Day 20: 30 baseball books in 30 days of April
The book: "The Last Real Season: A Hilarious Look Back at 1975 -- When Major Leaguers Made Peanuts, the Umpires Wore Red, and Billy Martin Terrorized Everyone"
The author: Mike Shropshire
How to find it: Grand Central Publishing, 288 pages, $25.99
Where we'd go looking for it: It's over at Powells online store.
The scoop: Following up on Day 19's Billy Martin-George Steinbrenner feuds, here's more Martin hijinx, highlighting the season before Steinbrenner brought him aboard with the Yankees -- his final year as the Texas Rangers' skipper.
Just look at the cover -- it wreaks of baseball from the '70s, in a "Ball Four" sorta way.
So who won the World Series that year? C'mon. Maybe the greatest ever. Reds vs. Red Sox. Fisk homer in Game 6. Morgan's hit wins it in Game 7. The Ed Armbrister play in Game 3.
The "peanuts" that the average player made that year was $27,600. Greenies were pre-steroids (although alcohol was still in vogue). Afros and long hair worked. The A's had their mustaches still going. And two months after that classic World Series, the players finally won the right to free agency when an arbitrator ruled that the reserve clause granted a team only one additional year of service from a player, putting an end to perpetual renewal right the clubs had claimed.
So if '75 was the last real season, let's celebrate it.
Three years ago, Shropshire wrote "Seasons in Hell: With Billy Martin, Whitey Herzog and 'The Worst Baseball Team in History' - The 1973-1975 Texas Rangers." The Fort Worth Star Telegram and Dallas Morning News writer knows the territory.
Shropshire notes that on July 28th of that season, famed Detroit resident and teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa went missing, and the Tigers started a losing streak of 19 games in a row. Shropshire wrote on the day that the Tigers blew a four-run lead in the bottom of the ninth: I drank three bottles of Stroh's beer in less than a minute and wrote that 'Jimmy Hoffa will show up in the left field stands with Amelia Earhart as his date before the Tigers will win another game.'
How it goes down in the scorebook: 1 to 9 to 7 to 5 triple play.
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