I didn’t really buy this, as it was an all-fan giveaway at Miller Park on Sunday for the Brewers-Padres game. Actually, I didn’t even get to go to the game because I had to work ten hours. But one of my bosses, who did not have to work ten hours, got to go to the game with one of my employing organization’s board members, who didn’t want his bobblehead, so said boss gave me the bobblehead, which was very nice of him.
It’s the t-shirt the Cobra, Dave Parker, made famous way back in 1976. And via the folks at Homage, it’s only $28! Or $39.63, in total, including shipping to the great nation of Canada. Pricey, yes, for a t-shirt, but at NotGraphs, we get paid the big bucks, and I sleep better at night knowing that I’ve done my part for your struggling economy, America.
On an aside, I want the Pittsburgh Pirates to be great again. Is that weird?
H/T: Calafornaheim.
Most of the things I did today are shameful, and concern for the reader’s modesty forbids me from recounting them (i.e. those things I did) in these pages. Among the less shameful activities in which I engaged, however, was to visit the very excellent Grey Matter Books in Hadley, MA, and buy the book you see pictured here, lying on a friend’s rug.
A Baseball Winter: The Off-Season Life of the Summer Game is an account of the 1984-85 offseason of five clubs: the New York Mets, the California Angels, the Atlanta Braves, the Philadelphia Phillies, and the Cleveland Indians. As editor-authors Terry Pluto and Jeffrey Neuman note in the Acknowledgments, “its focus [is] on the backstage aspects of the game: contract negotiations, trade talks, in short, the games as it is played off the field.”
Having read the first 10 or so pages, I can speak to one of the book’s virtues — namely, that it’s written in diary form, with three- or four-page entries for each (or most) of the days of the offseason. The style lends itself to a sort of urgency, a sense of witnessing the events as they unfold, that’s very pleasant.
