Baseball, O Baseball

This season cannot start soon enough. And in anticipation of it, I am adding this terrific-looking book into the bookshelf.

Many years ago, George Plimpton was a “Paper Tiger,” training with a football team and writing about his experiences therein. Here, Sam Walker of the Wall Street Journal enters his first Fantasy Baseball Tournament. From the Publisher’s Weekly review at Amazon:

He figures that because he can get to the ballparks in his journalistic capacity and talk to the players and coaches, he’ll be in a better position to judge the intangibles and pull one over the pure numbers crunchers. But even with the help of a young research assistant and a NASA scientist, things quickly head south. This hilarious diary of the 2004 season includes several encounters with the players Walker has picked; from Jacque Jones’s struggle to refute predictions of mediocrity to David Ortiz’s razzing Walker for trading him away.

The book sounds like great fun. (Buster if you’re reading, don’t look or you’ll spoil your birthday surprise!)