Scott S. Parker
By trade, I am an editor/colorist in the motion picture industry and worked so many hours that it was impossible to put this book together. Until now!
I’m looking forward to sharing my lifelong dream of creating this series of books for the fellow fan that, to date, no one else has ever done before.
The brand is "Baseball's Unlikely." Unlikely tells you most of what you need to know about the brand and what to expect. The official title is "Baseball's Unlikely: A Constant." So constant that I have two full books of these "unlikely" events totaling 600 uniquely-told stories through the eyes of a fan... ME! The first book is GAME 1 with the second book predictably being tagged as GAME 2. It took nearly four decades of collecting these stories as well as taking 99.99% of the pictures taken at the 37 Major League ballparks I have been to.
Being a creative guy since birth, the book does not contain chapters. The "chapters" instead mimic the game. The first "chapter" is Spring Training which is how every new season of baseball begins. It covers the more known historic moments before embarking into the game.
The next "chapter" is Pre-Game Warmup that gives historic insights into the technologies that bring the games into our homes from the ballparks many miles away.
Instead of a Glossary, there is "The Scorecard," which is something fans would purchase at a game to keep score in. This area is reserved for acronyms and words that the casual fan may or may not know about before reading the stories.
PLAY BALL! It's now time to read the stories with the first "chapter" using a line score, which is basically what you would see on the scoreboard that shows the results of each half-inning as the game progresses. That being said, the first "chapter" is aptly named "Top of the 1st Inning" and moves through the book in game-fashion until we finish the "Top of the 7th Inning" and move onto a very different section of the book to celebrate with the "7th-Inning Stretch." This includes some history and very entertaining non-game moments. We resume in the "Bottom of the 7th Inning" and proceed through the "Bottom of the 9th Inning" and force "Extra Innings" which are stories that are not Major League baseball for the most part, but are certainly all baseball.
The following chapter opens the "Postseason" and features stories that only happened in the postseason and then we conclude with "The Final Out," which is a dedication to Japanese two-way superstar Shohei Ohtani. Pages and pages of bullet points of things in the game that only he has accomplished.
Each story has a witty title that pays itself off somewhere in the story, but usually at the conclusion. One of the reviews on Amazon actually pointed this out, so I am proud the witty titles resonated. That was probably harder than writing the book! LOL
It's a very unique and fun reading experience. I will be embarking on GAME 3 soon enough.
Sincerely,
Scott S. Parker
