Agent Palmer

Everything’s coming up Earnhardt, and for Dale Jr, that’s great. For NASCAR, it may be a different story.

Dale Earnhardt Jr, AKA Dale Jr, is featured heavily in what was Amazon Prime’s summer coverage of races in June. He was prominent in advertisements and as a featured commentator for those races. He’s also featured in a new IHOP commercial. And a new Amazon Prime docu-series about his Dad, recently released to acclaim.

I enjoy baseball, and I enjoy spy and espionage books, films and series. It would seem, then, that The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg was bound to not only interest me, but intrigue and entertain me as well. I would argue that sociologists and psychologists would also enjoy this book, as the curious case of Moe Berg is more than what it seems.

Despite the research completed here by author Nicholas Dawidoff and other books written about him, the constant in this book is what we don’t know.

Soccer Against the Enemy by Simon Kuper was first published in 1994 with the subtitle “How the world’s most popular sport starts and fuels revolutions and keeps dictators in power.” I recently read the updated 2006 version, but since a lot has happened in those intervening years, like for example a World Cup in Qatar, this book is just exhibit A. This book is about Simon’s research by being boots on the ground in places like Scotland, Ireland, Holland, Germany,…

I previously went the full nine innings reviewing Bull Durham. It should be not surprise that I’d go another nine innings with The Church of Baseball written by Bull Durham writer and director Ron Shelton about the origin of, writing of, production, release, and reaction to Bull Durham.

So let’s do it, on to the first pitch… Play Ball!

Palmer Recaps the 111th Edition of the Tour de France 

The 111th edition of the Tour de France started in Florence, Italy, and finished in Nice, France. It was dominated by two-time (now three-time) winner Tadej “the Tornado” Pogacar in the high mountains, where he distanced his main rival and previous two-time consecutive winner Jonas Vingegaard. But there was more to this Tour than just two heavyweights battling up the high mountains of the Alps and Pyrenees.