Follow the progress of DIAMONDS FROM THE DUGOUT, look for author events near you, and watch for blog updates regularly.
Matt Sutherland, Editor-in-Chief of Foreword Reviews Magazine, interviewed me for their latest issue of Foreword This Week, the popular digital newsletter that reaches their library readership. Thanks for the Q&A, which ran during the World Series! You can read it right here.
We not only talked a lot of baseball, but we helped a great cause: Public EducationFoundation of Evansville. Thanks to all!
First book signing and reading. More upcoming!
First sighting at a BN.
I'm a Local Author in Evansville, Indiana.
Signed nearly 100 of these. Look for yours at your local Barnes & Noble. If it's not there yet, please ask a BN staffer to order copies! Thanks!
This is what I saw when I took the escalator upstairs the morning of the book signing at the Evansville Barnes & Noble. Thanks, Mariana! You are amazing!
And there's your book signing catch phrase. What do you think?
Standing Room Only at the Evansville Barnes & Noble. The man in the pink shirt is a very special guest, by the way: My Evansville Central High School Journalism teacher, Edwin Cole. One of the all-time greats! So nice to see him and his wife Sharon!
So nice to be home in Evansville!
Thanks to Leanne and Randy Mauer for handing me SEVEN books to sign! It was nice to personalize every one of them. Her own copy has my old Whiffle ball lineup on the title page -- 9 lines each reading "Rod Carew".
Amy Walker, Executive Director of Public Education Foundation of Evansville, graciously spoke to our audience about PEF's mission. It was so nice to help a great cause.
The audience member to the right? Oh, just my 100-YEAR-OLD Grandpa, Woody Groomer, a WWII vet. So happy to introduce him to everyone. He danced the night before at the local Owls club.
Thanks to my wonderful wife Lisa for her support throughout the decade it took to bring DIAMONDS FROM THE DUGOUT to baseball fans.
A meaningful moment just before walking into my hometown Evansville Barnes & Noble to start the book tour.
Thanks to a standing-room-only crowd that came out to Barnes & Noble in Evansville on Saturday for a fantastic book launch event! We teamed up to raise funds for Public Education Foundation of Evansville, and I am especially thankful to PEF Executive Director Amy Walker for speaking to the audience about PEF's mission, and to Kathy Singer of PEF and Mariana of Barnes & Noble for organizing such a beautiful and memorable afternoon. Here's a slideshow of the afternoon!
One takeaway: People are buying DIAMONDS FROM THE DUGOUT not just as a single copy, but in batches as gifts for so many people from all walks who love baseball, no matter what your team or town.
We're off and running! Looking forward to many more book signings and readings to come! Please be sure to LIKE the official Facebook page for our book at facebook.com/MarkNewmanAuthor! Ask your local Barnes & Noble if they have the book yet, and please leave a review if you order it online, as that will help us appear in search results. Thanks!
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 >>
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.
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!
Roberto Alomar is one of at least 44 current or future Hall of Famers included in DIAMONDS FROM THE DUGOUT. He is on page 190, and his brother Sandy Jr. is right behind on page 191. Great to see Robbie today in our MLB.com HQ in NYC!
Ozzie Smith still makes us "go crazy", and Bruce Sutter was a postseason legend, too.
The MLB postseason gets underway tonight with the first Wild Card Game between the Twins and Angels, so this is a good time to note that nearly a fourth of the legends in DIAMONDS FROM THE DUGOUT -- 32 of the 115 -- have a postseason hit listed in response to the question, "What hit meant the most to you and why?"
The most fun part of the journey of writing this book over the last eight or nine years was hearing surprising answers from legends who are known for iconic hits. For example, Carlton Fisk, Joe Carter, Luis Gonzalez and Aaron Boone are remembered for famous walk-offs in the postseason, but none of them considered those their own most cherished hit. Buy the book and you'll see why they hold on to something that is more personally meaningful.
Meanwhile, some of the legends in DIAMONDS FROM THE DUGOUT went right where the average fan might have expected. In doing so, however, legends like Edgar Martinez, Ozzie Smith and Chris Chambliss share new thoughts that provide insightful life lessons to the rest of us. I start the book off with "The Double" by Edgar, not only because so many of the greats from this book's roster (nine in all) were right there on the scene that night, but also because of the lesson he imparts to readers. I have always wanted to know what truly was in his head as he stood there in the batter's box on that forever-replayed game video, and here it is.
I am thankful to my friend Bob Costas for providing the Mickey Mantle story in proxy, as I was not able to ask The Mick my nine-word question as he signed a baseball for me ($50) at an Atlantic City card show during the 1991 season. Bob's hit was a Mantle homer in the World Series, appropriate for the legend who set the record for most Fall Classic homers. And as if that's not enough, James Caan was kind enough to provide a Mantle hit as well. There's an obvious Reggie Jackson postseason hit, with Tom Brokaw and Joe Piscopo narrating.
Other postseason hits in the book come straight from these guys: Johnny Bench, Alex Rodriguez, Tim McCarver, Dave Parker, Robin Young, Ron Swoboda, Albert Pujols, Joe Morgan, Bob Watson, Tim Salmon, Dr. Bobby Brown, Alan Trammell, Steve Garvey, Brian McCann, Dave Winfield, Mike Shannon, Jim Sundberg, Mark Teixeira, Sandy Alomar Jr., Tino Martinez, Mike Lowell, Kenny Lofton, Jorge Posada, David Eckstein and Torii Hunter.
Tony Gwynn had plenty to say about hitting when John Rawlings and I interviewed him and Stan Musial for two hours one day in the 1990s. A postseason hit did not come up, nor was this question raised back then. But when I asked Tony's brother Chris last year what hit he thought would have meant to Tony, he offered one from San Diego's 1994 National League Championship Series against the Cubs.
It has been a long journey of discovery, and sadly some of the legends I'd hope to ask are gone. When people ask me why I wrote this book, I tell them one of the main reasons is leave one more story behind for the heroes of our lives. You know how much it hurts inside when an Ernie Banks or a Harmon Killebrew or a Stan the Man leaves us; it rips out your inside. I wanted to be able to do a little something about it and leave an answer from them like this.
Another postseason is about to begin, and new legends are about to be made. One day, they might tell the story of a postseason hit that mattered the most to them. Or maybe not.
DIAMONDS FROM THE DUGOUT was 8 or 9 years in the making, and maybe the most important step in turning it into a coast-to-coast reality was the organizational breakthrough. For anyone producing a book, I hope this visual will help you "see the ball, hit the ball."
Lisa and Rachel deserve even more thanks than I offered in the Acknowledgements, simply for putting up with this takeover of our dining room sliding glass door for late winter and early spring in 2017. I had all these remarkable stories from baseball legends, and the life lessons within them is what really made a difference as a motivational/baseball book. But what to DO with them before submitting the final manuscript?
Using post-it notes spread out at eye level was the answer. I began arranging column headers that would serve as chapters, each representing a different category of similar lessons or character traits. Over days and weeks, I would move one post-it to a different column, or in some cases toss them as undeserving of the final cut. Being able to "see" the book this way, I could then re-order chapters, rename them, and get to a point where it felt done.
No matter what project you are working on, sometimes you have to look at it in a whole different way -- whether that's a whole wall in your basement, a big whiteboard and marker, a spreadsheet, or the front of your kitchen fridge. I had to get it out of digital form and into something more visual and tangible. For my family, the best part of all was the day when I finally removed all the post-its that covered that siding glass door, so they could see our deck and backyard and birds again as I saw my new book. Mission accomplished.
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