Author, Editor, Consultant, Speaker
Dorothy Jane Mills blog
The University of Nebraska Press has just announced that U.N.P’s author, Rob Fitts, has won the Seymour Award for the book, Banzai Babe Ruth, published last year. He will receive the award at a banquet that follows the NINE baseball conference in Tempe, Ariz., on March 16.
This announcement omits to reveal the full name of the award. More importantly, it omits to say who will present the award to Rob. Continue reading “Feb. 6, 2013”
“This book has the kind of story that would translate well to film–especially if Penny Marshall were available to direct.”
Last week, while vacationing in New Orleans, I attended a play at the Shadowbox Theatre. The title was “The Insanity of Mary Girard; A Dream in One Act,” by Lanie Robertson. Mary was a real person, the wife of a famous entrepreneur and philanthropist of the 1800s, Stephen Girard, who had her admitted to an insane asylum because of her so-called “uncontrollable bouts of rage” or “emotional outbursts.”
When I interviewed Marvin Miller at his New York office back in the 1960s with my late husband Harold Seymour, we were both impressed with his openness. He never dodged a question, and my transcription of the notes I took at the interview totaled ten full pages.
The History Channel has just launched a TV series called ”Mankind: The Story of All of Us,” a series that is supposed to “recount humankind’s full history,” as The Week magazine put it on Nov. 16. Unfortunately, it is very much out of date and therefore full of errors, especially errors of omission.
Baseball, says Sam Zygner in his new piece for the Fall 2012 Baseball Research Journal published by SABR, is “the ultimate game of equal opportunity.”
Why do women play baseball?
For a long time I’ve been irritated by TV commercials that make junk food look delicious and fail to reveal its real content. Fish and meat dripping with butter, sandwiches so thick the actors can hardly get their mouths around them — these pictures turn me off. The sales pitch for Domino’s Pizza boasts that it features fresh dough instead of frozen, but it never reveals what’s in either.
Last winter I gave a speech called “How Baseball Made Me into a Feminist.” The title attracted more curious people than the room could hold: after all, how could baseball turn anyone into a feminist?
Lately I’ve been under the vague impression that other writers’ ideas were bouncing off my own and that I’ve been catching the deflections. For years I’ve been saying that women in baseball deserve much more media attention. Now other writers with much more clout than I have begun talking about women in athletics.