Our July NYGPS Meeting has been moved up to June 17, as we are proud to present Bill Madden as our guest speaker. For more than 30 years Bill has covered the Yankees and Major League Baseball for the New York Daily News. The author of several books about the Yankees, Madden is also the 2010 recipient of the Baseball Hall of Fame’s J.G. Taylor Spink Award. Here is his speech at the Hall of Fame
http://m.mlb.com/video/topic/6003532/v10264409/bill-madden-receives-the-2010-jg-taylor-spink-award

Mr. Madden will be discussing his new book 1954, The Year Willie Mays and the First Generation of Black. The book will be available for purchase and autographing. If you already own the book Mr. Madden will gladly sign it as well. Here is the Amazon blurb:

Award-winning, New York Times bestselling author Bill Madden delivers the first major book to fully examine the 1954 baseball season, drawn largely from exclusive recent interviews with the major players themselves, including Mays and Doby as well as New York baseball legends from that era: Yogi Berra and Whitey Ford of the Yankees, Monte Irvin of the Giants, and Carl Erskine of the Dodgers. 1954 transports readers across the baseball landscape of the time—from the spring training camps in Florida and Arizona to baseball cities including New York, Baltimore, Chicago, and Cleveland—as future superstars such as Hank Aaron, Ernie Banks, and others entered the leagues and continued to integrate the sport.

Weaving together the narrative of one of baseball’s greatest seasons with the racially charged events of that year, 1954 demonstrates how our national pastime—with the notable exception of the Yankees, who represented “white supremacy” in the game—was actually ahead of the curve in terms of the acceptance of black Americans, while the nation at large continued to struggle with tolerance.

Please RSVP to me ASAP and by May 31st. This should be a wonderful evening at our “home base” the Bergino Baseball Clubhouse at 67 East 11st Street in Greenwich Village at 6:30PM. Thanks as always to Jay Goldberg, the owner of this terrific baseball boutique. Any questions feel free to contact me. GO GIANTS!!!-Gary