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Local man writes baseball book covering 2003 season with eye on history

By MICHAEL BOYLAN
mboylan@TheCitizenNews.com

The baseball season never really ends. Shortly after the final game of the World Series is played, the season awards are handed out and then the hot stove league heats up keeping everybody warm until spring training. The year round interest in the game is one of the reasons that baseball remains the national pastime. Newnan resident John Shiffert, the Director of University Relations for Clayton College and State University is a big baseball fan and his love of the game has been translated to the page with a book, “Baseball: 1862-2003.”

Shiffert began writing about the connections of baseball’s past and present in Dec. 2002. He started an e-zine that would discuss current situations in baseball and how they tied in with similar situations in the sport’s history. His first topic concerned the possible reinstatement of Pete Rose with another player who had bet on baseball, Ty Cobb. Shiffert began writing weekly columns and his coverage of the entire 2003 season became a book, starting with the story about Rose and Cobb and going to the MVP Awards at the end of the 2003 season.

Shiffert grew up in Philadelphia, Penn. and was raised as a Phillies fan. He recalled going to a game between the Phillies and the Reds in 1957. Shortstop Chico Fernandez fouled a ball into the stands and Shiffert’s father caught it and gave it to him.

“To this day, it is the only foul ball I have ever got at a game,” said Shiffert. He dedicated the book to his father.

Shiffert has always been fascinated by history as well as baseball but it has been over the last 15 years that he has started looking at baseball in a different light. While he doesn’t analyze everything to death, he has started looking at statistics and not just taking anecdotal/”common knowledge” as fact.

For instance, some of the chapters in the book include “Honus Wagner/Alex Rodriguez - the Greatest Shortstop Ever?,” “Isolated Discipline/Rocco Baldelli,” “Late Blooming Aces/Curt Schilling,” “Tacky Uniforms/Marlins Win World Series” and much more. Shiffert found lots of connections as he read about baseball history. Among his favorite reference sites were baseballreference.com, retrosheet.org, which has every box score since the mid-1970s and all scores since 1876, and espn.com, which has info on all current baseball players. Shiffert also leaned heavily on his own library. The bibliography of his book is four pages long and cites up to 70 books.

He is currently working on putting together a book about the 2004 season, which will likely be called, “Baseball: 1791-2004.” He is also hoping to collect baseball anecdotes for an anthology.

If you are interested in picking up a copy of “Baseball: 1862-2003,” it is available at the Clayton College and State University bookstore, Scott’s Bookstore in Newnan, publishamerica.com and amazon.com.