If you were enough of a baseball fan to watch any of the World Series this year, you might have seen Texas Rangers manager Bruce Bochy walk out to the mound to make a pitching change—and noticed how labored his walking looked. It’s true: As with many former catchers, Bochy can’t move around the way he used to.
Not so long ago, back when Bochy was in California, winning three World Series championships with the San Francisco Giants, we published Bochy’s A Book of Walks, a quirky little back-pocket book Wellstone Books published in 2015 literally offering
Bochy’s descriptions of some of his favorite long, thoughtful walks through North American cities—along with maps.
As one reviewer wrote, “His storytelling is simple yet wonderful. He makes you think about life in a more calm manner that life can be enjoyed without being in a hurry. I would definitely recommend this book to everyone I know.”
The book was a Northern California bestseller at the time—and we think it might make for a fun read even now, given how Bochy came out of seeming retirement to win his fourth World Series ring.
To get to the World Series, Bochy’s Rangers had to get past the Houston Astros, managed by another future Hall of Famer who previously managed the the Giants, Dusty Baker. His book: Kiss the Sky: My Weekend in Monterey for the Greatest Rock Concert Ever was also published in 2015.
It even earned a writeup in The New Yorker: Dusty and Jimi, “For his eighteenth birthday, (Dusty’s) his mother gave him, he writes, ‘one of the great presents a mother could ever give a son: two tickets to the three-day Monterey Pop Festival that weekend, along with twenty bucks and use of the family car.’ The teen-agers slept in the car and agreed on a rule to preserve their athletic futures: ‘No grass!’ The last day, they watched Hendrix set his guitar on fire. "I knew what I was hearing and that was a guy who could give his music a crackle and growl and scream, could detonate it like a stack of dynamite, but do it all in_ the music, in _the groove, true to the integrity of his musical sources,” Baker writes of Hendrix. “And best of all, he was having himself one heck of a great time."
Next Residencies: April 2024
We’re hosting writers this week, but our next available slots are in April 2024. We’ll be on a more limited schedule in 2024, so if you’re a returning writer looking to come get the creative spark back on track with us in 2024, we’d love to hear from you. Write to Sarah@WellstoneRedwoods.org or Steve@WellstoneRedwoods.org
I didn't know about the Bochy book or Dusty's book, but fun to read about both. (Have you tasted Dusty's wine?) In the 60s, even though I lived in LA and was a Dodger fan, I had big posters of Willie Mays and Hendrix facing each other on my bedroom wall. Both of those guys made good noise.