Tim Wendel

I've healed enough (ruptured appendix) to head to Portland, Oregon, this weekend. Reading at Powell's (Hawthorne branch) on Monday night at 7:30 p.m.

Working my way through a lot of great research material from Cooperstown. Trying to tease out the threads for this new book, SIXTY-EIGHT. In search of narrative.

We've come to an agreement with Da Capo Press for SIXTY-EIGHT: WHEN BASEBALL SAVED AMERICA. Besides detailing the Detroit Tigers, St. Louis Cardinals and the pitching achievements of that season, I'll take a look at football and the Mexico City Olympics, as well as the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy.
Our (more…)

No rest for the wicked. The first week of promoting High Heat opened with a reading at the Barnes & Noble in Alexandria. The manager there is my friend Brighid Moret and it was a fun evening.
From there, it was on to the Virginia Festival of the Book, where I joined Roland Lazenby (author (more…)

My friend Herta Feely was asking about the writing of High Heat. How I changed the working outline after the book contract was signed.
Read about it in the posting I did for Herta's new blog at Chrysalis Editorial -- http://chrysaliseditorial.com/blog/2010/03/our-first-guest-author-tim-wendel/

Where did the polite, almost cuddly country go that I grew up in the shadow of? (When I was a kid, Buffalo, N.Y., was already shrinking, so we often headed 90 minutes north to Toronto.)
In a bid to bring home more gold medals, the Canadians began the "Own the Podium" program. But it (more…)

Apologies, but I've been busy getting a new blog off the ground. It's in support of my new book, High Heat, and you can find it at HighHeatWendel.blogspot.com.
Also, don't forget the Buffalo Braves blog (Randy Smith Appreciation Day is coming up at Buffalo State) and the National Archive footage of the (more…)

OK, we cannot be too surprised to hear that Mark McGwire did performance-enhancing drugs, especially during The Great Home Race of 1998.
I covered that season for Baseball Weekly and got as caught as anybody in the hoopla. Still, I remembered how McGwire was a rookie with the Oakland Athletics. Certainly a big guy, but (more…)

My youth hockey teams always lost to the Canadian squads growing up. I mean we lost bad -- 10-0, 15-1. You get the picture. Even my younger brothers' teams, which were far better than mine, lost regularly to the big guns north of the border.
Now I love Canada. I married a Canadian.
Still, it was great to see (more…)

David Maraniss, author of Clemente and When Pride Still Mattered, just gave High Heat a big thumbs-up.
"High Heat is a great idea, brilliantly executed. Tim Wendel, one of my favorite baseball writers, delivers this fastball with a winning mix of science, biography, and mythology."
Pub date for HH is March 9, 2010.