Some good news for sports museums, which were challenged for visitors and revenues even before the recession: The Philadelphia Athletics Historical Society has been saved from likely closure.

The small museum devoted to a largely unsuccessful team that left that town nearly 60 years ago moved into trophy company space as part of the reconstituted Philadelphia Sports Hall of Fame at the end of April.

After operating since 1998 in suburban Hatboro, the A’s museum fell upon hard financial times (and some claim mismanagement), and earlier this year appeared to be on the brink of shutting down.

Much of the musuem’s memorabilia — at least what wasn’t auctioned to prepare for the move – is devoted to the glory years of the A’s in Philadelphia, from 1929 to 1931, when they won two World Series and rivaled the best team the game had to offer, Babe Ruth’s “Murderer’s Row” New York Yankees.

(The essential magazine read is William Nack’s Sports Illustrated cover story in 1996; the most recent book treatment is Brett Topel’s 2011 self-published title, “Simply the Best.”)

Connie Mack’s best teams featured eventual Hall of Famers Jimmie Foxx, Lefty Grove, Al Simmons and Mickey Cochrane, all of whom he economically acquired to build a powerhouse club. But days after the A’s won the World Series over the Cubs, the stock market crashed, and the Depression took a toll at baseball ticket booths. Notororiously parsimonious by nature, Mack had sold the cornerstone pieces of his club over the next three years.

The Philadelphia A’s not only never reached another World Series, they were among the consistently worst teams in baseball before moving to Kansas City in 1954. Mack died a year later.

But the memories — and the stories — resonate deeply with those who recall them, or who wish to preserve them for future generations. Lou Brissie, one of Mack’s late-era journeyman pitchers (and the subject of a 2009 book by Ira Berkow, “The Corporal Was a Pitcher”), told a suburban Philadelphia newspaper last month that Mack wrote to him and other baseball-playing veterans on World II duty, offering to give him a chance in the game after he suffered serious wounds in Italy.

Brissie, who’s now 88, got his chance while wearing a leg brace, pitching for the A’s from 1947 to 1950, and he still maintains ties to the historical society.

Now the last official connection to the Philadelphia A’s has moved back into town, closer to the now-demolished Shibe Park (later Connie Mack Stadium) where the team played. I’ve always felt being close to hallowed ground makes the work of preservation easier, and I’m hoping this is the case with the relocated A’s shrine.

It’s been 20 years since University of Pennsylvania historian Bruce Kuklick published “To Every Thing a Season,” his history of Shibe Park and its impact on a community of north Philadelphia that’s as much an afterthought to locals as the A’s.

In a 2011 interview with Philly Sports History, as the Phillies were three years removed from a World Series title, Kuklick couldn’t help but place that achievement in a larger historical perspective:

Finally somebody says, “Sure the Phillies are great. Sure Chase Utley is great. But is he the greatest 2nd baseman that’s ever played here? Absolutely not. He doesn’t even come close.” People don’t realize that the 1929, 1930, and 1931 A’s are better than even this team today, which I think is the best team this franchise has had.

Here are parts two and three of the Kuklick interview. A snippet:

That ballpark is right in the middle of the city. And you are in the middle of an urban area. And you walk into this park, and it’s dark and there’s concrete around, and then you come up to one of the entrances to the field, and you see this green diamond. There’s just something there that’s just incredible.

And another one:

My wife and I went on vacation one time to Club Med, and we were talking to some people, and we said, “Where are you from?” and this guy said “Wrigleyville.” He didn’t say Chicago. And we knew exactly where he was talking about. That ballpark is known all over the Western World. And every once in a while, I think, “Gee if they had only had the foresight.” But basically that area went through a really terrible period. It’s now come up considerably on its own. It’s a lot less nasty and dangerous than it was.

Robert Birnbaum surveys newly-released baseball books at The Daily Beast – many of them in an historical vein, of course — and as usual I came across something unanticipated and refreshingly welcome.

In addition to Stuart Banner’s history of the antitrust exemption, Dennis D’Agostino’s salute to legendary baseball writers and Robert Weintraub’s examination of the immediate post-World War II game comes this gem from Edward Achorn: “The Summer of Beer and Whiskey.”

If that doesn’t grab your attention, the subtitle ought to stoke your thirst (pun intended): “How Brewers, Barkeeps, Rowdies, Immigrants and a Wild Pennant Fight Made Baseball America’s Game.”

It’s the story of how Chris Von der Ahe, a German-born saloon owner, founded the St. Louis Browns in 1883 — and later the American Association, which became the American League — as a way to sell more beer. Achorn, the editorial page editor of The Providence Journal, writes that Von der Ahe knew practically nothing about baseball. But his suds-selling scheme opened the game up to everyday working people, and in particular immigrants like himself.

Unlike the National League, which didn’t play on Sunday and didn’t sell alcoholic beverages at the ballpark, Von der Ahe did both, selling tickets for 25 cents for any and all comers to enjoy booze and ball on the Lord’s Day. From an excerpt on the NPR website:

With cheap tickets, Sunday ball, and beer, he grabbed control of the dying game in St. Louis and, in a turnaround at least as improbable and dramatic as the one engineered by the 2011 Cardinals, infused it with new life and popularity—while perhaps saving all of professional baseball in the bargain. Von der Ahe also played a role in founding a flamboyant new major league, whose influence echoes loudly through Major League Baseball to this day.

(Achorn, author of several baseball history titles, including Twitter star Old Hoss Radbourn, is interviewed by NPR’s Jacki Lyden here.)

The title of the book comes from how National League snobs regarded the maverick league, calling it the “beer and whiskey circuit.” But Von der Ahe’s entrepreneurial ruse changed the game during a time when the fate of what’s become the national pastime wasn’t always certain.

In addition to Birnbaum’s survey is a notable “project” by Los Angeles Daily News columnist Tom Hoffarth, who recently embarked on a review of 30 baseball books in 30 days — it’s become an annual thing. Sports media writer Ed Sherman did this Q & A with Hoffarth last month:

I’m also huge on history-related books, but only if they’re written well, not like a college dissertation but with a writer’s flare to insert color and not just research. This year, another book by Robert Weintraub nails it with “The Victory Season.” The opposite is true with a bio on “Smoky Joe Wood.”

Hoffarth also references baseball book maven Ron Kaplan, proprietor of Ron Kaplan’s Baseball Bookshelf and author of  the recently released “501 Books Baseball Fans Must Read Before They Die.”

The book is organized into 15 chapters, detailing books according to categories, such as biography and memoir, the minor leagues and for young readers.

The meter’s running, folks. I say it’s time to get cracking with some of those.

I love baseball.

I love poetry.

But I hate baseball poetry. Or, more precisely, I absolutely despise the pretentiousness of baseball poets, no time more than the present, with another season soon upon us and the exhortations of spring and splendor are being uttered.

There is nothing subtle about how I feel, and it hurts me to confess that my favorite poet and the forever bard of America, Walt Whitman, is to blame for all this.

The Poetry Foundation, which sponsors The Writers Almanac that Garrison Keillor narrates daily on NPR, features on its website an essay entitled “Baseball and Verse, from Tinker to Evers to Big Papi: Grand slam poetry: our twin national pastimes,” which makes me want to hurl.

And not from the pitcher’s mound.

Levi Stahl enthusiastically reminds us that it was Whitman who “fell for baseball in its first heyday, saying that it had ‘the snap, go, fling of the American atmosphere.’ ”

And it descends from there in treacly fashion, with doses of Longfellow, Frost, Japanese haiku and even Marianne Moore tossing out a first pitch.

Take me out to that ballgame. Not.

Stahl includes the dreadful Donald Hall poem, “The Baseball Players,” and concludes that “baseball’s very rhythms are those of poetry, acknowledging that if everything can change in a moment, then attention to those moments is an essential duty.”

Gag me.

Stahl is channeling the same Donald Hall, once an American poet laureate, who says on Ken Burns’ overwrought film on the same subject that “baseball, because of its continuity over the space of America and the time of America, is a place where memory gathers.”

Enough. Please. Enough. Mudville is weeping torrential rains. Casey is going go all Carlos Zambrano and take his bat and smash all this.

I wrote yesterday of baseball and memory through prose, and specifically the prose of literary stylists and baseball historians Roger Kahn and Roger Angell.

As I think about why my revulsion for baseball poetry is so deep, I have no rational protest to offer except this: I don’t think the poetic form is suited to reflect the full humanity of baseball.

It seems that our best versers are capable only of sentimental, pastoral ramblings. Oh sure, they write about the failure inherent in the sport — the batting averages, the losses, the errors — but rarely do they plumb deep into the game’s heart of darkness. This is as close as Gail Mazur comes in “Baseball,” a not-so-surprising conclusion to a not-so-surprisingly named poem:

the question of what makes a man
slump when his form, his eye,
his power aren’t to blame, this isn’t
like the bad luck that hounds us,
and his frustration in the games
not like our deep rage
for disappointing ourselves

Gee, thanks Gail. This has always kept me up at night, but now you’ve eased my concerns.

I apologize to those who get into baseball poetry for my crankiness here. Baseball brings out the worst in some of our best poets, who spit out the most overwrought metaphors and the falsest of pieties.

They are more hacktastic than even the hackiest deadline hacks who ever wrote for a newspaper.

It’s what you get if Frank Merriwell could have gotten the hang of rhyming couplets. Abstract, one-dimensional characterizations of a game whose more essential meanings are left for artists in other forms to flesh out.

If you disagree with me, then perhaps you will be comforted by this collection of baseball poems, also lovingly compiled by The Poetry Foundation.

I’ve read more than I care to, but in my next post comes the antidote, thankfully in prose. Stay tuned.

Before the winter set in, Alex Belth penned this marvelous tribute to his late father and how “his remaining connection to the sport was the two Rogers, Roger Angell and Roger Kahn. They have been linked in my mind ever since.”

The SB Nation Longform article delves deeply into that linkage, what “The Old Man” thought of the writers and their works, and Belth’s more recent encounters with both Rogers after his father’s death.

Afterward, as he held his father’s copy of “The Boys of Summer,” the son admitted it was “about a father and son connecting through baseball:”

I imagined Dad reading the book when it was published forty years ago. He was married to a beautiful woman and his career in TV was flourishing, his fantasies being realized. I understood how he could have seen himself in Kahn. But he didn’t have Kahn’s drive or professional discipline. Yet if the Old Man never achieved the professional success he craved, if sobriety was not the perfect tool to repair his own spiritual wreckage, and if he wasn’t always the father I needed him to be, he was not a failure. He taught me about generosity and compassion, to value hard work and effort, and above all, how to appreciate a good story.

It was the difference, in the end, between what we want to be and who we are.

With the winter still doggedly hanging around as March and spring training have arrived, I’ve read over this story several times, trying to forge another connection that has eluded my grasp. Perhaps the timing isn’t anything more than coincidental, but I’ve always found the baseball off-season the perfect time to plumb the deeper chords of memory.

After all, this is a sport that, at least in America, is shrouded by its past like no other. The familial connections that Belth so eloquently explores are a strong example of why this is.

I have no such links, given that my father wasn’t a passionate baseball fan. I can’t recall him ever reading much about the game, much less watching or following it.

Not long after my parents were married, and before they started a family, he attended Milwaukee Braves games at County Stadium with my mother’s uncles.

After the Braves followed us to Atlanta, and as I was deeply immersed in my first sporting love, there were a few games we attended together at Atlanta Stadium. I remember wearing my full softball uniform, including stirrups, cap and glove. Only my plastic cleats had to be sacrificed, in the name of practicality, for sneakers.

Soon after the marriage dissolved, like that of Belth’s parents, and the memories of those times are rather short.

But they keep recurring as I proceed in middle age, fighting the urge to traffick in cheap nostalgia. Are memories what we try to revive and understand when we wonder if there’s not much more to look forward to? A devoted baseball fan would say not; there are always new memories waiting to be created. Their meaning, like a fine wine, requires years to distill.

And now I’m sounding like the baseball poets, something I avidly seek to avoid, and the subject of tomorrow’s post. Grapefruit and Cactus League games are underway, and a month of anticipation is counting down. A friend of mine, on Facebook, is posting a “Brave of the day” baseball card, which evokes even more memories. We’re roughly the same age, so we share the same timeline that predates the Braves’ spectacular success of the 1990s.

He remembers, as I do, “crowds” of 2,000 or so at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium (the name change didn’t do much except placate petty politicians), and being implored by Milo Hamilton to show support for a team 35 games out of first place.

That scolding always rubbed me the wrong way, and he thankfully got out of town and off local airwaves. But it never soured me on the obsession of following an utterly hopeless team, or feeling devastated when the rare fat years (I’m especially thinking 1982 here) were followed by so many more lean ones.

My friend just wants the baseball season to hurry up and get here, and I have to admit I’ve been eager for it to return. After a number of years of feigning only idle interest stemming from the 1994 strike, I’ve come to realize that it’s such a foolish thing, to “boycott” something you love so much. You’re stunting your own understanding of the memories that have shaped you, and not just as a baseball fan.

I’ve truly enjoyed the last few summers of turning on a game and letting it take me back, way back. Steadily, this has helped me catch up to what the game has meant to me on a deeper level than who won, who lost, and what the standings look like today.

It’s that connection that gets switched on when March turns to April, and as the bitter cold of winter melts into an early spring.

Fascinating read from Jeff Passan about how new MLB free agency rules designed to prevent Scott Boras from dominating the hot stove season have had a major impact well before the month began:

The new draft format included fixed bonus pools for teams based on the previous year’s record; the worst teams would get the most money. A separate rule transformed compensation for free agents who left. Teams would have to offer a player a one-year deal worth the average of the highest-paid 125 players in the major leagues the previous season – about $13.3 million this year. If another team chose to sign one of those players, it would forfeit its first-round draft choice and the bonus-pool money that came with it – unless it was a top 10 pick, in which case it would lose its second-rounder and the accompanying bonus value.

The resulting concoction was poisonous to the nine players offered the one-year tender. David Ortiz and Hiroki Kuroda re-signed with the Red Sox and Yankees. Josh Hamilton and B.J. Upton, the jewels of the class, went to the Angels and Braves, who forfeited the Nos. 22 and 28 picks, respectively. Nick Swisher’s market collapsed before he found a four-year, $56 million deal from Cleveland, which didn’t lose its first-round pick because it’s No. 5 overall.

In the old draft system, even when teams lost their first-round picks for free agents, they could overspend in later rounds to pluck players who slipped because of signability concerns. The pool system limits flexibility and creativity, leaving teams even more reticent to plunge into an already-inflated free-agent market when it’s tied to the draft.

Keep in mind that these new rules are in accordance with the players union, which gets six additional players a year eligible for early arbitration:

Boras’ involvement in three-quarters of the cases also may be a factor in the league’s slow response. Teams have handed out more than $750 million to Boras clients in January alone, from Barry Bonds in 2002 to Carlos Beltran in 2005 to J.D. Drew in 2007. In 2010 he got Matt Holliday $120 million, in 2011 Adrian Beltre $90 million and in 2012 Prince Fielder $214 million.

While it’s tough to argue Bourn, Lohse and Soriano are in any of those players’ classes, the distinct lack of interest – especially from the teams with pick Nos. 11-20 – makes his job that much harder. Should Boras extract multiyear contracts with new teams for any of them, it would be among his greatest victories as an agent.

My former AJC colleague Mike Tierney talks to Christie Moore Freel, who was taken aback by news of her former husband’s death in spite the demons she knew he had fought for years:

I know a lot of people say they weren’t shocked by it, but I really was. I really thought, at some point, the answer to all of this would come along for him. It just never did.

Roberto Clemente was lost to the world trying to help others in need.

Remembrances from ESPN Deportes, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, USA Today, Craig Calcaterra.

Rob Neyer solicited reader nominations for the worst baseball writing of 2012 and, unsurprisingly, Mitch Albom’s name came up about his anti-statistical diatribe on Miguel Cabrera and the MVP.

Unlike a certain column in the past, Albom wasn’t making anything up in claiming “the eyes have it.” But it was fanciful in another way, popping off a couple of days after native Michigander and childhood Tigers fan Nate Silver, the king of the stats geeks, made the numbers-based case for Mike Trout.

Writes Neyer:

“The only thing that’s missing is the proverbial blogger in his proverbial mother’s proverbial basement. Actually, that might have been in there. I couldn’t stand to go back and read the damned thing again. No, Mitch Albom is not a baseball writer. At this point he’s not really a sports writer. But as long as reputable news organizations are willing to publish this sort of drivel, his work is fair game.”

This is a lot more charitable than other accounts, including Josh Levin, Ty Duffy, and most notoriously, Drew Magary.

Mark Haller of the Arizona Republic claims he’s “choosing to speak loudly by using silence” in declining to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot. But he has plenty more to say about why he’s doing what he’s (not) doing:

“The day of reckoning I’ve been dreading for five years — ever since Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens finally left the playing field and started the countdown to Hall of Fame eligibility — has arrived.

“With no guidance from either the Hall of Fame or Major League Baseball, no clarity from the courts or Congress, and no soul-baring from the players themselves, it’s up to the 600 or so Hall of Fame voters to be judge and jury for these symbols of baseball’s steroids era.

“The questions are unprecedented. Who was dirty? Who was clean? Who got an advantage from using performance-enhancing drugs and who didn’t?

“In the end, all we have is a ton of circumstantial evidence, a general acknowledgment that it was a dirty time in baseball for a lot of players, but no checklist telling us who juiced and who was clean.

“Hall voters are left with three options:

“Vote based on players’ career records and shelve the PED debate.

“Selectively vote based on whatever suspicions one might have.

“Vote for no one.”

Haller’s colleague Paola Boivin simplistically calls 2012 “the year of the cheater” and claims we are so “scarred” by the sports deceit all around us that “we don’t know who to trust anymore.”

My objections to the War on Steroids are not subtle, nor are they conflicted, as I have written here and here and here.

The caveat has always been that I’m more concerned about the public unaccountability of the taxpayer-funded USADA than athletes who are presumed guilty merely by being charged with doping. Including Lance Armstrong.

But expressing a desire to decriminalize the use of anabolic steroids and halt the federal government’s investigative and prosecutorial powers in this area isn’t the same as cheering on athletes who dope.

And here’s where some conflicted feelings emerge. Ballots for the 2013 class of the Baseball Hall of Fame are due by Dec. 31, and a grand conundrum is unfolding over whether Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa and Rafael Palmeiro are fit for Cooperstown.

Their names are all on the current ballot, but it’s unlikely they will get in, at least for now, because of the state of our public discourse on steroids and sports.

A number of other candidates have spoken out against the inclusion of steroids users, namely Barry Larkin and Dale Murphy, who is in his last year on a Hall of Fame ballot.

If I had a vote, both of these gentlemen would be in, especially Murphy, who played on bad teams in my hometown for too many years, which may ultimately cost him a spot in a place where he truly belongs. I do appreciate Larkin’s appeal to respect the “integrity of what the Hall of Fame stands for.”

These are important points to make, and a valuable conversation to have.

But as longtime sports journalist and Hall of Fame voter Ron Rapoport wrote recently, it’s a rather one-sided discussion, given the moralizing habits of his own tribe.

Writing on L.A. Observed over the weekend, Rapoport took the audacious view that all of those stained or dogged by steroids charges who are on the ballot ought to be voted in:

“I believe the steroid generation of players, of which these five players are among the most conspicuously accused, may well have saved baseball. I also believe these players’ greatest achievements will outlast not only their careers, but their lifetimes.

“Those of us who covered baseball during the strike that wiped out the 1994 playoffs and World Series well remember how bitter the players, owners and fans were then, and how dire the outlook for the game’s immediate future seemed. We also remember how the home run battles between Sosa and McGwire wiped away this bitterness in an instant and brought the fans running back to the ballpark in forgiveness and delight. Bonds’ assault on all-time home run records in the seasons that followed was equally transfixing as was Clemens’ age-defying march to 354 victories.”

Sports columnist Mike Lupica wrote a book celebrating the Sosa-McGwire duel, then became a come-to-Jesus anti-steroids scold when “Big Mac” was hauled before some of the same sanctimonious old birds in Congress who once hailed him for his feats.

While steroids have been banned by MLB since 1991, there wasn’t a uniform testing procedure in place until 2003. How can you draw a line across the careers of these individuals in “The Steroids Era” when the headmasters of the game couldn’t be bothered to enforce their own rules?

The moralists like to claim that players ought to observe a code of honor, but in reality few were paying much attention until anti-doping zealots gained enough media traction during the last decade. Former pitcher Tommy House (who caught Hank Aaron’s 715th home run ball in the Braves’ bullpen) is quoted by Rapoport as saying that “enhancements have been around forever.” Concluded Rapoport:

“I wonder where in the game’s lily-white, indentured-servitude, amphetamine-dispensing past, we can find total purity.”

I admit to some serious ambivalence about how I would vote, if I could. But ESPN’s Buster Olney, in assessing the obligations of the voter and claiming “it’s the writers, and the writers alone, who are the bottleneck,” really unlocks the issue for me:

“So the baseball writers ought to get out of the way rather than acting like overzealous crossing guards empowered by their ballots. The writers’ work should always reflect history, not determine legacies; that’s the work of the players, the good and the bad.”

Some of these voters are no more likely to vote for anyone linked to steroids than some on the Veterans Committee would welcome the recently departed Marvin Miller into the fold. That’s more than an omission, but a scandal bigger than anything Barry Bonds may have pumped into his body.