Hoping to pick some brains to get some ideas on a title for my upcoming collection of essays on baseball history. It's going to be a pretty short book, just 15 chapters in varying lengths about fascinating/lesser known facts about players, incredible games, oddities & absurd instances, etc. Mostly it focuses on things that happened in the Deadball Era (pre-1920), with a couple post-1920 for good measure. I also include a sort of op-ed about why the movie Field of Dreams isn't really a baseball movie at all. I have an idea for the subtitle, something really simple like "A Collection of Baseball Essays." or "The Strange, Eerie and Fun Side of Baseball"....that kind of thing/along those lines. But it's the main title that is eluding me. I'm looking for something direct but also engaging and not forced or too corny. Like "Baseball is Weird" or "Diamond Fables" or "The Greatest Game; The Weirdest Game." I want to capture the whole "good old days" vibe but not be too overdone. Any ideas/title dumps would be greatly helpful
If I were looking for an enjoyable yet relatively serious collection of essays about baseball, I would skip right over any titles that try to be too cute or clever. For me that would include most of the titles you put out. But I'm not sure how serious your books is supposed to be; if it veers more towards the Ripley's Believe It or Not sort of subject matter then the zanier the better probably.
I completely agree...as a reader of baseball history, this too would probably put me off. My collection is somewhere in the middle. There is definitely some crazy, wacky stories, and some that are more serious and impressive. It's a mishmash. @SapereAude has the right idea. Something like that. I don't really want to shoehorn it into putting "Deadball" in the title since not every story takes place in the Deadball Era. I keep coming back to "Cowhide Chronicles" or "Horsehide Heroics" (since baseballs were made of horsehide prior to 1974) or even something like "The Absurd Ballgame." I want it to be a little clever but not too cute...and not too bland either.
You could try and incorporate the word "spring" into the title somehow. I can't quite think how, but that could be good, since the baseball season takes place in the spring, and the period you're writing about is an early time in the game (more or less). I think A Collection of Baseball Essays is a great subtitle.
I definitely was leaning toward basing it off a baseball idiom. The two biggest challenges of course are 1. Not being too fancy/cute with it and 2. Finding one that hasn't been used already. But just a few minutes ago, I think I may have landed on it. (Not) Just Another Ballgame: A Collection of Baseball Essays OR (Not) Just Another Ballgame: Stories from Baseball's Past I like the idea of the parentheses because it implies sort of a double-meaning, and also because the content of the book is about the uncommon/crazy/strange occurrences in the game's old days.
