#stickjockey When I was about 15, about the time you should begin to read serious books and challenge the accepted wisdom of your forebears, I got a copy of Total Baseball, an enormous, flaccid, yellow paperback about the size of the Manhattan phone book. I studied it at the foot of my bed next to the hardbound Macmillan Baseball Encylopedia which looked more like a social register from 1941. One was an annually changing volume; what truth it contained today may be, and likely would be, revised in the coming year. The other, at the time, was the establishment of names and numbers any decent person should know. More »