The photo above is from one of the highlights of Doug Glanville's career -- the game-winning triple he hit in Miami in Game Three of the 2003 NLCS, scoring Kenny Lofton with what would prove to be the winning run in extra innings.

As it turned out, that was the last hit Glanville had in a Cubs uniform; he describes that scene and quite a bit of the rest of his Cubs career in "The Game From Where I Stand", the book he wrote about his life in baseball that I bought (and had signed by him) at Rangers Ballpark when I was there in May, and just this past week got around to reading. (Incidentally, Glanville seems like a good guy -- chatted with him briefly during the signing.)

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George Castle has written a number of books about the Cubs and baseball history and is currently a contributing columnist for our sister site SB Nation Chicago, among other media sites.

But before all that, he was part of a right-field bleacher group that I joined in 1979, the same group that still exists in the left field corner in section 301.

"When The Game Changed" is a history of baseball covering the years 1969-1979. This would be unremarkable -- it's just a choice of a ten-year period of baseball history, though an eventful one -- except for the author's choice of the format used to write this book.

The subtitle of the book is "An Oral History of Baseball's True Golden Age, 1969-79", and that is its genius and what makes for a compelling narrative. The story of what Castle calls "Baseball's True Golden Age" is told in large part by those who played the game during that era. Castle has interviewed dozens of former major leaguers who played during the 1970s and this history is told in their own words.

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Many times, I have been asked, "Why do you go to every single game?" or "What is it about the bleachers that you like so much?" or "Why do you sit out there when you could get a better seat closer up?"

The answers to these questions are difficult to give, but now I can simply tell people who ask, "Go buy 'Wrigley Regulars', because it answers all these questions better than I possibly can."

Before I tell you about this book, you should know a couple of things. First, Holly Swyers, who is an assistant professor of anthropology at Lake Forest College, is one of the "Wrigley Regulars" and has been a personal friend of mine for more than ten years. She asked me (and other regulars) to read through her drafts to make sure all the facts were correct, and that means you'll find things about me (and about this site) in the book. It's also written not just about baseball and the Wrigley bleachers, but it's designed to be a college-level sociology/anthropology textbook about communities and how they come together.

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Let me preface this by stating: I am not a cook.

Thus, this book wouldn't be very useful for me; I enjoy eating, but my cooking skills are limited to making sandwiches and heating stuff up in the microwave.

However, if you do like cooking, there are plenty of good recipes in the Chicago Cubs Cookbook. It would appear that a lot of the players featured in this book can't cook either, because many of their favorite recipes come from restaurants in the Chicago area. The good news is that those recipes are in the book, so you can make things you like from places like Harry Caray's, Twin Anchors, Hub 51, and D'Agostino's.

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I had intended to write this review this morning, and when I was ready to get started I noticed this FanShot which, among other things, accuses Andy Van Slyke, who played for two big rivals of the Cubs (the Cardinals and Pirates) in the 1980's and 1990's, of just trying to make a buck off the Cubs, or of playing off a "Cubs curse".

Neither is true. I had a chance to meet Van Slyke at a news conference for this book yesterday, and he's not the typical ballplayer-who-hired-a-ghostwriter-for-his-book.

Though he never played for the Cubs, nor does he have any connection with Chicago (he's originally from upstate New York), Van Slyke said he always enjoyed playing in Wrigley Field as a visitor and would have loved to play for the Cubs if he'd had the opportunity. He said he enjoyed the ballpark and the energy that the fans brought to the games. He claimed to have had a .370 lifetime average in Wrigley Field; like a lot of ballplayers, his memory doesn't match the facts, although his numbers in Wrigley were the best he had in any ballpark: .316/.397/.540 with 15 HR in 366 career plate appearances. Van Slyke did say at the news conference that he thinks day games do hurt the Cubs; he says the constant schedule-shifting could be the issue. Since he never played here, his opinion is anecdotal from his experiences as a visiting player. The schedule, for example, didn't stop the Cubs from winning 96 games in 1984 with an all-day game home schedule, or 97 games in 2008.

The book has nothing to do with any "curse", really -- I think it's a rather unfortunate title, probably designed to sell books. But the idea and concept are clearly Van Slyke's. One of the primary characters is named after Van Slyke's high school baseball coach, a man he said had an incredible influence over his future baseball career, and a man who in the book overcomes many obstacles to succeed. The co-author, Rob Rains, is a longtime St. Louis sportswriter who Van Slyke knew from his days as a Cardinal. This novel is clearly a collaboration, though, not simply a ghostwritten book using an athlete's name. After the jump, a review of the book itself.

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I used to call myself "the milestone jinx".

Why? Because for years I kept missing major baseball milestones by one. The first one was Ernie Banks' 499th career HR on May 9, 1970. Had the actual home run Ernie hit in Montreal on June 30, 1969 been correctly ruled a home run instead of having the umpire believe Expos OF Rusty Staub, who said on a rainy, murky night that the ball had gone under the fence and given Ernie a double, the May 9, 1970 homer would have been Ernie's 500th, in front of a nearly packed house on a sunny Saturday. Instead he hit it in front of about 5,000 people on a cold and gloomy Tuesday afternoon.

Then I was in St. Louis to see the Cubs one day before Lou Brock got his 3000th hit off Dennis Lamp.

And I was in Milwaukee on September 8, 1992, specifically hoping to see Robin Yount's 3000th hit. He needed two. He got one and walked in the bottom of the eighth, his last at-bat of the day. The crowd booed.

So on September 16, 1993, when I was traveling and changing planes in Minneapolis, I could have switched my flight back to Chicago and gone to try to see Dave Winfield get his 3000th hit. But he needed two. "No way", I thought, remembering the previous year. So I stayed on my original flight and didn't go to the game. Well, he got it -- in the ninth inning, and scored the tying run.

I was happy to not see Roger Clemens get his 300th win, because it meant the Cubs beat him at Wrigley Field in one of the most memorable games of the 2003 season.

I had planned for a couple months to go to San Francisco in 2004 to see the Cubs play... and that's when I finally got one, Greg Maddux's 300th win against the Giants on August 7, 2004, after witnessing him leaving his previous start at Wrigley six days earlier trailing 2-1; the Cubs rallied to win, but the victory went to Kent Mercker. Incidentally, the first Cub to relieve Maddux in that game was Ryan Dempster; that was Dempster's first appearance in a Cub uniform.

Since then, I have witnessed one more -- Tom Glavine's 300th win against the Cubs on August 5, 2007, a game I'd rather the Cubs had won, and also notable for the serious hamstring injury Alfonso Soriano suffered running the bases. It wasn't until Soriano came back three weeks later that the Cubs made their run to the 2007 NL Central title.

This is a rather long way of introducing Dan Schlossberg's new book, "The 300 Club", the story of all of the 300-game winners, which also asks the question, "Will there be any more?"

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You're a Cubs fan. You look at the title of this book and you say, "I know what the most lopsided one was -- Brock for Broglio".

If you're saying that, at least by the measure Doug Decatur uses (Bill James' Win Shares), you'd be wrong. In Decatur's new book, "Traded: Inside The Most Lopsided Trades In Baseball History", Brock-for-Broglio doesn't rank in the top 300 such trades. It is, however, the one that got the Cardinals the most Win Shares of any deal in St. Louis history. As much as Cubs management has been criticized over the decades for making bad deals, the Cubs rank 12th overall in getting value out of these types of trades -- the Cardinals 24th.

This is just one of the fascinating things I learned from reading this book; there are, in fact, two deals the Cubs have made in the last 30 years that rank in the top 20 of most lopsided deals based on future Win Shares (and one really bad one that ranks in the top ten).

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Continuing today's book review series, I had heard about "Willie Mays: The Life, The Legend" before it was released so I wound up going out to buy a copy not long after it hit the bookstores.

Willie is 79 now -- he's just a few months younger than Cubs Hall of Famer Ernie Banks -- and for those of you who never saw him play (I did, a few times, near the end of his career), you may not realize just how great Willie was. Willie's statistical record doesn't even begin to tell the story, which is well laid out in this biography (the first "authorized" bio of Mays; he cooperated with the author and gave many interviews for it).

The 660 HR that Willie hit could have been more -- he spent two years in the Army after his Rookie of the Year season in 1951. It can be argued, since he hit 41 and 51 homers the two years after his return, that he might have hit somewhere around 80 in the two years he missed -- which would have had him, not Hank Aaron, as the first to surpass Babe Ruth.

Mays, writes James Hirsch, had that kind of rock star aura, the aura that Ruth had, in his early years. It didn't start out that way -- recalled in May 1951 after hitting .477/.524/.799 (yes, a 1.323 OPS, that's not a misprint) in 164 plate appearances for the Giants' top farm club at Minneapolis, Mays couldn't buy a hit for his first couple of weeks in the major leagues. Depressed and thinking he was a failure, guess who helped him? That's right, his manager, Leo Durocher -- who stuck with him and became a father figure to him.

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