.. baseball season is upon us. It’s not even ten degrees here and, with two feet of snow on the ground, I don’t think I’ll be shelving my skis anytime soon, but nonetheless, it’s definitely baseball season. The shadow of the new Minnesota Twins ballpark looms just beyond the view from my office window, ready, despite common sense, to bring outdoor major league baseball back to Minnesota. In Florida and Arizona, pitchers and catcher have been in spring training for a week, and now the position players are reporting. A certain aging shortstop from near my hometown and young catcher from my current city are both in need of new contracts. If all that isn’t enough to make you crave peanuts and crackerjacks, then I have this for you:
Dino-Baseball is the third installment in Lisa Wheeler and Barry Gott’s dino-sports franchise, and, though I’m not really impartial, I think it’s hilarious.
When I was working with Barry on spec’ing out the illustrations, I had a lot of fun looking at various YouTube highlights so that we could make sure die-hard baseball geeks would recognize a few iconic moments and gestures. As much as I wanted to, we didn’t have enough space for a detailed illustration of the infield fly rule (really, you can’t learn it early enough), but there’s a lot of good baseball stuff here. For example, the raptor shortstop ought to bear some resemblance to a certain SS from Kalamazoo, Michigan. The managerial freak-out owes a lot to the best manager tantrum ever captured on film. And finally, anyone who’s ever worshipped in the pews of the cathedral at 1060 West Addison ought to recognize this scene:
(Free copy of the book to the first commenter to explain what’s going on here and why it’s heartbreaking.)
-Andrew Karre
Bob Raczka
Poor Steve Bartman. One of the biggest Cub fans ever, he'll forever be remembered as the guy who cost the Cubs a trip to the World Series because he caught a foul ball that MIGHT have been caught by Moises Alou, the Cubs left fielder. Never mind the fact that the next batter hit a potential double play grounder to shortstop Alex Gonzalez, who booted it and…well, you get the idea. Not that I'm a long-suffering Cub fan or anything.