Hot Stove goes international! Today’s lead story in Hot Stove #286 is also being released out of London as Shelfies #48 (click here).

The Shelfies newsletter was created by Lavie Tidhar and Jared Shurin to take a peek each week into other people’s book collections. “A unique dose of book love directly into your inbox – sharing our love of books with you.”

Shelfies #48: This is my contribution to Shelfies, reflecting on two of the many baseball shelves in my library.

The first baseball book I remember was a record book published annually by the Sporting News. I was about 10 years old and fascinated by the numbers and their connections to the greats like Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth. My passion for baseball has continued for another seven decades, and my bookshelves provide the evidence.

Those books have now taken on a second life as research material for the baseball newsletter I began in the wake of the Kansas City Royals winning the 2015 World Series. Soon after that Series, my wife and I took a winter vacation to Puerto Vallarta, and to provide inspiration for my upcoming newsletter writing, I spent most days immersed in rereading Roger Angell.

And so that’s where I will start, with Roger Angell, on the left of the bottom shelf…

Roger Angell: If someone asked for an example of the best writing about the beauty of baseball, I would steer them to Roger Angell. Starting in 1962, Angell wrote baseball essays for the New Yorker, and his observational and writing skills matched perfectly with the pace and rhythms of baseball. Every few years, the essays were packaged as books, covering baseball from 1962 to 2002: The Summer Game, Five Seasons, Late Innings, Season Ticket and Game Time. A must read for baseball aficionados.

Negro Leagues Baseball: The rest of the lower shelf is devoted to baseball as splendidly played in the Negro Leagues. Growing up in Kansas City, I was aware of the Negro Leagues through our Kansas City Monarchs. After former Monarch Jackie Robinson broke the color line in 1947, the Negro Leagues began to fade. But the stories of the skills of the players and their place in the civil rights movement lived on. The first book I read on the subject was aptly titled Only the Ball Was White (1970, by Robert Peterson). The biggest name in the Negro Leagues was Satchel Paige, and among several books about him, I recommend Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend by Larry Tye.

Recognition of the Negro Leagues received a big boost in 1994 when Buck O’Neil charmed the American public during his appearances on Ken Burns’ PBS series on baseball. Buck was also instrumental in the creation and publicizing of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City. Buck’s charm and his relentless optimism were captured in print by Joe Posnanski in The Soul of Baseball: A Road Trip Through Buck O’Neil’s America (next to the Buck O’Neil bobblehead).

Moving to the upper shelf…

Statistics/Sabermetrics: My childhood fascination with baseball stats went to an elevated level in 1977 when Bill James began publishing his “Baseball Abstract.” He also published several books, including the classic The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract (2000) that to this day is a valuable resource of baseball history and statistics. James coined the term “Sabermetrics” for his advanced statistics, and teams began taking notice (as entertainingly conveyed in the book and movie “Moneyball”). Others developed variations of Sabermetrics, such as the composite metric of WAR (Wins Above Replacement). Using his own variation of WAR, Jay Jaffee wrote The Cooperstown Casebook, which has become the bible for Hall of Fame eligibility.

Great Players: A big shoutout to Jane Leavy who has written the definitive biographies of two legends: Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy and The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood. Also shelved beneath the Bobby Witt Jr. bobblehead is George Vecsey’s Stan Musial: An American Life. Those players, along with the Babe, Ted, Clemente, Yogi, Willie and 92 others make for great stories in the 2021 best seller, The Baseball 100, where Joe Posnanski counts down the best 100 players of all time. Joe’s excellent follow-up in 2023 was Why We Love Baseball: A History in 50 Moments.

 Off-the-Field Greatest: The titles of these two books are spot on. Casey Stengel: Baseball’s Greatest Character (Marty Appel) and Bill Veeck: Baseball’s Greatest Maverick (Paul Dickson). Amazing baseball lives over several decades. Be prepared to laugh.

Great Teams: Luke Epplin’s Our Team: The Epic Story of Four Men and the World Series That Changed Baseball is the story of the 1948 World Champion Cleveland Indians told through the individual lives of owner Bill Veeck and players Bob Feller, Larry Doby and Satchel Paige. Postscript: The Indians (now the Guardians) have not won a World Series since then. In Wait Till Next Year, Doris Kearns Goodwin, who usually writes about presidential history, penned this wonderful memoir about her childhood love of the 1955 Brooklyn Dodgers. After decades of futility, the 1955 team won its first-ever World Series. It was bittersweet. The Dodgers left for Los Angeles three years later and broke her heart.

The rest of the books on this shelf relate to Kansas City baseball, with several on players who were part of the 1985 World Champion Kansas City Royals: Willie Wilson and Frank White (who also signed the baseballs) and George Brett (hard to believe, a whole book on George’s Pine Tar Game).

The item on top of the autographed baseballs is a replica of the 2015 World Series ring in honor of the Royals defeating the Mets. This gets me back to Roger Angell. At the age of 95, Angell was covering the 2015 Series and delivering daily masterpieces in the online New Yorker. I loved how he captured the essence of those Royals and the thrill of the games. After the Series, Angell wrote that he wished he had no stake in the Series for his hometown Mets because he “fell in love with these Royals in their near-thing debut in the World Series last fall…there’s a collective elan to them, a bearded joy in their work that you want to be part of.”

 More books are written about baseball than any other sport. Baseball is the best for statistics and nostalgia. We still talk about Babe Ruth and what he did a century ago. Almost everybody knows who broke the color line in baseball. The game has inherent narrative qualities – every at bat is a new one-on-one encounter. And it helps a lot that we get to read Roger Angell, Joe Posnanski and other authors who eloquently tell the stories of baseball.

[That’s the end of my Shelfies post. The Shelfies archives are here, and if you want to subscribe, there is a signup box at the end.]

 The London/Shurin Connection: Why a baseball piece in a London newsletter? The short answer: A form of nepotism. I know the parents of Shelfies co-editor Jared Shurin. The long answer…

I started law school at UMKC in the fall of 1964 and joined Phi Alpha Delta Law Fraternity because second year student Wayne Tenenbaum asked me to. Hard to say no to Wayne. The next year, new student Leland Shurin, who had gone to high school with Wayne, was also lured to PAD. So, I have now known Leland for 60 years, and our paths have crossed many times, especially in Democratic politics.

In 2002, Rita and I moved into a condo on the 3^rd floor of Townsend Place on the Plaza. Leland and his wife Jill lived on the 11^th floor. In 2008, Rita and I moved to the 11^th floor and have now been across-the-hall neighbors of the Shurins for the past 17 years. Here is a photo of Rita and Leland in that hallway from 12 years ago when Rita was posing with hair-deficient friends while going through chemo for breast cancer.

We don’t see Leland or Jill as much as you might think. They winter in Arizona and spend a lot of time in Los Angeles (daughter Autumn and family) and London (son Jared and family). When Rita and I were in London in 2010 with Woody and Jane Overton, we overlapped with Leland and Jill visiting Jared and his wife Anne. Below, clockwise from Rita and her hat, Lonnie, Jane, Woody, Jared, Anne, Leland and Jill.

Jared’s day jobs in London have been in communications, and he currently works at the London mayor’s office as the “Head of Marketing and Strategic Communications” for the Greater London Authority. But day jobs have not kept Jared from many other projects, mostly related to authoring and editing books. Check out his Amazon author page here. Shelfies, telling the real stories behind guests’ beloved books, is his latest project.

Leland added Jared and Autumn to the Hot Stove distribution list years ago to help keep them connected to Kansas City. This led to Jared asking me to contribute to Shelfies.

Jared, although living in the soccer world of London, remains interested in baseball. Last year, he met with Joe Posnanski when Joe was in London promoting Why We Love Baseball. In his JoeBlogs, Posnanski wrote about his…

 “…new pal Jared Shurin, who is head of marketing campaigns and strategic communications for the mayor of London. Jared has been working in London for a couple of decades, but he is from Kansas City, and he’s invested in: (1) Looking to see how baseball can make inroads in London; and (2) Finding actual Kansas City barbecue in London. I would think that, with the popularity of ‘Ted Lasso,’ that (2) would have happened by now. Apparently not yet.”

Posnanski was prescient on the Ted Lasso comment. The Ted Lasso contingent just finished a week of filming Kansas City scenes for the upcoming 4^th season of the show. One of the filming locations was Gates Bar-B-Q on Main.

Baseball and barbecue in London. With a nudge from Jared Shurin and Ted Lasso.

JoeBlogs: Jared’s cameo in Joe Posnanski’s blog was cool, and Hot Stove got a little of the same last month. Joe had written about the Houston Astros being pioneers in counting pitches to protect the arms of young pitchers. By a nice coincidence, I knew one the pitch counters, David Matson, who at age 15 (1968) sat in the press box of the Astrodome counting pitches and calling down to the dugout when the count approached 100. I wrote about this in the last Hot Stove, and Posnanski picked it up and ran the story in JoeBlogs. Here was his nice intro: “Brilliant Reader Lonnie Shalton has been doing his wonderful Hot Stove newsletter for many years now and today features a cool story about another Brilliant Reader, David Matson.”  [Note: Joe calls all his subscribers Brilliant Readers.]

If you don’t already subscribe to JoeBlogs, you can sign up here.

Lonnie and Leland Ballots: My first election involvement was in 1968, a year after I got out of law school. Leland was still in law school in the spring of 1968 and took ten days off to open a campaign headquarters and hire staff for Robert Kennedy in Indiana for the presidential primary there. Leland described that experience in Shelfies #43 (click here; this is a good example of direct family nepotism). This was Leland’s bookshelf:

In our early political days, Leland and I often worked with candidates allied with the Committee for County Progress. An example was 1974 when he was working on the campaign of George Lehr for state auditor and I was Mike White’s campaign manager in his race for county executive. Lehr and White won their first offices as CCP-backed candidates, and then both won higher office in 1974.

My ballot story about Leland needs some background. In 1975, Charlie Wheeler was running for re-election as mayor. The Citizens Association was backing Joe Shaughnessy, but he lost the primary, and they switched to Sarah Snow for the general. Politicos Bill Morris and Ken Hill wanted to help Charlie counter the Citizens’ endorsement, and so created the “Democrats for Progress,” clearly borrowing on the popularity of the Committee for County Progress. Although the city races are non-partisan, and both candidates were Democrats, the intent was to take advantage of the Democratic majority in the county. Wheeler won.

In 1978, the Committee for County Progress endorsed Dale Baumgardner for county executive. The ballot for the August primary is shown at the left below and was in the traditional yellow/orange that had been used for years by the CCP. Dale won.

In 1979, it was again time for a mayoral race. The survivors of the primary were Bruce Watkins and Dick Berkley. The Citizens Association backed Berkley, and the Democrats for Progress resurfaced to back Watkins. Although the race was non-partisan, voters were made aware that Watkins was a Democrat and Berkley was a Republican. The ballot for the DFP was a knockoff of the CCP ballot used six months earlier. Berkley won, ballot format notwithstanding.

 

 Sorry for the long story, but there is a punchline. Political ballots are required to have a contact party, and that info is in the small print at the bottom of the ballot. On the CCP ballot, it is CCP chair, Lonnie Shalton. On the copycat DFP ballot, it is DFP treasurer, Leland Shurin.

Although Watkins lost, two winning council candidates on that DFP ballot later became mayor. In 1991, Emanuel Cleaver was elected as KC’s first Black mayor. In 1999, Kay Waldo (as Kay Waldo Barnes) was elected as KC’s first (and to date, only) woman mayor. They each served two terms.

Leland’s political passion is also evidenced by his collection of several thousand campaign pins. The entryway of his condo is filled with framed boards of pins, including this one that includes a Robert F. Kennedy pin from the Indiana primary (lower right).

 

 Lonnie’s Jukebox – Michael Ochs (RIP): On July 28, I got an email from Tim Sear, “I assume we will soon see a Hot Stove on Michael Ochs.” The name sounded familiar, but I had to Google. I found that Ochs had died in July 23 at the age of 82. According to his obituary in the Hollywood Reporter, Ochs was a self-described “music junkie” who collected millions of images of singers, actors and celebrities for an archive that fed CD reissues, books, news sites and documentaries. Per the New York Times, Ochs built the world’s leading collection of photos chronicling the modern history of popular music. He sold his archive to Getty Images in 2007.

Then I remembered why I knew the name. His collecting also involved vinyl record albums, and he put 1,000 of the covers in a book that I had received as a gift. I went to my rock ‘n’ roll shelf in the library, and there it was.

It was a poignant moment when I opened the book and saw the inscription: “Hope you enjoy. Di & Larry, August 2005.” Diana and Larry Brewer had come in from Phoenix for a party Rita was throwing for me on my 64^th birthday (“Will you still need me, will you still feed me when I’m 64?”). As many readers of Hot Stove know, our dear friends Di and Larry died earlier this year, and this was a wonderful reminder of our long friendship. And if you are doing the math, yes, I’ll be 84 this month – August 9, easy to remember because that is the date of Satchel Paige’s Hall of Fame induction (1971) and Richard Nixon’s resignation (1974). For the record, at the party, Rita answered the “64” questions by singing the Beatles “I Will.” And she has continued to do so (excellent cook).

As I leafed through the book, I saw several album covers that Rita and I still have. I’ll select five for this session of the jukebox.

“I Got a Woman” by Ray Charles from the album Ray Charles at Newport (1958). I had enjoyed the dawn of rock ‘n’ roll in high school, but the music scene was changing fast as I entered college at Rolla in the fall of 1959. Little Richard became a preacher. Buddy Holly was dead. Elvis was in the army and Chuck Berry was about to go to jail. But not to fear, a lot of good stuff was coming. Motown. Carole King and others at the Brill Building in New York. The first whispers of the English Invasion. And Ray Charles.

Ray was a favorite at our Sigma Nu Fraternity house. His “What’d I Say” and the Isley Brothers’ “Shout” made for fun dancing with the call and response lyrics. I bought The Genius of Ray Charles album when it came out that winter and wore sunglasses at our parties to show solidarity with my new music hero.

However, I was late to the scene for Ray Charles. He had been making hit records for years, but they were on the R&B chart. “I Got a Woman” was a #1 R&B hit in 1954. That all changed in 1959 when “What’d I Say” was a top 10 hit on the pop chart. Some of the upper classman knew of his earlier work, and I bought this used album from one of them.

When I looked at my old album this week, I was reminded of the address of Atlantic Records which is at the bottom of the back cover.

I knew the address because it was the first piece of an assemblage project that I worked on for my client Gary Barnett. He acquired 157 W. 57^th in 1997 (Atlantic had moved by then), and for years after that continued to assemble adjacent properties and development rights for a 700,000 square-foot tower. The 75-floor building was completed in 2014 and houses a Park Hyatt Hotel and luxury condos. The name of the tower is taken from the address of the first piece of the assemblage – One57 (website here).

“California Dreamin’” by The Mama’s and the Papa’s from the album If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears (1966).

The first cover was deemed indecent because of the toilet, so the record company started covering that up with names of songs in the album. Then they went even further with the fifth version of the cover…

“Peace Train” by Cat Stevens (a/k/a Yusuf) from the album Teaser and the Firecat (1971). My favorite listening place for Cat Stevens music is within the 1971 movie Harold and Maude (trailer here). The film became a cult classic, running for years in places like the Bijou Theater in Westport, no doubt prompting the purchase of many of Cat’s albums.

 

“Only the Good Die Young” by Billy Joel from the album The Stranger (1977). “You Catholic girls start much too late/But sooner or later it comes down to fate/I might as well be the one.” Religious groups pressured radios stations to not play the song. Joel: “The minute they banned it, the album started shooting up the charts.”  Rita and I watched the new HBO documentary Billy Joel: And So It Goes (very good; trailer here).

 

“Hey Jude” by the Beatles from the compilation album that was to be titled The Beatles Again but was changed at the last minute to Hey Jude to match up with the blockbuster single (1970). Beatles fanatic/20-year-old college student Rita Leifhelm purchased this album soon after its release in early 1970. Her vinyl record has the album name of The Beatles Again because the early pressings occurred before the record company decided to change the album title. The back and front of the album cover do not show an album title or even the Beatles name, but the spine of the album does say the Beatles and the album title Hey Jude.

We just watched CNN’s four-part series Live Aid: When Rock ‘n’ Roll Took Over the World (info here). It was a great history lesson on the 1985 Live Aid concert (a fundraiser to combat African famine) and the 2005 Live 8 concerts (to pressure the G8 countries to grant debt relief and provide more aid to Africa). Bob Geldof and Bono deserve profound thanks for their relentless efforts. At the end of the Live 8 concert in London, Paul McCartney played the finale…

“Long and Winding Road”/”Hey Jude” by Paul McCartney and ensemble.

While we are talking about the Beatles…In June, Rita and I attended the Radioactive fund raiser for KCUR at the Loews Hotel. In the lobby leading to the ballroom, there is artwork related to Kansas City history. This drawing of a ticket to the 1964 Beatles concert at Municipal Stadium spoke to Rita. She was there, then 14 years old. 

Walk-Off Photos – No Fishing: Lots of koi in the pond at Loose Park. This photo was taken in the spring when the water temperature invites the fish to the surface. They disappear to the deep in cold and hot weather, so don’t expect to see a gathering like this in our August heat.

No fishing is allowed…

…but the resident heron does not read English or Spanish.

We have often seen the heron standing in wait at the edge of the pond, but last week was the first time we saw a successful catch.

Go Royals!