Luke Epplin

Still!

I'm a little disappointed in my timeline that it's taken this long for me to find out that Daniel Day Lewis is returning this fall from an eight-year acting hiatus.

I generally agree with that. But I'm seeing some folks confidently state that he is a future HOFer and am wondering if I just am not judging him correctly.

That might be the case. I'm surprised to see he has barely 1,000 hits and not even a 20 career WAR. But I don't know--maybe we'll judge him differently.

Let's assume that Kyle Schwarber plays at or near this level for three more seasons. Is that enough to make him a Hall of Famer?

The president is the only person who could talk about putting $10 million here and $10 million there and spin that into being a victim. Poor guy--what a rough life he's had....

Well, those bits of dialogue came from a newspaper. And as I said from the very start, numerals were used, and that's why my copy editor kept them in. So, again, very bad advice.

Well, guess what, in the newspapers in the 1940s, they weren't. So, again, bad advice.

Well, you're not. And someone who is intending to explain "the art of writing" should understand that stylistic changes aren't uniform across time and mediums. So, again, not helpful.

Oh dear, how much more "Free Bird" can we stand?....

My daughter loves "The Wheels on the Bus" so much that when she hears the opening chords, she reacts like someone hearing the start of "Free Bird" at a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert.

So I don't really understand what you're saying here. Your first tweet was that the fans came to Paige's first start to throw fruit at him. I said that's not the case. I'm going to need to see evidence to believe that. Perhaps there are newspapers that I didn't consult?

Sure, that's all in my book. But your contention is that the fans in his first start in the majors threw fruit at him. There's no record of that, not even in the Black press. Paige himself in his autobiography said that the crowd that night "never seemed so happy to see anyone in their lives."

Copyedits have been turned in. All that's left is reviewing the page proofs next month, and then "Moses and the Doctor" is out of my hands.

Look, you're free to read my book if you'd like. I spent years researching it. Or you can claim things that aren't true. Based on this conversation, I assume that I know which way you'll lean here....

That is certainly not what happened.

“An Unashamed Proposal,” by Kiran Desai Look, Sunny said, however progressive my mother is, she is an Indian woman from another generation. Do you really think I can tell her that we sleep in the same bed?

The New Yorker just excerpted a chapter from Kiran Desai's upcoming novel "The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny." Sharing it because it's one of the best novels I've ever had the fortune to work on. Look for it in September. www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

Even then, that's bad advice. A newspaper might have good reason to have used numerals based on space constraints and other style issues that we're not aware of. So, again, that was not helpful.

No, but you gave bad advice. You should go with what the source has. And you should know that my book was edited and copyedited by the best in the business, so again, your advice was not good.

Hey, I copied it directly from the source, and it had numbers. So that's why they're there. But let me give you a bit of advice: I wouldn't nitpick an author's work to his face. It's not a good look.

It's a great quote. Check out my book if you'd like to reminisce about Paige a bit more....

Hey, thanks! Let me know what you think when you get around to reading it.

The difference between Ms Rachel and Mister Rogers? One has theater kid energy and one didn’t.

77 years ago today, Satchel Paige, at age 42, made his first start in the major leagues. The surprise announcement of Paige as the starting pitcher kicked off a frenzy for tickets, shattering the attendance record for a night game. Here’s what I wrote about it in “Our Team.”

My copyedits are due back to the publisher tomorrow, so I'm doing what I assume every author does: obsessively reading through the manuscript, changing a word here and there, then changing it back.

But there were articles in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel about Veeck's involvement with the Phillies, which led me to believe it was a serious matter. And I don't doubt that Veeck had it in mind to integrate. So it's somewhere in the middle: he wanted to do it but probably wasn't close to doing so.

The short answer is: We'll never know. The version that Veeck gave in his autobiography--that he was on the verge of buying the Phillies but then was thwarted from doing so when it was discovered that he planned to integrate the roster--is almost certainly overblown, as were most things Veeck said.

Thanks! Let me know what he thinks after he’s finished reading it.

Paige fell behind early in his first start, understandably so, and then immediately recovered and cruised to victory. Bill Veeck saw it as confirmation of his decision to sign Paige against the pushback from the baseball establishment. Once more from “Our Team”:

77 years ago today, Satchel Paige, at age 42, made his first start in the major leagues. The surprise announcement of Paige as the starting pitcher kicked off a frenzy for tickets, shattering the attendance record for a night game. Here’s what I wrote about it in “Our Team.”