A lot has been happening lately. This Day at Shea has taken a week off, there’s been good reason.
I was preparing for my visit to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown to discuss Shea Stadium Remembered. A lot happened at Shea, so I spent some time gathering notes for the talk to kick off the Hall’s Author’s Series for 2019. And then I never looked at the notes.
I want to thank everyone who came to listen to the talk, and who came around and bought books. I signed so many books for the museum that I went into Catholic school punish assignment default mode. But with much happier results. I especially want to thank my official photographer, Dan Carubia; Utica’s Observer-Dispatch sportswriter Don Laible; and my son, Tyler, who got up early and had a full day with his dad on the road and in Cooperstown. Like my dad, he’s not the biggest baseball fan but takes it all in stride for me. They say it skips a generation.
Special thanks to Bruce Markusen, whom I’ve known since 1971. We spent eight years together at Iona Grammar School in New Rochelle, writing out punish assignments and talking about baseball. We reconnected 20-plus years ago with me working on baseball books and him narrating video and putting together programs at the Hall of Fame. He is quite a writer in his own right (he was always the better student), and Bruce won the 1999 Seymour Medal for his excellent book on the 1970s Oakland A’s. Back in the 1970s we were both hardcore baseball fans and manned the right side of the infield for the same softball team—Bruce was always tall, and was at first base with his Joe Rudi glove; I had my Don Money mitt at second.
And thanks for the PR leading up to the event. The aforementioned Don Liable from the Observer-Dispatch wrote a nice piece on the book. And over the weekend I spoke with Mike Silva from the awesome Talkin’ Mets podcast from Metsmerized Online. I come in around the 19-minute mark, with an introduction by Lindsey Nelson about moving to Shea in 1964.