Major League Baseball Takes Big Step To July Opening Day

Yankee Stadium could look like this come July under a proposal to play games without fans. This was from the first game of a doubleheader between the Yankees and Orioles on May 15, 2019. Photo by Jason Schott.

Major League Baseball took a major step to launching the 2020 season when, according to the Associated Press, the owners have approved a proposal from the players' union that could lead to the season opening in July in ballparks without fans.

Part 2: A Chat With "Yogi" Author Jon Pessah

Jon Pessah.

Jon Pessah is the founding editor of ESPN the Magazine, former sports editor at Newsday and the Hartford Courant, and the author of The Game: Inside the Secret World of Major League Baseball's Power Brokers, which detailed Major League Baseball's labor strife in the 1990s. 

"I Know This Much Is True," Based on Wally Lamb's Novel, Debuts Sunday On HBO

This Sunday, May 10, marks the debut of the HBO Limited Series "I Know This Much is True," starring Mark Ruffalo and based on the novel by Wally Lamb (I Know This Much is True; Harper Perennial/HarperCollins Publishers; paperback; $17.99).

Part 1: A Conversation With Jon Pessah, Author of "Yogi"

Jon Pessah is the founding editor of ESPN the Magazine, as well as managing sports sections at Newsday and the Hartford Courant, and the author of The Game, which detailed Major League Baseball's labor strife. 

Caitlin Moran's Novel "How To Build A Girl" Now An IFC Movie

Caitlin Moran is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel How To Build A Girl, and she was also the screenwriter for the IFC Film production, which debuts this Friday, May 8.

Book Chat: With Brad Balukjian, Author Of "The Wax Pack"

The Wax Pack: On the Open Road in Search of Baseball's Afterlife
By Brad Balukjian
University of Nebraska Press; 280 pages; hardcover, $27.95; eBook, $16.95

Brad Balukjian, a freelance journalist who is also the director of the Natural History and Sustainability Program and teaches biology at Merritt College in Oakland California, and he set out on a quest to see if there's life after baseball.

Books: "Westside Saints" By W.M. Akers

Westside Saints
By W.M. Akers
Harper Voyager; hardcover, $27.99; available Tuesday, May 5

Last year, W.M. Akers introduced a different kind of New York City in Westside. Set in 1921, the city dying and a thirteen-mile fence running the length of Broadway that splits Manhattan into the prosperous East Side and the Westside, which is an overgrown wasteland and, with an aversion to modern technology, a home to the gritty underbelly of the city.