Dan Schlossberg’s new book; my foreword to it
Dan Schlossberg’s book has had a fabulous longevity that is the admiration of all his baseball-writing comrades, especially this one. Dan and I have been circling each other, professionally and fraternally, for so long that it seems we have built up a shared bibliography. As fans who became writers — or was it the other way around? — we have been interested in the same subjects, often tackling them within years of each other.
In 1974 I published A Century of Baseball Lore, a grab-bag of stories that were surprisingly true, or were so great that they ought to have been. In 1975 Dan issued Barons of the Bullpen, the first book-length study of relief pitching. In 1979 I wrote The Relief Pitcher, a somewhat nerdier book on the same subject. In 1980, he created The Baseball Catalog, the grandfather of the book you hold in your hands, and had an approach in common with my earlier Baseball Lore. In 1990, I put together The Whole Baseball Catalog, a guide to the baseball marketplace, which owed more conceptually to Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog than to Dan’s book, yet may be said to have expropriated Dan’s title. I was even Dan’s publisher in the early 1990s, when he compiled a splendid pitching instructional for kids.
Dizzying, huh? For all these years Dan and I have been friends rather than rivals, belonging to a mutual admiration society of two. What do we like about baseball? All of it: the stats, the stories, the tall tales and short squibs; the long history and last night’s box score. We are lifelong fans of the game who implausibly have made careers writing for fans about the best, the worst, the least understood and the most unusual.
But enough about us. Let me tell you about this glorious book, which began life as The Baseball Catalog, then over time was infused with the accumulated knowledge of Dan’s lifetime of covering the game, and today stands unrivaled for longevity among shape-shifting baseball books. Baseball encyclopedias may go through many editions, largely resembling each other except in their statistical updates.
It may even be said that the principal charm of baseball itself is that it is eternally the same yet every day different — renewing itself from a mysterious wellspring of creativity and happenstance.
Indeed, the only book that I can think to compare with The New Baseball Bible as a fountain of wit and wisdom is Jim Bouton’s Ball Four. A thirty-year memoir, my pal Jim’s masterwork is shelved in my study alongside the now forty-year iterations of Dan’s.
For Jim, for Dan — and for me, too — work and fun have proceeded more or less interchangeably, indistinguishably. We have been lucky. And so are you, dear reader. You are about to enter into not truly a bible — though it is indeed a guide for the faithful fan — but instead a repository of myth and legend, real heroes and fanciful villains, and thrilling tales that would make Frank Merriwell blush.
So, if this book is not a bible, with exemplary stories and moral lessons beyond dispute, what is its real literary form?
It is a commonplace book, a venerable form of scrapbooking that by the seventeenth century was formally taught to college students in such institutions as Oxford. At Harvard, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau were taught to keep commonplace books, which survive in published form. I just might take a deep dive into my own decades of gathered stray bits that litter my files and my mind and create a commonplace book (shall I call it Thornucopia?) … and thus extend my decades-long copycat relationship with Dan.
The prior edition of The New Baseball Bible was described in its subtitle as “Notes, Nuggets, Lists, and Legends from Our National Pastime.” The publisher may go with that again; it works for me. This book is a great big bag of peanuts — reach in anywhere and you’ll come up with something good. And there are crackerjack nuggets, too, for even the most knowledgeable fan — things you didn’t know before or had never grasped in quite the same way as Dan presents them
Clichés attain their status because they are oft-repeated, but first they must be true. Of The New Baseball Bible it may rightly be said that it is “a book for fans from eight to eighty.” I am nearer to eighty than to eight but I still have much to learn from baseball … and from Dan Schlossberg, its great chronicler.
The New Baseball Bible was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.