Plum Job

It’s a thankless job, short on accolades and glory.

The medals are bruises and the trophies come in the form of approving nods from the mound.

Author Tim Brown didn’t just focus on catchers for his book with Erik Kratz, The Tao of the Backup Catcher. Instead he examined the guys who don’t get regular at bats or crouch behind home plate every day. It’s these second-string and third-in-line backstops who are the true glue guys in a major-league organization – players like Kratz, who began his professional career with the Medicine Hat Blue Jays in 2002 before donning a mask for nine MLB teams.

Bowes Knows Baseball

Lisa Bowes knows sports.

A long-time journalist with TSN, The Score, and CTV, the sports media trailblazer entered the world of children’s books inspired by the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.

Bowes’ latest offering, Lucy Tries Baseball, hit store shelves on April 11, and she joined us to talk all about the inspiration, the character, and more.

Bliss, Blasphemy & Bizarre Nights at the Ballpark

A barefoot pitcher, a chimpanzee chasing players around the diamond, a missing mascot head and much, much more.

Minor league baseball really does have it all and Tim Hagerty knows that better than most people.

We chat with the author of “Tales from the Dugout: 1,001 Humorous, Inspirational & Wild Anecdotes from Minor League Baseball” about some of the connections in his book to Alberta.

Ten Books for Alberta Baseball Fans

It’s a great time to find a comfy chair, sit back, crack a book and get lost in it for a few hours.

With that in mind, we’ve compiled a list of 10 books that are of interest to Alberta baseball fans. These titles include biographies, historical studies, movie-inspiring tales and first-person accounts of experimental baseball projects.

So, in no particular order, here are the books and authors that have captivated our attention …

Wax Tracks

It is seemingly a marriage of three favourite pieces of baseball lore: cards, travel and books.

Brad Balukjian’s new book, “The Wax Pack: On The Open Road In Search Of Baseball’s Afterlife,” dives into what happened to the players he found in a pack of 1986 Topps baseball cards.

It led him down an 11,341-mile adventure that can only be described as a mix of nostalgia, travelogue and self-discovery.

Kinsella at the Bat

Long before author William Patrick Kinsella ever dreamt about baseball in Iowa cornfields, he was a stimulus-starved child growing up in rural Alberta. What he lacked in local events and community activities as a homeschooled farm kid near Darwell – 75 kilometres northwest of Edmonton – Kinsella made up for using his imagination.

That creativity served him well as a writer, as William Steele notes in his new biography, Going the Distance: The Life and Works of W.P. Kinsella. The book provides a comprehensive look at the man made famous for his 1982 novel Shoeless Joe, which was the basis of the seminal baseball movie Field of Dreams.

Here is an excerpt from Going the Distance …

Q&A with Author Stacey May Fowles

We chat with Stacey May Fowles – author of Baseball Life Advice – about tacos, hanging out at baseball diamonds, and favourite writers.

Q&A with Baseball Author Mark Kingwell

We catch up with Mark Kingwell, author of Fail Better: Why Baseball Matters, to talk Cannons, Trappers, Dawgs and baseball books.