The Pecan Park Eagle

Hello, everybody! It’s good being back here on the blog site after an absence of about a week. The publication deadline took me away for awhile had everything to do with a project very dear to my heart. Allow me to explain.

About two weeks ago, former Houston Astro slugger Jimmy Wynn and I learned that the book he and I had been working on about his baseball and personal life story had been picked up for publication by McFarland Company, the largest publisher of baseball biographies in the country. The good news simply left me with some last minute manuscript editorial barbering and detail work to perform that took priority over all other projects in the short term. That work wrapped up yesterday when I tromped on out through the snow and FedExed all our submisson materials to the publisher. What a great sense of relief that turned out to be.

The working book title is identical to the title of this blog article, but could change between now and our release date. We missed the McFarland dance card for a spring list release, but “The Toy Cannon” will be available for purchase through bookstores and Internet sites like Amazon.Com some time between July and December 2010. We’re hoping for a publication near the 201o All Star Game.

All I can tell you for now is that working with Jimmy Wynn on his life story turned out to be the labor joy of my life. We were already friends, but this project simply drew us closer. The guy was an amazing ballplayer, alright, but he’s an even more incredible human being. Jimmy doesn’t allow an ounce of ego fat to get in the way of any life lesson he’s needed to learn for the sake of his own survival and spiritual growth. And it will all be right there on the approximate 300 pages of this book to soon be.

Jimmy and I did the book with him telling his story in the first person over numerous hours of taped interview sessions. The story begins in the snow of his Cincinnati childhood and it moves all the way through his sometimes misadventurous big league playing days and finally forward to this incredible moment today in his late-in-life second career as an Astros community services representative and blossoming FOX Network baseball television analyst.

Along the way, Jimmy doesn’t play dodgeball with the consequences that arose from certain personal experiences, nor does he miss the wisdom that only comes strongly from enrollment time in the school of hard knocks. Those lessons carried forward as the invisible binding of  this work. To put it in plain and simple terms:  This book is not just about the yearly stats of “The Toy Cannon;” it is eventually and inevitably about the soaring wisdom and soul of a man named Jimmy Wynn.

As we get closer to knowing the actual release date of the book, I will keep you informed. In the very sweet and lovely meanwhile, I have to say that it’s good to be back in the land of The Pecan Park Eagle. I’ll try not to spam you too much, but I won’t make any promises.

Have a nice weekend – and try not to eat too much as you’re watching all the conference championship NCAA college football games that are unfolding before our sports-weary eyes this very cold Saturday!

Tags: ATLANTA BRAVES, Baseball, History, Houston Astros, Jimmy Wynn, Los Angeles Dodgers, Milwaukee Brewers, New York Yankees

This entry was posted on December 5, 2009 at 3:27 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.