Baseball

A new round was added to baseball's qualifying tournament for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, a system that could have given the United States a second chance to get to the Athens Games.This is a significant change in light of the U.S. loss to Mexico in the quarterfinals of the Olympic qualifier in Panama in 2005.

Qualification for the eight-team Olympic baseball competition will now take place in two phases, the International Baseball Federation said Thursday. Also, qualification will now be based on the results over an entire tournament, with single-elimination games no longer part of the format. Games will be played in Taichung at the Intercontinental stadium and in Dou Liou at the stadium. Yes, that Dou Liou in Yunlin county, south of Changhua county.

've been collecting children's picture books for over 25 years and it's been a long time since I've had a book surprise and delight me as much as this title. The creativity with which Christopher Bing has blended his own terrific etched illustrations with the memorabilia and fictional news clippings is highly imaginative and will pull you through the book. In many ways the poem/ballad of "Casey at the Bat" becomes a secondary theme yet it skillfully holds the entrie composition together. After "reading" the book for the first time, I realized I hadn't even read the poem/ballad!! There are many subtle, underlying stories hidden in the pages. The clipping which tells the history behind the racism and eventual segregation of black ballplayers lies next to an illustration where the catcher is clearly African American. This books is a real treat. If you love baseball, children's books, history or just great creative expression through art, this book will give you hours of joy and discovery.

Mr. Christopher Bing has reconceptualized "Casey at the Bat" from being a poem that appeared in the June 3, 1888 edition of the San Francisco Examiner into an imaginary news story with drawings and artifacts in "The Mudville Sunday Monitor" of the same date. In that reframing, the classic poem takes on a greater life and significance for fans of the poem.

Each page in this brief book resembles the yellowed file copies of that old newspaper, with historic artifacts strewn across its pages. You will see tickets to the game, money, confetti, articles of that time, advertisements, a baseball, a baseball card, and the Library of Congress catalog card for "Casey at the Bat." Even the acknowledgments are put into this format.

After you finish oohing and aahing over the great illustrations and reliving your pleasure in the poem, I suggest that you reflect over the famous at-bats that have occurred in real baseball games. Which one is your favorite? For me, none can match Kirk Gibson's hobbling home run to help the Dodgers top the Mets in Shea Stadium in the final game of the National League Championship Series and go onto the World Series. I still get chills thinking about that. Reggie Jackson's third home run in the same World Series game comes close as a thrill.

Since I usually make an annual Spring tradition of reading "Casey" to some classes, I can tell you that this edition by Christopher Bing works very nicely for group read-alouds. However in this setting kids miss out on the many interesting--but smaller--details that Bing has added to each page, such as