRADING MANNY
Much of this spring has been spent putting the final touches on a book proposal for TRADING MANNY: RE-DISCOVERING BASEBALL WITH MY SON JOE IN A SEASON OF STEROIDS & SCOUNDRELS. This is a very personal, very funny account of last year's baseball season and how it affected Joe, my 8-year old ballplayer of a son. The work-in-progress is presently being shopped to publishers by my wonderful agent, Elizabeth Wales. Wish us luck in finding a home for what I believe to be an important story about how baseball is so tightly woven into our American lives.
HEAR JOE AND JIM TALKING BASEBALL ON NPR'S "ALL THINGS CONSIDERED"...listen here
EXCERPT FROM TRADING MANNY:
TOP OF THE FIRST: THE MITCHELL REPORT: It was our bad fortune when, six months into Joe’s new passion for all things baseball, the institution of Major League Baseball figuratively pursed its lips in New York City, drew in a deep breath, stuck out its tongue and then farted a long, wet raspberry that buzzed and fizzed across the land and landed with a moist slap on our doorstep on little Bainbridge Island, Washington, about as far from New York as you could physically get in the continental U.S. and still hate the Yankees. It was a Bronx cheer on steroids, as it were, that baseball sent to us and to every fan of the game; suddenly, everything had changed and teaching baseball to Joe, as my father had taught it to me, was not going to be easy.