Peter Schilling will be at Barbara's Bookstore (Halsted and Roosevelt) on April 25 at 7:30 to discuss his debet novel The End of Baseball.  I don't know much about this guy, except that he is NOT the German synth-pop from the 80s.  I just thought I would give you guys a heads up on this baseball related event in and around the South Side of Chicago.   Also, I hear there will be complimentary beer and Cracker Jacks.  Here are a couple blurbs about the book:

Publishers Weekly (Monday , February 25, 2008):
With this debut, sportswriter Schilling has written one of the best baseball novels since Howard Frank Mosher's "Waiting for Teddy Williams". Using actual events, Schilling has fictionalized a fantasy scenario in baseball history and the integration of black players into the major leagues in 1944. Bill Veeck Jr., a Marine veteran from a prestigious baseball family, buys the Philadelphia Athletics in 1943, becoming the youngest man to ever own a major league club. Veeck is a genius at publicity and promotion who wants to win the World Seriesbut using black players. He signs the best of the Negro League to the Athletics, against all conventional feeling and the opposition of Judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis, the vicious commissioner of baseball. The Athletics romp through the 1944 season behind the on-and-off diamond antics of real-life stars like Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige and Roy Campanella, with Veeck struggling to raise money, avoid race riots and flummox Judge Landis. This exciting, fast-paced story is a fine commentary on baseball lore, race relations, and American sentiment during World War II, and it will have the reader hanging on every pitch, wondering how Veeck and his players will overcome racial discrimination to prove they can play in the major leagues. "(May)" Copyright 2008 Reed Business Information.

Brief Description:
Hungry for a pennant, young Veeck jettisons the team's white players and secretly recruits the legendary stars of the Negro Leagues, fielding a club that will go down in baseball annals as one of the greatest ever to play the game. Here are the behind-the-scenes adventures that bring this dream to reality, and a cast of characters only history's pen could create: the players themselves-the tragic Josh Gibson, the remarkable but self-centered Satchel Paige, the Cuban wonder Martin Dihigo, the veteran stalwarts Cool Papa Bell, Willie Wells, and Buck Leonard, and the rising stars Roy Campanella, Artie Wilson, and Dave Barnhill--plus Walter Winchell, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, and J. Edgar Hoover! The End of Baseball is the most rollicking, free-spirited baseball yarn in years, the unvarnished truth of that incredible season and the men who lived it.

Defensive Indifference:

"This book sounds weird."