Updates regarding my current project
Building the Brewers: Bud Selig and the Return of Major League Baseball to Milwaukee was published by McFarland & Company on October 31, 2019. Readers of the book will discover: The owners, teams, and ballparks behind decades of minor league baseball in Milwaukee and Seattle The rise and fall of the Milwaukee Braves, leading to…
The last couple weeks have been crazy for me – quite surreal, to put it mildly. First, Clayton Trutor from Down the Drive on SB Nation contacted me about the Brewers book. We had a great conversation over topics ranging from the one thing I’d like readers to take away from the book to my…
When I submitted my book proposal to McFarland, one of the items was an Abstract. It’s a fancy way to say outline/descriptive table of contents. My original Abstract had around 14 chapters and a larger scope for the book. I wrapped up the book in 2004 when Bud Selig’s family sold the team to Mark…
If there’s one thing I can’t stress on this blog enough, it’s how fortunate I feel to have made some connections with ex-ballplayers in the past two years. Not everyone wants to talk, and some say the number of teams and games combined with the passage of time make their memories not so reliable. I…
When I first started thinking I’d like to write a book about the Milwaukee Brewers franchise moving from Seattle in 1970, I kept coming back to a simple question: Who were the players, coaches, executives, and stadium workers? Not just their names, but who were they personally and what did they experience when the Brewers…
Pitcher Bob Humphreys‘ input was extremely important as I started doing research for my Milwaukee Brewers historical book, so I decided to create a full-length profile for him right here on the blog. Humphreys was born in Covington, Virginia on August 18, 1935. He loved baseball and basketball, playing both sports in high school and Hampden-Sydney…
As I started doing research for my Milwaukee Brewers book, I was grateful that Lew Krausse from the original 1970 team took the time to answer some questions about his career. Lew Krausse was born on April 25, 1943 in Media, Pennsylvania. His father Lew Sr. was a baseball pitcher and that certainly influenced the…
The baseball definition for a “Cup of Coffee” is a short time spent by a minor leaguer at the major league level. One way a player can get a cup of coffee is via the September call-up when teams are allowed to expand their rosters from 25 players to 40. Many players joining teams during…
Left-handed pitcher John Morris was born on August 23, 1941 in Lewes, Delaware. He played baseball as he grew up and was signed by the Philadelphia Phillies shortly after high school, in 1960 as an amateur free agent. Morris spent the next few years toiling away in the Phillies minor league system, and made his…
In this post I’d like to share with you some background on how I came to write my Milwaukee Brewers historical book and narrow the scope of what it’s about. I’ll also give some details about my writing process and how doing what I do helped me finish the first draft in a little over…
Chris Zantow 