The tragicomic story of the 1899 Cleveland Spiders, baseball’s futility leaders and winners of only 20 out of 154 games that season. Meet some of the most colorful men ever to wear a major league uniform. Follow their unfortunate train-travel odyssey through the National League and straight into obscurity. Marvel at the real desperation of a team forced to turn a cigar store clerk into a starting pitcher. Anecdotes galore. Reviewed in the 1999 Cleveland Indians Yearbook. Illustrations, appendices, sordid statistics, bibliography, and index.

MISFITS! Baseball's Worst Ever Team: 1899 Cleveland Spiders

Sports & Outdoors

Hetrick, J. Thomas

Baseball

Pocol Press

Head Full of Traffic dishes nearly two dozen tales of deliciously dark doomsday scenarios. Head Full of Traffic is a veritable tour-de-force of fantasy horror pieces. Grab a brush and paint in Istvan’s warped world. Wake up with Brandon Verity, spokesman for Pacific Northwest Power & Light. Slow down vehicles with Randy and his road crew. See what Grandpa's planting in his orchard. Not recommended for those that can’t or won’t ride roller coasters of the imagination. Cover art by Ken Meyer, Jr.

Head Full of Traffic

Literature & Fiction

Ames, Brian

Genre Fiction

The Genealogy Anthology Project (GAP) celebrates the extraordinary lives of ordinary people. Inside are tales of survivors, of determined individuals with indomitable wills, of unfortunate children, of searchers, of story tellers, of family men, of the anguished, of the courageous, and of the fiercely proud. These special people live together, break bread at mealtime, worship their gods, marry, raise families, grow old, and pass away. When their immediate kin and friends also enter that great beyond, often these stories are lost forever. The Genealogy Anthology Project attempts, in some small way, to rectify these losses. GAP is a series of ongoing writings for publication by Pocol Press. Our main focus is on family narratives. In essence, this material serves as a culmination of painstaking hours spent researching, compiling, interviewing, and recording information about loved ones.

Bygone Days: Fondly Remembered

Douet

Shunfenthal

Caseby

Parenting & Relationships

The classic 19th century base ball narrative features Earl “Ducker” Draves, a fictional yet all-too-real young player who recounts his remarkable 1884 base ball season and his whirlwind rookie campaign in Cincinnati. Early Dreams is crammed with insightful comments on base ball's pioneers, box scores, and Draves’ surprising reactions to the drinking, gambling, and whoring activities that were central to early base ball. Early Dreams manages to cover nearly every nuance of the era, including evolving game strategy, financial squabbles, and racism--all against a backdrop of the rough-and-tumble milieu of the 19th century brand of ball. Nemec’s book draws favorable comparisons to Ring Lardner's You Know Me Al. Cover illustration by Todd Mueller.

Early Dreams

NEMEC, David

Contemporary

Sacred Voices: Women of Genesis Speak breathes life into the heroines of Biblical times. The Biblical women tell their own stories in lyrical verse. Understand their thoughts, actions, feelings, and motivations. Presented in order of appearance are Lilith, Eve, Mrs. Noah, Sarah, Hagar, Lot’s Wife, Rebekah, Leah, Rachel, Bilhah and Zilpah, Dinah, and Miriam of Exodus. Contains Explanation and Commentary, Bibliography, artist contact information, and illustrations.

Sacred Voices: Women of Genesis Speak

Shunfenthal, Sherri Waas

Poetry

Some blame God, others blame kismet, and still others rail against random happenstance. All told, maybe there are no accidents. With Bonneville Stories, Mark Doyon delivers ten compelling tales of fate and the freedom to choose. 
In the fictional town of Bonneville, good people lose limbs, fight lightning, and slip into sinkholes. They pitch over bicycles, tumble off ladders, and expire without warning. They spin the wheel and take their chances. 
It's all in a day's work. 
Echoing the wondrous oddity in the works of Roald Dahl, Ray Bradbury, and Donald Barthelme, Doyon’s stories explore a quirky milieu evocative of the novels of Kurt Vonnegut and Frederick Exley, and of the television shows Twin Peaks and The Twilight Zone.

Bonneville Stories

Doyon, Mark

Short Stories & Anthologies

Numerous books have been written about baseball's champion batsmen. But, what about ballplayers who repeatedly produced little more than pathetic squibbers to third base, infield pop ups, and ego bruising strikeouts? What could possibly be their value to a baseball club? Plenty. Using eye-opening statistics, interviews with players, and illustrations, author Al Pepper produces remarkable biographies of fifty of major league baseball's worst hitters. Men like Brian Doyle, Choo Choo Coleman, Bob Uecker, Tony La Russa, Ted Beard, Charlie Manual, and 44 others finally receive their due. The origins of the famous Mendoza Line and a biography of its namesake Mario Mendoza is also included. In addition, the book serves as a rollicking tour through baseball history -- from the nineteenth century through today. Foreword by ex-big leaguer Mike Stenhouse.

Mendoza's Heroes: Fifty Batters Below .200

Pepper, Al

The Holy Paragon

Karnes, Bob

Parallel Lines and the Hockey Universe is a novel that is often like a short story collection--it begins with a family of Macedonian-Canadians, the Traicheffs. One son stays in a working class suburb of Toronto, driving a cab while he tries to decide what to do with his life. His brother marries a middle-class Iowan and takes to writing sports for the Waterloo paper. He writes about hockey, the Canadian national game, which has also emigrated. And Tracey writes about the players on the team and their coaches and fans, about the kids the brothers knew in school, and about the music and movies they use as points of reference on their way to adulthood. I read it all at once, almost afraid to pause to look back at a book so undeniably real. Like life, perusal has no time outs.

Parallel Lines and the Hockey Universe

Tracey, Grant

The year is 1897. The place: Boston, Mass. Star short stop Herman Long has just been beaten and left for dead, alone and in the locker room of the Boston Beaneaters National League base ball team. But, whodunit and why? It’s up to ne’er-do-well Will Beaman, who stumbles across Long while trying desperately to secure a front office position with the ball club, to solve the case. Filled with romance, numerous red herrings, exciting game reportage, and shady characters, Best Bet in Beantown dives deeply into the sordid world of 19th century base ball.

Best Bet in Beantown (A Will Beaman Baseball Mystery)

Rowe, G. S.

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