I’ve been working on a Yankee Stadium book

Along with trying to become a more prolific blogger over the last several months, I’ve also been in the middle of another project that has consumed just about every available bit of time in the evenings and on weekends since about mid-June.

The book department here at F + W Media asked me to author a book, Legendary Yankee Stadium: Memories and Memorabilia From the House That Ruth Built. This was not my first book – I authored the Alan Rosen biography True Mint in 1994 – but it was the first done through the traditional collaboration with our book department. Much different than the virtually solo affair of 14 years ago (solo except for dozens of hours of interviews with Rosen).

And while the soon-to-be-demolished Stadium has been the subject of a number of books, ours will hopefully still attract a good deal of attention because we’ve gone at it from a slightly different direction.

Legendary Yankee Stadium is going to showcase many of the remarkable artists and photographers that our Sports Collectors Digest readers have come to know over the years, plus we’ll obviously also have a dramatic emphasis on including images of memorabilia from many of the great auction houses that have graced those same SCD pages.

(Mantle artwork by Ron Stark; www.ronstarkstudios.com)

For my part, I spent the summer researching online and poring over two decades worth of SCD’s in assembling profiles of some of the Yankee legends that any Bronx Bomber fan would come to expect. Rather than recount the results of World Series contests or All-Star Games, we’ve approached it instead as an opportunity to look at the heroic names from Yankee history, with an a bit of an anthropological bent by unearthing (figuratively speaking) some of the artifacts that were so much a part of their careers.

With a focus on Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, Mantle, Berra, Ford, Reggie, Thurman, Mattingly, Jeter and A-Rod, plus hundreds of photos of the Stadium (old and new) and our own unique perspective (and photos) of Barry Halper and his acclaimed collection, we’re hoping to provide a look at all of this that defies easy categorization.

Much of my end of the undertaking is completed, though we had hoped that a bit more information about Stadium demolition plans might have been available at this point. The book is already in the design phase and is slated for release next spring.