NINE Magazine Baseball Conference Scores A Ten In Phoenix

Source: leelowenfish.com --- Sunday, March 25, 2018
The 25th annual conference of NINE Baseball Magazine was a rousing success in Phoenix last week. I find it hard to believe that it has been ten years since I delivered the keynote address, “Whatever Happened To The Marvelous Importance of the Unimportant?” I still like the title and the idea - that Baseball should be entertaining and fun, not a matter of life and death, not a vehicle for obtaining and showing off great wealth and celebrity. I’m a realist, though. In an increasingly violent and insecure world, Baseball and almost all sports remain a high-growth industry. One of the charms of the NINE conference has been there are no simultaneous panels, everyone can hear each other’s presentations without missing any one paper. Too many highlights to mention them all but here are a few: **The opening night talk by Felipe Alou, the first Dominican star in major league Baseball history. He talked about his new book from U of Nebraska Press, “Alou: A Baseball Journey,” with an introduction by Pedro Martinez. Collaborator/sportswriter Peter Kerasotis has captured well the rags-to-riches story of a man who is known to speak in parables. **California Whittier College professor Charles S. Adams’s wry look filled with gallows humor at Seattle Mariners’ history and their lack of “an adequate myth”. **Larry Baldassaro’s probing and good-natured look at Italian-American Baseball players since the 1930s. **Ed Edmonds and Frank Houdek's take o ...

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