So, I kinda sorta missed Thursday Blog Day yesterday. Not totally, because I did have time to post a short blurb and cut & paste my most recent Kickstarter update onto it, but it really wasn’t a blog. It was more of a placeholder for this one, which I’m writing on Friday morning.

We currently have a visitor in the house, as a granite technician takes detailed measurements of the countertops in all three bathrooms here. They will soon undergo a transformation from that “contractor’s grade” white stuff to a cool new granite. We found some remnants at a place down in Burnsville and are getting it all done at a great price.

And Burnsville…  A south-side suburb of the Twin Cities. When we followed Siri’s directions to the granite place, and pulled into the parking lot, I said to Barbara something I’ve uttered more than a few times since we originally moved to Minnesota in 2002. I said, “I’ve been here.” Not the granite place, but the location directly across Route 13. Burnsville High School.

As you’ll learn in “Bats, Balls, & Burnouts” I spent parts of four years as a regional scouting supervisor for the Toronto Blue Jays, and each year my area was tweaked either a little bit (add a new state or remove part of another) or a lot (move to Fresno from St. Louis for a year) but for my last two years Minnesota was part of my area.

I’d always have to hit Minny last in my region, which would also include Iowa, Missouri, Southern Illinois, Kentucky, and Tennessee, just to let the snow melt, but the Land of 10,000 Lakes quickly became my favorite state in the region. It was then that I felt the first inklings that I’d want to live here. The people, the scenery, and the quality of life were so pleasant and so easy to like.

I’d get up here in late April or early May, often when big snow banks were still evident on the sides of the roads, and hit most of the colleges and many of the high schools, wherever my “sources” told me there were prospects. There were almost always prospects at the University of Minnesota. That school produced a few good players over the years, if by “good players” you mean names like Dave Winfield and Paul Molitor. During my time with the Jays, I watched and reported on Terry Steinbach.

When I was scouting, schools like Edina and Eden Prairie usually featured the most prospects, but Burnsville was a good baseball program as well. I remember 1982 and ’83 very well, and both years I watched Burnsville High at their home field. When we pulled up to the granite place, I saw the school and the memory of having been there was as fresh as if it had been last year. I dig memories like that.

That was a decent digression, but the main subject matter here is “Bats, Balls, & Burnouts.” It’s a real book, almost.

On Monday, I was surprised to see an early-morning email from Outskirts Press, and it contained a link to a PDF. That file was the full book, formatted and laid out just as it will look in print. It was a momentous morning.

This week has been all about my last pass through the book. This is my final chance to make corrections, additions, or deletions. So, I’m carefully doing it one page and one paragraph at a time. I’ve been doing that all week. And just for giggles and a ton of fun, here’s a look at the Table of Contents, to give you a hint as to the subject matter of all the chapters. Click on it (or any other photo) to enlarge it.

As soon as I’m done with this blog, I’ll get back to work on the book and today will start with Chapter 20, wittily entitled “Hello New Jersey” and it, of course, details my time with Motorsports Marketing Inc., representing Chuck Etchells and Mike Dunn. I was technically a Vice President for MMI, but in reality I was the assistant to the guy who owned the company. It was a challenging job in a lot of ways, not the least of which was the requirement that I move from my hometown of St. Louis to the northern suburbs of New Jersey, but it was also a rewarding one. I learned a ton about doing this PR and marketing thing, for professional NHRA Drag Racing teams, and I laid the foundation for what I’d later do for two decades.

I think you could officially state that there would likely never have been 12 years with Del Worsham and seven years with Tim Wilkerson without that first stop in Jersey, with MMI. All those dominoes had to fall in the right order to get me where I eventually ended up.

Once I’m done going through it one last time, I’ll fire my changes back to Outskirts and the book will move into final production. At that point, we’ll have the final page count and that will give us the exact dimensions for the cover. I’ll be counting on my buddy and expert, Todd Myers, to finalize his incredible graphics and off we’ll go.

Yes, the big question is “When will it actually be on sale?” but I don’t know that yet. What I’ve learned through this process is that nothing happens overnight in the publishing biz. It all happens at it’s own organic rate. So, it’ll be a matter of weeks but I don’t yet know how many weeks. Rest assured I’ll keep you posted.

And, as the title to today’s blog insinuates, I may be a day late but I’m not a dollar short. Before I headed to the airport to pick up Barbara last night, after she’d spent yet another week back out in Spokane, I went to the grocery store to replenish a few basic items we were out of. As I walked back to my car, I spotted this dollar bill on the ground. Barbara says I should buy a lottery ticket with it. That might be a good plan…

And speaking (writing) of dollars, the great news with the proof of the book is the page count. When I finished principal writing, way back in late October, we had planned on a 6×9-inch format and it looked like we were going to end up close to 1,000 pages, which was really untenable and unrealistic.

So, we did a few things. We stepped up to a 7×10 format, we heavily edited the manuscript and left some fun, but not necessarily important, stuff on the floor, and we condensed the pages by eliminating the space between paragraphs. All of that got us down to 511 pages plus the photos and other extras at the front and back. And that impacts the purchase price.

Even before I saw the proof, I was still concerned that the book would come in north of 700 pages, because it was impossible to do that math until we saw how it all laid out. At that size, the cover price could’ve realistically been around $65 per copy. That scared me to death. Now, I think we’ll come in around $49 per copy. That’s more than I’d like, but I don’t have a say in the minimum price. The publisher has a to make their money, too.

All this adds up to the fact we’re almost there, almost at the finish line, almost having a book to hold in our hands and read. That’s pretty cool. It’s been such a journey, and it’s not over yet. Originally, I thought the writing would be so much more rewarding than the editing and production, but the reality was that it has all been great. Even this last pass of editing is a thrill, because I’m finally looking at the actual “print ready” book. That’s a lot more fun than looking at a Google Docs or Word file.

On the subject of photos that didn’t make the cut, how about this incredible shot of my mother, Taffy, from the mid-1940s. She worked at the Air Force base in San Antonio during World War II, where she was actually named Miss Air Force, and my father was stationed there. That’s how they met. He was technically a “physical education instructor” during the war, but mostly he was a star on the baseball team that represented the base, along with a few other St. Louis Cardinals.

As beautiful as Mom was, she had no shortage of soldiers asking her out on dates. She did like to dance, though, and my dad was not much of a dancer, so he’d take her out for afternoon dates and then hang out with her parents when she went out dancing later. His plan worked like an absolute charm. Had it not, you wouldn’t know me and there would be no book. That’s why I make a point, in the book, of stating that I’m still the luckiest kid in the world. Miss you, Mom!

I guess we’ll wrap this up and get back into editing mode. I’ve found the best way to approach it is to do one chapter at a time, then take a break. If I try to do more than that, I tend to get a little blurry-eyed (or is it bleary-eyed?) and that’s when I miss stuff. Seriously, this is my fourth or fifth pass through the book and I’m still spotting things that leap out at me, screaming, “How did you miss this?” in a loud voice.

Back to work, and I’ll be back here again next week. Hey, do you know what Monday is? It’s Opening Day. Starting Monday, Dick Bremer and Bert Blyleven will be our house guests again nearly every afternoon or evening, as they announce the Minnesota Twins games on TV. It’s baseball season. All is right with the world.

Bob Wilber, at your service and ready for some baseball…