Book in the works:
TRADING MANNY
My book proposal for TRADING MANNY: RE-DISCOVERING BASEBALL WITH MY SON JOE IN A SEASON OF STEROIDS & SCOUNDRELS is hot! This is a very personal, very funny account of how the steroid scandal hits home with our one, little American family, and how we can use it to teach new values to Joe about not taking drugs and not cheating. The manuscript 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.
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.
KUDOS FOR TRADING MANNY:
“Jim brings to life the circular challenge of a parent who loves the game yet wrestles with the disappointment of the steroid era. Any parent who sees a dream inside the heart of their child will exhale that someone has finally tried to express the shattering effects of baseball’s inability to teach from its failings. Jim has attacked it head on, in a manifesto that has both raw honesty and fatherly tenderness.”
Doug Glanville, former
MLB star and columnist for
the New York Times
"Funny, smart and heartaching, 'Trading Manny' gives voice to lifelong baseball fans who have become disillusioned, if not disgusted, by the sport in the 'Steroids Era.' Seen through the piercing eyes of a 7-year-old and a father who share a grand passion
for baseball and a disdain for cheating, who know the simple difference between right and wrong, truth and lies, baseball’s 'Steroids Era' is revealed as more than a stain on the game. It’s a blow to the American spirit, a betrayal of our deepest values, that
reaches across generations. Jim Gullo writes with the wit, insight and breezy style of humorist Bill Bryson. But in 'Trading Manny,' Gullo takes on a subject that has made him and millions of other fathers uncomfortable, even infuriated, with a game they grew up loving and wanted to share in unabashed innocence with their children.”
Steve Wilstein
Retired AP Sportswriter who first broke the story of Mark McGwire’s supplements,
creating the first public awareness of PED use in baseball