Sunday Morning in the Queen City

Address of T-Birds is 4529 Vine Street.

Sunday 4:00 to 6:00.

Mike Shannon, Editor, Spitball: The Literary Baseball Magazine


Fred: I assumed you know all the details of the CASEY Banquet but then I thought ... maybe not. It'd be great to see you there so here's the scoop:

Sunday March 8 from 4-6:00 pm at T-Birds Pub in St. Bernard. T-Birds is across the street on Vine from St. Clement Catholic grade school and about 2 blocks north of Roger Bacon High School.

Cost is $10. You get a subscription to Spitball ... AND ... a copy of Hallowed Ground, the big & beautiful ballpark art calendar made every year by Bill Goff. The calendar retails for $17 plus $6 shipping, so it's a nice perk.

Doug Feldman will be the guest speaker and will talk about his new book on the 1976 Reds. Charles Alexander will also be there to sign any of his many outstanding books.

Take care, YB, Mike
Ps. Please forward this email to any of your contacts who are baseball fans and tell them, if they wouldn't already know, about the main purpose of the event: to honor the 10 best bb books of the previous year. We will have 150+ bb books all published in 2008 on display as usual.

After reading the above information, you might wonder what this is all about. Well, in 1987 I met Mike Shannon, one of the Founders of SPITBALL, THE LITERARY BASEBALL MAGAZINE. The Wall Street Journal did an article about Mike and his baseball magazine and since he was living in Cincinnati, I looked him up in the phone book to talk with him about his love for baseball. I found out that he also liked to play fast pitch soft ball and that he had a team that played in Northside on Wednesday or Thursday nights. In 1987, I was only 46 and I loved to play fast pitch softball so I joined his team. As a left hander, I played in the outfield in hard ball; however, for fast pitch soft ball, I loved to play catcher. The snap of that ball hitting my glove as the batter whiffed through the third strike was the sweetest sound to my ears. But, that doesn't tell you much about Mike Shannon and SPITBALL. Mike started publishing SPITBALL in the early 1980s and also started giving an award to the best baseball book published each year. He called the award the CASEY AWARD, named after the famous poem Casey at the Bat. So, every year Mike holds a "banquet" to award the best baseball book of the year and to sell subscriptions to his magazine. In the old days, he had the banquet at the Carnegie Art Center in Covington, KY and he served beer, hot dogs and peanuts in the shell, just like at the ball park. I lost contact with Mike over the years; however, baseball would always get us back together. If you love baseball and you love reading books about baseball, then you need to get in your car and come to the SPITBALL BANQUET today at 4pm in St. Bernard, Ohio. The info is at the top. DON'T DRESS UP, THIS IS A FUN TIME AS YOU CAN EVEN WHERE A BASEBALL SHIRT IF YOU GOT ONE. For $10, you get a subscription to SPITBALL, a calendar worth $17 bucks and an opportunity to look at the 150+ baseball books published in 2008. I am going to try and make it myself.