Alex Irvine is a writer who lives in South Portland. His latest book, The Comic History of Baseball looks at the American game from start to present day through illustrations. He covers details of the game you may not have heard of, like the great disco fire during a Tigers game when creates of disco albums were blown up in center field resulting in the delay of game due to a gaping hole in the field.
He looks into the dark secrets of the game’s history, revealing all its ugly warts and how it has evolved. The characters that make the game so exciting, like Yogi Berra and Ted Williams among so many others. It is a deep display of a game played continuously for over a century, and the book weaves it into the fabric of American life. It even has a drawing of Walt Whitman with a beer helmet.