Book Review by Perfect Pitch

Thanks to Susan Spector -- Met Opera oboe, longtime Mets season ticket holder with husband Garry, and staple of the MLB.com/blogs community for a decade -- for her review of DIAMONDS FROM THE DUGOUT on the Perfect Pitch blog! Please visit Susan's blog and check out the review. Great custom beret, too! Here's an excerpt:

      Fans, the media, statisticians, bloggers, and baseball historians have time-honored criteria for quantifying or qualifying an individual athlete’s performance relative to his peers.  They are also afforded their respective platforms for self-cultivated “highlight reels” of their own selection.  Some of the crowning points shared with Mark by these ballplayers might be seen as relatively unremarkable, from a strictly baseball point of view; what is noteworthy is the reason why this is the hit selected by the player himself and given its own chapter in Mark’s book.

     The subject of each chapter is certainly a measure of athletic accomplishment, but more often a player’s selection had more to do with the context in which the hit was made. Mark skillfully weaves together the specifics of the play with anecdotal information from the player.  Reading these vignettes, one can easily visualize the whimsical grin playing across the face of a player or the slight misting up of a player’s eyes involved in the hit’s memory and his retelling a story that, for that player at least, has obviously become the stuff of myth or legend.  The inclusion of each player’s “back story”, the opportunity for him to “set the stage” and to add personal embellishments to his saga:  this is what makes the book fascinating reading.

Click here for the full review >>

Barnes & Noble book signing / USA launch

I am proud to be launching DIAMONDS FROM THE DUGOUT in my hometown of Evansville, Indiana, at the Barnes & Noble on Green River Road. The book signing is from 1-2 p.m. CT on Saturday, October 14. Please buy the book there, because part of the proceeds will benefit the Public Education Foundation Evansville. I became a reader and writer in the Evansville public school system, and my parents worked for the Evansville-Vanderburgh School Corp. Evansville is home to Don Mattingly, one of the 115 legends included in the book. Hope to see you there!

Roberto Alomar

Roberto Alomar is one of at least 44 current or future Hall of Famers included in DIAMONDS FROM THE DUGOUT. He is on page 190, and his brother Sandy Jr. is right behind on page 191. Great to see Robbie today in our MLB.com HQ in NYC!

32 hits and a new postseason

Ozzie Smith still makes us "go crazy", and Bruce Sutter was a postseason legend, too.

The MLB postseason gets underway tonight with the first Wild Card Game between the Twins and Angels, so this is a good time to note that nearly a fourth of the legends in DIAMONDS FROM THE DUGOUT -- 32 of the 115 -- have a postseason hit listed in response to the question, "What hit meant the most to you and why?"

The most fun part of the journey of writing this book over the last eight or nine years was hearing surprising answers from legends who are known for iconic hits. For example, Carlton Fisk, Joe Carter, Luis Gonzalez and Aaron Boone are remembered for famous walk-offs in the postseason, but none of them considered those their own most cherished hit. Buy the book and you'll see why they hold on to something that is more personally meaningful.

Meanwhile, some of the legends in DIAMONDS FROM THE DUGOUT went right where the average fan might have expected. In doing so, however, legends like Edgar Martinez, Ozzie Smith and Chris Chambliss share new thoughts that provide insightful life lessons to the rest of us. I start the book off with "The Double" by Edgar, not only because so many of the greats from this book's roster (nine in all) were right there on the scene that night, but also because of the lesson he imparts to readers. I have always wanted to know what truly was in his head as he stood there in the batter's box on that forever-replayed game video, and here it is.

I am thankful to my friend Bob Costas for providing the Mickey Mantle story in proxy, as I was not able to ask The Mick my nine-word question as he signed a baseball for me ($50) at an Atlantic City card show during the 1991 season. Bob's hit was a Mantle homer in the World Series, appropriate for the legend who set the record for most Fall Classic homers. And as if that's not enough, James Caan was kind enough to provide a Mantle hit as well. There's an obvious Reggie Jackson postseason hit, with Tom Brokaw and Joe Piscopo narrating.

Other postseason hits in the book come straight from these guys: Johnny Bench, Alex Rodriguez, Tim McCarver, Dave Parker, Robin Young, Ron Swoboda, Albert Pujols, Joe Morgan, Bob Watson, Tim Salmon, Dr. Bobby Brown, Alan Trammell, Steve Garvey, Brian McCann, Dave Winfield, Mike Shannon, Jim Sundberg, Mark Teixeira, Sandy Alomar Jr., Tino Martinez, Mike Lowell, Kenny Lofton, Jorge Posada, David Eckstein and Torii Hunter.

Tony Gwynn had plenty to say about hitting when John Rawlings and I interviewed him and Stan Musial for two hours one day in the 1990s. A postseason hit did not come up, nor was this question raised back then. But when I asked Tony's brother Chris last year what hit he thought would have meant to Tony, he offered one from San Diego's 1994 National League Championship Series against the Cubs.

It has been a long journey of discovery, and sadly some of the legends I'd hope to ask are gone. When people ask me why I wrote this book, I tell them one of the main reasons is leave one more story behind for the heroes of our lives. You know how much it hurts inside when an Ernie Banks or a Harmon Killebrew or a Stan the Man leaves us; it rips out your inside. I wanted to be able to do a little something about it and leave an answer from them like this.

Another postseason is about to begin, and new legends are about to be made. One day, they might tell the story of a postseason hit that mattered the most to them. Or maybe not.

See the ball, hit the ball

DIAMONDS FROM THE DUGOUT was 8 or 9 years in the making, and maybe the most important step in turning it into a coast-to-coast reality was the organizational breakthrough. For anyone producing a book, I hope this visual will help you "see the ball, hit the ball."

Lisa and Rachel deserve even more thanks than I offered in the Acknowledgements, simply for putting up with this takeover of our dining room sliding glass door for late winter and early spring in 2017. I had all these remarkable stories from baseball legends, and the life lessons within them is what really made a difference as a motivational/baseball book. But what to DO with them before submitting the final manuscript?

Using post-it notes spread out at eye level was the answer. I began arranging column headers that would serve as chapters, each representing a different category of similar lessons or character traits. Over days and weeks, I would move one post-it to a different column, or in some cases toss them as undeserving of the final cut. Being able to "see" the book this way, I could then re-order chapters, rename them, and get to a point where it felt done.

No matter what project you are working on, sometimes you have to look at it in a whole different way -- whether that's a whole wall in your basement, a big whiteboard and marker, a spreadsheet, or the front of your kitchen fridge. I had to get it out of digital form and into something more visual and tangible. For my family, the best part of all was the day when I finally removed all the post-its that covered that siding glass door, so they could see our deck and backyard and birds again as I saw my new book. Mission accomplished.