Fred's Book Club: At the Plate.

It's Wednesday, friends, and that means another dose of the Humpback Writers, our Hump Day book feature. Get it? Hump Day, Humpback? No? Me neither. 

Anyway, it's also the day before baseball's Opening Day, and with that we have another baseball book, and another brief tale of Fred from when he had a career. Yes, today we have a book from National Geographic and the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, a children's book that is as American as anything American can be. 

And I couldn't get to Ralph Kiner for an autograph. The local TV crews were all over him. 

America at Bat: Baseball Stuff & Stories came out of a national tour, and the tour came from the love for our nation in the wake of the dastardly attacks of September 11, 2001. The Hall of Fame and its partners decided to put together a tour of sensational baseball memorabilia from the museum, a tour that would launch with an appearance by dozens of Hall of Famers. It began in New York City in March 2002, and traveled as a museum installation for six years, finishing in Boston in September 2008. It was called Baseball As America. 

At the time of the launch I was working for a magazine in midtown, and was one of the only people on staff who was a fan of baseball, or any sport other than backbiting. So when the features editor got an invitation to the launch party at the American Museum of Natural History, she kindly asked if I wanted to go. Did I!

I could not have imagined being in a room with so many baseball superstars at once. Kiner was there, and Hank Aaron, and Warren Spahn, and Bob Feller, and 22 others, and somewhere I had a notebook and press info with everyone's names but that has been lost to time. 

Out of the tour came a commemorative book for adults, but I wasn't given a copy of that. I got the kids' book, written by Paul Rosenthal, with an introduction by Aaron, from which these pages come. It's a great little book, full of amazing baseball pictures, stories, trivia, and photos of objects from the Hall of Fame's museum that were on the tour. Tour items included a replica of Ruth's bat you could pick up, FDR's "green light" letter to Commissioner Landis recommending baseball continue during World War II, and of course ancient equipment, priceless uniforms and cards, and an Andy Warhol silkscreen of Tom Seaver. 

I thought then and think now that it was a nice thing for the Hall of Fame to do, and a reminder that sports could really bring people of all backgrounds together. 

Of course, in recent years, sports, like everything else, is being used to tear us apart instead. Which is why I can be sentimental about this sentimental book -- baseball was a light in a dark hour in New York City in the year after 9/11. I wish Major League Baseball and the other pro sports leagues felt that way now. Instead they seem to hate America as much as our foreign enemies do, and then wonder why Americans are tuning out. But I'll probably be watching some games this year, at least until the newly configured Mets fall prey to injuries and stupidity, as usual.