Sports Fact and Book Rec of the Day 12/24/2007

12/24/1967:
Jim Lonborg of the Boston Red Sox suffers a torn knee ligament while skiing near San Francisco. After going 22-9 with a league-leading 246 strikeouts and a 3.16 ERA for the "Impossible Dream" Red Sox last season, Lonborg will be plagued by arm trouble the rest of his career. His fastball will disappear and he'll become a finesse pitcher, going only 6-10 and 7-11 the next two years before a rehab stretch in the minors and subsequent trades to Milwaukee and Philadelphia. After his playing days, he'll fall back on his Stanford education and become a dentist.

Birthdays:
Bill Dudley b. 1921
Mel Triplett b. 1931
Paul Pressey b. 1958
Winston Moss b. 1965
Kevin Millwood b. 1974

INVESTIGATIVE NONFICTION

Oscar Wilde once wrote that “though one could dine in New York, one could not dwell there.” Steven Gaines proves him right. His exposé of real estate follies in Manhattan is like a bag of potato chips—you can’t stop until you’ve gobbled up the whole thing. Gaines pulls back the curtain on the private lives of the wealthiest people in the most heated and exclusive property market on earth. Doyennes, diplomats, divorcées, brokers, businessmen, and boldface names—The Sky’s the Limit is the perfect follow-up to Gaines’s New York Times bestseller on the Hamptons, Philistines at the Hedgerow (Back Bay Books, 1999).

THE SKY’S THE LIMIT: PASSION AND PROPERTY IN MANHATTAN, by Steven Gaines (Little, Brown, 2005)