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The unusual part of writing books is selling them, talking about them, encouraging folks to sit down and check ‘em out. Or come and meet the author!

On Saturday afternoon from 2 p.m to 4 p.m., I’ll be sitting at Books A Million behind a display of my pair of baseball books — “Diamond Duels,” my new one and “Last Time Out” my book from 2022 — and when I stopped in Books A Million a couple weeks ago, not only did they have the display already up, Tara Kirkland wanted me to do a video.

No script. No makeup man. No soundcheck. No dialogue coach. No Take Two.

How’d I do? Her only instruction, “Be concise.” So I was. Or tried to be. Will somebody hire me to do commercials? Probably not.

ON THE BOOKS: “Diamond Duels” I think I can say this, having read as many baseball books as I have — there’s no book quite like it! We all know the cast: Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Pete Rose, Ted Williams, Whitey Ford, Joe DiMaggio, Wade Boggs, Rod Carew, Lefty Grove, George Brett, Sandy Koufax…

What you don’t know — and neither did I until I did the research — are the specific details of how these players did against one another. We knew Hall of Famer Stan Musial was one of the greatest players in St. Louis Cardinal history. But did we know that in his 20-year career, he came up to bat against the Milwaukee Braves’ Hall of Famer Warren Spahn 356 times? That’s almost an entire baseball season of at bats against a single pitcher!

Did we know that former Cubs’ great Sammy Sosa hit the most three-run homers in baseball history? Or that former Cardinal great Albert Pujols hit the most first-inning home runs? Or that Red Sox ace Pedro Martinez allowed just nine home runs in 1999?

And there’s so much more; Why did Yankee Hall of Famer Whitey Ford have 73 lifetime starts against the Chicago White Sox yet only 42 against arch-rival Boston? Or that Musial (.342) and Hank Aaron (.362) did hit Sandy Koufax but Willie Stargell (.083) and Rico Carty (.000) couldn’t. Or that Harry Heilmann got seven hits in an end-of-the-season doubleheader to win a fourth batting title? Six hits in a DH two years earlier! Or that a lefty named Frank DiPino held Tony Gwynn to an .050 average?

If you love baseball, especially the way it used to be played, you’ll love the book. Call that an author’s guarantee. I think it’s a really fun read.

LAST TIME OUT: This is the updated version of the original book I did in 2005 with 43 chapters on the MLB farewell’s of the game’s all-time greats AND a closing chapter about my son’s first MLB game for the St. Louis Cardinals.

Chapter 44: John’s first MLB hit!

The first version of “Last Time Out” included the MLB farewells of 25 of the game’s all-time greats. My publisher suggested in 2021 that I ought to update the book to include recent retirees like Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera, David Ortiz, Chipper Jones as well as other players who were still active during the first edition — Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Tony Gwynn, Tom Seaver, Mike Schmidt and some I missed: Roger Maris, Tony Conigliaro, Nolan Ryan…

It was fascinating to see how so many of these baseball giants, players that were almost always the very best player on the field, got no special breaks from the Baseball Gods in their farewells. My original idea was to find out if anybody BESIDES Ted Williams walked away from the game with a final at-bat home run? And we found out that some did, including Tallahassee’s own David Ross, but most of the others — Ian Kinsler, Nyjer Morgan, Jim Edmunds, Albert Belle, Joe Rudi, Tony Kubek, Dan Uggla — were good players but not Hall of Famers. The only other HOF guy who homered in his last at bat was catcher Mickey Cochrane, homering off Yankee Bump Hadley but was beaned in his next at bat and ultimately had to retire because of it.

Closing the book with John’s first MLB game occurred to me about halfway through the updated edition. All the stories were about last games, I thought, why not close the book with his MLB debut? I called my editor up in Connecticut and he loved the idea. So Dad got to write about his son’s first game in a major-league uniform. Cool.

We’ll have plenty of both books at Books A Million! Hope to see you Saturday!

Two hard-core baseball guys; one plays, one writes about it. And him.