If there’s one thing I’ve learned at college, its that you should always heed titles with more than one colon in them. Why? They have a lot of things to say. Important things. Things you need to hear. Like Tom Stanton’s Ty and the Babe: The Incredible Saga of Baseball’s Fiercest Rivals: A Surprising Friendship and the 1941 Has-Beens Golf Championship. Isn’t that second colon especially captivating?

Stanton’s book follows the fierce rivalry between two baseballs greats, Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb. The legends met early on in their careers when rookie Ruth, “a platter-faced, gray flanneled 20-year-old” went up to pitch against Cobb for the first time. Opposites in every way, the men competed from that day forward for fourteen seasons. Insults and taunts were slung from both sides, and the exchanges almost came to blows on numerous occasions. The book culminates in a charity golf match several years after each had retired, stoking the competitive fires one last time. The press loved it.

Stanton beautifully details the rivalry, and the larger atmosphere of baseball in the time period. He goes beyond the stereotypes - Cobb as a racist, Ruth as a womanizing blockhead - and builds three-dimensional, flawed, and exceptionally talented men. He appeared on The Diane Rehm Show to discuss the project.

Listen to the full interview

Cleveland Indians superstar Jay Alcazar has been accused of his rape, and damned if his manager Howie Traveler is going to leave him high and dry. Before you run to flip on SportsCenter, perhaps you should make a quick stop at the NPR website.

“What! NPR doesn’t cover sports! You’ve gone mad, boy!”

No, you’ve gone mad! NPR recently sat down with sports writer Frank Deford, in whose novel The Entitled, you’ll find Alcazar and Traveler faced with decisions that could end their careers or land them in jail. To complicate things further, Alcazar has been around the bases a few times off the field, too, and when Traveler walks by his player’s hotel room on one such night, he sees that will make him continually question everything he’s put his career on the line for.

And we don’t find out who is right ’til the very end!

When asked why he chose baseball to frame his plot, Deford responded, “the easiest thing to write about and I guess the most fun to write about …. Every day there [are] winners and losers and there’s drama and there’s joy and there’s glamour. And the guys playing it are young, and so lots of times they say all the wrong things.”

True enough. Listen to the interview and read the article here.

Remember that book, Hate Mail from Cheerleaders and Other Adventures in the Life of Reilly, by that Sports Illustrated-columnist Rick Reilly? Remember that? It was a collection of his funniest, wittiest and most touching columns from the course of 9 years occupying the back page of SI. Yeah, that one. Well, now you can see what that guy looks like, because CBS has posted a clip of the interview with Reilly on its Website, in which he discusses some of the columns contained therein and why his book makes a great fathers’ day gift.