Summer is upon us and that means one thing: baseball season is in full swing in the Lower Mainland.
While the Major League clubs have been in action for three months already, the Vancouver Canadians got their short, Single-A season underway just a few weeks ago.
Baseball has one of the richest literary traditions of any North American sport, and to celebrate the 2016 season, I’d like to share a few of the great baseball books that are available at the New Westminster Public Library.
Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn is without a doubt my favourite baseball-themed book.
Kahn, a sportswriter who covered the Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1950s, juxtaposes his experiences covering the talented Dodgers teams with intimate, often melancholic stories of the players’ post-retirement lives. Baseball legends like Jackie Robinson, Duke Snider, Pee Wee Reese and Roy Campanella are presented in an intensely personal light. Kahn’s book is a sentimental must-read for any baseball fan.
Sticking with the sentimental theme, Jonah Keri’s Up, Up, and Away looks at the ill-fated, but still beloved Montreal Expos.
Les Expos endured more than their fair share of bad luck over the course of their 35-year history. Jonah Keri’s book combines interviews with former owners, Expo greats, and other notable baseball personalities to create this excellent English-language history of the ‘Spos.
The New Westminster Frasers Baseball Club, by Ken McIntosh and Rod Drown is a slice of oft-forgotten local baseball history.
This incredibly detailed book describes the one-year history of the New Westminster Frasers, a minor league team from the Royal City.
No baseball-themed booklist would be complete without mentioning the works of W.P. Kinsella.
The Canadian author has penned numerous works on the “American” past-time, including Shoeless Joe, Magic Time, and Butterfly Winter.
All these books and more can be found at the New Westminster Public Library.
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