America's Pastime

Baseball fans in Minnesota have a lot to look forward to this spring. Target Field opens April 12, and the night before two great baseball minds will meet to discuss America's pastime Sunday, April 11, at 5:00pm.

------------

In Peter Schilling's The End of Baseball, a team that "almost was" becomes real, and the extraordinary season of 1944 comes vividly to life.

Bill Veeck, the maverick promoter, returned from Guadalcanal with a leg missing and $500 to his name, has hustled his way into buying the Philadelphia Athletics. Hungry for a pennant, young Veeck jettisons the team's white players and secretly recruits the legendary stars of the Negro Leagues, fielding a club that will go down in baseball annals as one of the greatest to play the game.

"The End of Baseball is so engaging and convincing that it accomplishes something truly special: it makes you wish desperately it were true."--Brad Zellar, The Rake

Peter Schilling Jr. edited the online baseball journal MudvilleMagazine.com and has covered baseball for years. He grew up in Michigan and now lives in St. Louis Park, Minnesota. The End of Baseball is his first novel.

Peter Schilling's short play Who's on Steroids (written with Judd Spicer) is part of It's Outta Here!, an original, nine inning show of baseball plays and sketch comedy. The interactive production has been designed to be like an actual game with nine one-act “innings.” It features baseball themes and an intermission (seventh inning stretch) and culminates with a noted baseball comedy sketch. It's Outta Here! will be performed at several theaters in the Twin Cities, March 5th through April 18th. Learn more at www.itsouttahere.net.

------------

From open air to the Dome to blue sky again in 2010, Doug Grow covers a half century of Twins baseball. In We’re Gonna Win, Twins! the longtime sports reporter and columnist chronicles a half century of Twins baseball, season by season. Grow captures the changing economics of baseball and vividly portrays the characters that defined the times--from the “holy cow” of original radio color man Halsey Hall to the sweet moments and struggles of players like Zoilo Versalles, the first Latin MVP, to the 2006 season when the major leagues’ batting title, MVP, and Cy Young Award all went to Minnesota Twins.

"There will always be people who say that baseball is just a game--until they read this book.”--Don Shelby, WCCO-TV

Doug Grow covered the Minnesota Twins as a sports columnist from 1979 to 1987, and as a metro columnist he wrote about the 1987 and 1991 World Series as well as the long debates over stadium funding. He is currently a journalist working for the online publication MinnPost.

Details are here.--David E