I was listening to episode 446 (Living Without) of This American Life this afternoon, and there was a former baseball player talking about grounding out and knowing when the ball came off his bat that that was it, he was done playing baseball. It got me thinking about the last plate appearances of well-known players. The obvious extension of that thought was to look at the first and last plate appearances by well-known players. So I did. There’s 22 of them so far. I’m kinda picking them randomly, and maybe, just maybe, I might try and add a new one every day. We’ll see how that goes. And if it goes well, I might extend it to look at the outcome of the first batter faced by well-known pitchers, too.

Click through for links to places to order it, and to an article I wrote for SB Nation's Baseball Nation about the book, site, my love of baseball, and baseball's Internet presence.

My book "Flip Flop Fly Ball: An Infographic Baseball Adventure" is published by Bloomsbury on Tuesday, July 5th.

There's also some more pixelly baseball card-y drawings. I've been enjoying drawing them and figure I might keep on doing them, so I've made a new part of the site which I've punningly called Flopps. New drawings include Ichiro, Manny Ramirez, Kevin Youkilis, Cito Gaston, Jose Bautista, Jesse Barfield, and Billy Martin.

Now that the book is finished, I'll be putting up new stuff on the site with a bit more regularity. In the meantime, here's a visual metaphor for the summer I've had: more-or-less ignoring everything else in favour of thinking about baseball. (Link takes you to my other, more arty site, Flip Flop Flyin'.)

http://www.flipflopflyin.com/onetrackmind/

Also I've recently some pixelly pictures of baseball players. I kinda like the way they look, so hopefully, I'll be doing more of them in the near future. For now, I've done Jayson Werth, Diamondbacks-era Randy Johnson, and umpire Joe West.

http://www.flipflopflyin.com/flipflopflyball/drawings.html

At the moment, the book is called "Flip Flop Fly Ball," but that might change. It's a name I'm not overly happy with for the web site, let alone a book, but we'll see. (Frankly, if I'd have thought that the site was going to be as popular as it has been - thank you! - I'd have chosen a more baseball-y name, rather than a name that's just a baseball-related pun on the name of my main web site.)

The book will essentially be like the web site, but with about 25,000 words thrown in, and maybe a few photographs and drawings, too. Somewhere in the region of 50% of the infographics that will go in the book will be exclusive, so I'll be trying to balance the needs of the book with also putting new stuff on the web site itself.

I'm super happy about this, especially - and I know I've brought this up before, so forgive me - especially because I'm a foreigner and a relative newcomer to wonderful world of baseball. I never imagined I'd love any sport more than soccer, but baseball sucked me in through a turnstile in the Bronx and on the other side I found a thoughtful pastime, an engrossing history, and an aesthetic joy waiting to be explored.

It's going to be so much fun for me immersing myself so completely in baseball while I produce this book, so I'd better apologise to my friends in advance: I know you don't care about Larry Yount incredibly short career in Major League Baseball but I'm probably not going to be able to stop myself from telling you about it.