The FIFTY SEASONS Cover Reveal

On book covers, Earle Combs, and, just maybe, the most perfect baseball photograph ever taken

As an author, you know that the whole “you can’t judge a book by its cover” cliché is ridiculous. People judge books by the cover. Of course they do. Everyone does. I mean, you walk into a bookstore to browse, and you are besieged by celebrity books and political books and romantasies and Parts VII and VIII of some dragon series and classics and self-help and cookbooks and histories and books from movies you just saw and children’s books and hockey romances and literary fiction, and you will probably find yourself looking for a book that calls to you.

How can that book call to you except through the cover?

When my first book, THE SOUL OF BASEBALL, came out, I had no idea how to even think about book covers. Heck, I had no idea how to even write a book. I was just following the spirit of Buck O’Neil, and when the publishing house showed me this cover — with Buck on the top and a baseball field on the bottom and the title and subtitle in the middle — I thought, “Sure, why not?” I don’t even remember if they showed me any other options. I love the cover now because I love the book so much. But I do wonder if another cover might have captured the spirit of the book more. I don’t know.

Next came THE MACHINE, and I will admit now that I don’t love this cover. We went with the same top/bottom concept — photo of Pete Rose on the top, photo of the team lined along the first base line at the bottom, a way too long subtitle — and, looking back all these years later, it feels chaotic to me and doesn’t quite get across what I hope that book is about

THE BASEBALL 100 was, in many ways, the first book cover that I think precisely nailed the feeling I was going for when I wrote it:

My first reaction to this cover was, “Wait, it’s TOO simple.” The whole Baseball 100 experience was strange — I’d been writing it very publicly on my blog for more than a decade, starting and stopping on multiple occasions before writing the final version over 100 days for The Athletic. Before I ever even thought of it as a book, it had become a part of me. And then I was shown a bunch of covers, and I kept gravitating toward this one, and I also kept thinking, “But, no, it’s too simple — I mean, there’s nothing to it.”

We, of course, went with this cover, and I will never forget bringing an early copy with me to the first Field of Dreams game in Iowa, and I was sitting in the stands with it on my lap when the guy next to me, with no prompting at all, said, “I know every single thing that is in that book. I love that book. Quiz me.”

And I said, “But this book hasn’t even come out yet.”

And he said, “Yeah, I read it all online.”

And two thoughts occurred to me: (1) Why would anyone buy this book if they’d already read it online? (2) This cover is magical.

Fortunately, lots of people who read it online bought the book. And, yes, I still think the cover is magical.

My favorite cover, though — at least until today’s announcement — is WHY WE LOVE BASEBALL. For me, it’s the perfect balance of title and image and color and … you look at this cover, and you know EXACTLY what this book is all about. As a special bonus for JoeBlogs readers here on FIFTY SEASONS book cover day, I’ll show you three of the covers we turned down:

It’s funny — I had totally forgotten that first one on the left — that’s more or less the image that Molly Knight and I are using for our “Joy of Baseball” podcast (that we will be launching August 11! More details on that coming very soon!).

FIFTY SEASONS is my tenth book, which means I’ve gone through this cover process many times, and I don’t know much more than I did at the beginning. But I do know that I want to FEEL the power of the cover. I want to look at it and have fireworks go off in my mind. I want to see it and think, “OK! That cover is exactly what this book is!”

That’s a tough trick to pull off in a single image.

And it’s especially tough for a book like FIFTY SEASONS, which is not an easy book to sum up. It is both a countdown of the fifty seasons that echo loudly — you know, Yaz in ‘67 and Mark Fidrych in ‘76 and Cal Raleigh in 2025 and Josh Gibson in 1936 and Pete Incaviglia in ‘85 and on and on — and an accompanying series of baseball stories that echo just as loudly.

How do you get all of that into one cover?

Well …

That’s Earle Combs at the plate. Earle Combs does not have a full season in this book. That doesn’t matter. He has a story. This at-bat happened in the first game of a doubleheader between the Yankees and Athletics in 1928. The pennant was on the line. The largest crowd to ever watch a baseball game filled the stands that day, more than 85,000 people. Combs led off the bottom of the first. He was famous in his day for waiting until the last possible second to swing and then almost punching the ball right out of the catcher’s glove the other way. That’s exactly what he did here for a single. A photographer snapped the perfect shot, maybe the most perfect baseball shot ever taken.

The shot is taken just as Combs is looking at the ball and running toward first.

A’s catcher Mickey Cochrane — a Hall of Famer who inspired Mutt Mantle to name his son Mickey — began to stand out of his crouch, and he followed the ball.

Home plate umpire Bill McGowan — another Hall of Famer who Ted Williams called “Number 1,” because he was the best umpire of his day — followed the ball too.

It’s all there. All of baseball. All of this book.

I love this cover so, so much.

FIFTY SEASONS is already available for preorder. If you do preorder, please save your receipt because I cut out more stories from this book than any book I’ve ever written. Great stories. We will turn those stories into a PDF and send it to every person who preorders the book. There’s a Zack Greinke story in there. A Ty Cobb story. A Greg Maddux story. A lot more.

I should add that we will be announcing our special signed copies preorder campaign soon. We’re trying to make that very special, so it will take a bit of time. But we have a bit of time. The book comes out on February 2.

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I’ll have final “Name the cover” contest results for you soon … but last I heard from our intrepid editor Kathleen, more than 200 of you named Earle Combs as our cover star after my last set of clues. I think I went overboard with the clues at the end; but my first three clues were so vague and unhelpful that zero people got it right before then.

In any case, we’re coming up with a prize for everybody who got it right. We’ll let you know as soon as we get everything finalized.