Book Cover Reveal! Plus Preorder Offer!

OK, if you are a dedicated JoeBlogs reader, you might remember that I gave you a sneak preview of this a little while ago. But today is COVER REVEAL DAY for my new book, Why We Love Baseball, which will be coming out on Sept. 5!

Here it is! Check it out!

Choosing a book cover is quite the process. This is book No. 7 for me — No. 8 if you count The Good Stuff, a collection of my early columns at The Kansas City Star — and each cover is its own interesting story. OK, well, I’m not saying each would be an INTERESTING story to you. Being honest, they’re probably about as interesting as you telling me about your golf round or your fantasy football team.

But I look back at my books, and there are some covers I still love and other covers I wish I could do over again. As the years have gone on, I’ve become more and more drawn to simplicity in book cover design. I love the WWLB cover so much because of its simplicity (the same way I felt about the wonderful Baseball 100 cover). The image of the ball in the glove sends my heart racing, it really does.

If you go to the awesome Dutton Preorder Page I’ve linked above — heck, I’ll link it here again — you will see that I wrote a special message to readers about how much I love this book. This is because I have not been this excited about a book coming out since my very first one, The Soul of Baseball, was published 16 years ago.

In many ways, I see Why We Love Baseball as a continuation of Soul. That book was about my friend, Buck O’Neil, and the extraordinary way he saw the world. And underneath every story was Buck’s unmatched love for baseball. That love saw him through trying times, lifted him up when he was being held down and drew people close to him, like a magnet.

That’s the love I try to capture in this book: Buck O’Neil’s love for baseball. Also Art Stewart’s love for baseball. Also Theo Epstein’s love for baseball and Jonathan Abrams’ love for baseball and Dale Murphy’s love for baseball and Bob Kendrick’s love for baseball and Ellen Adair’s love for baseball and Ichiro’s love for baseball. They’re all in here, along with many more. The book is a countdown of the game’s most magical moments — some famous, others almost entirely unknown — but to me, it’s so much more than that. Every single day of writing this book, my love for the game grew just a little as I came upon a story, a character, a detail I didn’t know.

I cannot wait for you to read it. I really believe it will make you happy.

You can preorder the book pretty much everywhere now — not QUITE everywhere, but, yeah, at Bookshop.org and Amazon and Barnes & Noble and Books a Million and Hudson and Target and so on. You will notice, not all of these places have put up the new cover yet — that’s how new it is!

But, as usual, my favorite place for you to preorder is Rainy Day Books in Kansas City, and we’ve got a super-special deal going there. Part of it you probably know: If you order from Rainy Day, I will obviously sign the book, but I will also inscribe it with anything you like. I will write “Derek Jeter is awesome.” I will write “I agree with Mike Schur on hot fruit.” I will write, “I learned everything I know about baseball from Steve” — assuming your name is Steve.*

*The caveat this time around is that your inscription cannot be longer than 150 characters (including spaces but not including the person’s name). We had to do it; some of the inscriptions for The Baseball 100 were Russian novels. Now, you may ask: How long is 150 characters? Is that enough room? Well, let me give you an example:

To Ellen,

Aaron Nola will win the Cy Young this year and every year for the foreseeable future because of his four-pitch eminence and your undying faith.

That’s 143 characters; so that does seem like enough space to get across whatever it is you want to get across.

We did A LOT of these Rainy Day Books inscriptions for The Baseball 100. Like a lot. Like thousands. My dream is to do even more for Why We Love Baseball. I’ve been doing book signing exercises in anticipation. And that’s why there’s a second part. I can’t reveal too much, because the details will be worked out over the next few months, but let’s just say that there will be cool extras. And there might even be a certain special guest star.

More on all that later!

You can preorder the book from Rainy Day here:

Thank you! I’m bursting with excitement about this, I really am. I have written this whole book of baseball stories — funny stories, inspiring stories, touching stories, absurd stories, meaningful stories — and it will be months before I can share them with you and, as JoeBlogs readers well know, that’s not easy for me. But I feel so sure it will be worth the wait.