Book ReViews, 123 S. Main St., will host a book-signing from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 15, with Mike Lackey, author of "Spitballing: The Baseball Days of Long Bob Ewing."
Lackey is a longtime newspaper reporter, editor and columnist. His book is a biography of a lifelong Auglaize County resident who pitched in the major leagues from 1902 to 1912. Ewing is a member of the Cincinnati Reds Hall of Fame.
"Spitballing" (Orange Frazer Press, $19.99) recounts a colorful time in baseball and American history. The book also details Ewing's post-baseball life, including two terms as the Prohibition-era sheriff of Auglaize County.
The book has been nominated for the Larry Ritter Award, given annually by the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) for the best book about baseball's so-called "dead ball" era, and was a finalist for the 2013 CASEY Award, given by Spitball magazine for the best baseball book of the year.
Lackey is a native of Dayton and a graduate of Earlham College in Richmond, Ind., where he earned a degree in history, wrote for the student newspaper and kept statistics during the golden age of Quaker baseball.
He launched his newspaper career as a $45-a-week proofreader in Saint John, New Brunswick, and subsequently worked 36 years for The Lima News before retiring in 2008.
His most memorable assignment involved traveling 16,000 miles to visit every Lima in the United States. He won or shared 10 writing awards from The Associated Press, twice being named Ohio's top columnist in his circulation category.
