Next stop Cooperstown!

Here is the Baseball Hall of Fame's official press release announcing their Summer Authors Series. I will be leading off the schedule of 14 baseball books with HOF themes, starting at 1 p.m. ET on Wednesday, June 6. There will be a discussion using the big-screen presentation system inside the Bullpen Theater adjacent to the plaque Gallery room. Then I will sign copies of #DiamondsFromTheDugout in the Library Atrium. The event will be listed on the Schedule that patrons receive when they enter the Hall of Fame that day! Hope you can join in! - Mark

A word from Edgar

It has been my honor to vote for Edgar Martinez with my Hall of Fame ballot, and I can't wait to see him go into Cooperstown in 2019, his 10th and final year of eligibility. It has also been my honor to include him at the start of #DiamondsFromTheDugout. So you can imagine my elation when this tweet popped up on Edgar's Twitter page. Thanks, Gar! #mariners

Ready for January 6!

Here's the new display at Barnes & Noble Palisades Center mall, ready for the big #DiamondsFromTheDugout author event and bookfair at 2 pm ET on Saturday, Jan. 6! I'll discuss the No. 1 bestselling baseball book and sign copies, and the bookfair will benefit the Clarkstown Family Resource Center - part of the massive Clarkstown School District. I'll stay there until about 5, so there will be plenty of time to sign, but get there early if you want to catch a baseball discussion. If you're in the NYC area that day, come out and join us, for a good cause! See the book tour page for the latest updates on official author events and the #BarnesandNobleStormingTour.

Milestone with a marker

Barnes & Noble Fifth Avenue signing on Dec. 21, 2017

Wednesday's signing at Barnes & Noble Court Street in Brooklyn was the 39th BN store across the country I have hit on the DIAMONDS FROM THE DUGOUT book tour since our October launch, and Thursday was the milestone 40th at the BN Fifth Avenue location at 46th Street. You can visit the Book Tour page here at marknewmanbooks.com/tour and see the stops.

Thanks to all of the amazing BN team members I have met along the way, starting with our launch at the Evansville (IN) location, followed by The Grove in Los Angeles and Fort Lauderdale and St. Louis and New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delware visits as well. That's a lot of signed copies of the book Cal Ripken called "the perfect gift for any baseball fan," and I also want to say thanks for everyone who has gone to those stores and snapped them up! Please make sure you like the official Facebook page at facebook.com/MarkNewmanAuthor and follow instagram.com/marknewmanauthor so we can share our experiences with the book!

Signing at Barnes & Noble Court Street in Brooklyn on Dec. 20, 2017

Thanks to the Iron Man

On Sept. 6, 1995, I was in the press box at Camden Yards covering Cal Ripken Jr.'s 2,131st consecutive game played for the Baltimore Orioles, the night he somehow surpassed Lou Gehrig's "unbreakable" record. I also treasure the memory of standing next to Cal as he signed every last autograph on Main Street out front of the National Baseball Hall of Fame & Museum at about 1 a.m. the night before he gave his Hall of Fame Induction speech in 2007.

This post today by Cal on his Facebook page ranks right up there on my own thrill-o-meter from No. 8. Humble thanks to Cal for sharing his memory and lesson of his own personal favorite hit (it has to do with his father), and thanks for this endorsement of DIAMONDS FROM THE DUGOUT! This is from his Facebook page.

"A great new baseball book from Mark Newman... Brooks even wrote the foreword!"

Cal's must-read #DiamondsFromTheDugout is perfect for all baseball fans. Grab your copy here: marknewmanbooks.com.

Over the river and through the woods, to BN stores we go

Barnes & nOBLE STATEN ISLAND BOOK SIGNING ON 12/18/17

UPDATED 12/19/17.
BOOK TOUR PAGE JUST UPDATED - 38 BARNES & NOBLE APPEARANCES AND COUNTING...

From Friday through Monday, I signed each day at Barnes & Nobles stores throughout New Jersey and New York, bringing the total of BN stores visited to 38. This past weekend included a Barnes & Noble author event at Paramus (NJ) on Friday night, then the third consecutive weekend of #BarnesandNobleStormingTour store signings within the Northeast, then a meet & greet event at Barnes & Noble in Nanuet (NY) on Sunday, and then a visit to Staten Island to sign many books they have in stock. That was pretty cool, considering I usually am running over the Verrazano Narrows Bridge in the opposite direction for the NYC Marathon! Great stores!

The first #BarnesandNobleStormingTour across 9 Connecticut BN stores was such a success, the Jeep made the trip on the next weekend through crazy snow and to 10 BN stores throughout New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware. This #BarnesandNobleStormingTour went to: Clifton, Clark, Edison, East Brunswick, Princeton, Moorestown, Cherry Hill (all in NJ on Saturday), then Rittenhouse Square in downtown Philadelphia (after 20-minute MLB Network Radio appearance to talk about the book while parked outside the Philly store!), Concord Pike in Wilmington, Delaware, and finally Freehold (NJ).

See the @MarkNewmanAuthor Instagram page for all the posts with a ton of pics and videos, and thanks to the BN stores that also posted about the signings! This has been an incredible journey, not just getting a book from manuscript to market, but this holiday season of helping to put DIAMONDS FROM THE DUGOUT into eager baseball fans' hands for gifts!

All those stores now have signed copies waiting for you, at least while they last. Give them sticker copies for a gift!

9 Connecticut BN store signings in one day

The DIAMONDS FROM THE DUGOUT official book tour page is updated with Saturday's #BarnesandNobleStormingTour. Bingley and I drove to nine Barnes & Nobles all over the state of Connecticut in one day: Stamford, Westport, Milford, North Haven, Glastonbury, Manchester, Enfield, Farmington and Waterbury. Sorry, Danbury -- couldn't make it there before 10 p.m. close! That's 21 Barnes & Nobles across the United States and counting on the DIAMONDS FROM THE DUGOUT tour. Grab "the sports book of the holiday season" for family and friends!

My 2018 Hall of Fame ballot

I just mailed back my 2018 Baseball Hall of Fame ballot. Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Chipper Jones, Edgar Martinez, Jim Thome, Scott Rolen, Curt Schilling, Mike Mussina, Larry Walker, Vlad Guerrero. Read my 6,000-word blog post analyzing my entire top 20.

While I did not agree with Joe Morgan's email to voters -- neither the message nor the delivery -- I appreciate him being a part of my new book DIAMONDS FROM THE DUGOUT.

Thanks, Brooksie

You won't find a better person than Brooks Robinson, and it was so nice to spend time with him in the cocktail reception before this month's Major League Baseball Players Alumni Association 18th annual Legends for Youth Dinner at Capitale in Manhattan. We had fun talking about DIAMONDS FROM THE DUGOUT, which he helped make possible by providing the Foreword as well as the first insightful interview response about nine years ago that moved this entire project toward what became a well-received baseball book filled with everyday lessons. I'm proud to say that the book also benefits the Constance & Brooks Robinson Foundation, which helps important causes. I knew it was all meant to be when he agreed to write the Foreword on the very same day last April that I was inside Camden Yards posing with one of his statues. True story. Among the photos I took below is one of the 1955 Baltimore Orioles team stats, which is on a club-level hallway at the ballpark. If you look closely at that, you can see that a rookie named "Brooks Robinson" was 2-for-22 that first year, and that explains why he chose the hit that he did for this book! Don't miss his story and Foreword.

Baseball by the Book Podcast

Thanks to my fellow Sporting News alum Justin McGuire for having me on his Baseball by the Book podcast! DIAMONDS FROM THE DUGOUT is episode 94 there.  Click here to listen.

MLB.com Newsmakers Podcast

Thanks Bill Ladson for having me on the MLB.com Newsmakers podcast to talk about DIAMONDS FROM THE DUGOUT! You can listen to the interview here.

Barnes & Noble Fort Lauderdale

Thanks to my friends at Barnes & Noble Fort Lauderdale on North Federal for letting me sign copies of DIAMONDS FROM THE DUGOUT . . . and displaying them prominently on the Customer Information counter by the sign "Books We're Talking About". Get your signed copy now or order it online here.

Evansville Courier & Press

Evansville native Mark Newman's book asks baseball's greats: Which hit was your favorite?

By Chad Lindskog, Evansville Courier & Press

EVANSVILLE — Mark Newman received a wakeup call last year on the morning of Game 7 of the World Series.

It was Pete Rose.

Newman scrambled to put baseball's all-time hit king on speakerphone and open Microsoft Word on his computer inside a Cleveland hotel room. Then he asked this question: What hit meant the most to you and why? . . . Read more >>

Book Review by Perfect Pitch

Thanks to Susan Spector -- Met Opera oboe, longtime Mets season ticket holder with husband Garry, and staple of the MLB.com/blogs community for a decade -- for her review of DIAMONDS FROM THE DUGOUT on the Perfect Pitch blog! Please visit Susan's blog and check out the review. Great custom beret, too! Here's an excerpt:

      Fans, the media, statisticians, bloggers, and baseball historians have time-honored criteria for quantifying or qualifying an individual athlete’s performance relative to his peers.  They are also afforded their respective platforms for self-cultivated “highlight reels” of their own selection.  Some of the crowning points shared with Mark by these ballplayers might be seen as relatively unremarkable, from a strictly baseball point of view; what is noteworthy is the reason why this is the hit selected by the player himself and given its own chapter in Mark’s book.

     The subject of each chapter is certainly a measure of athletic accomplishment, but more often a player’s selection had more to do with the context in which the hit was made. Mark skillfully weaves together the specifics of the play with anecdotal information from the player.  Reading these vignettes, one can easily visualize the whimsical grin playing across the face of a player or the slight misting up of a player’s eyes involved in the hit’s memory and his retelling a story that, for that player at least, has obviously become the stuff of myth or legend.  The inclusion of each player’s “back story”, the opportunity for him to “set the stage” and to add personal embellishments to his saga:  this is what makes the book fascinating reading.

Click here for the full review >>

Barnes & Noble book signing / USA launch

I am proud to be launching DIAMONDS FROM THE DUGOUT in my hometown of Evansville, Indiana, at the Barnes & Noble on Green River Road. The book signing is from 1-2 p.m. CT on Saturday, October 14. Please buy the book there, because part of the proceeds will benefit the Public Education Foundation Evansville. I became a reader and writer in the Evansville public school system, and my parents worked for the Evansville-Vanderburgh School Corp. Evansville is home to Don Mattingly, one of the 115 legends included in the book. Hope to see you there!