No, I'm not going to Latin America, but I just received the following email from my friend Megan who's there now:

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Hey Zack,

We went to a baseball game today and I thought of you... Granada vs. Rivas... so awesome. Best seats in the house were $5 for two tix, beer at $1 each, manual scoreboard, goats just over the outfield fence, kids in the trees watching from outside the park, and the game was so genuine and awesome. No 100 mph pitches, just awesome baseball playing. Declared a tie at 2/2 after 13 innings. Have you ever been to a game in Latin America? I can't remember. You should totally go... you could get a ball no problem, it would be awesome. If you want me to go with you and translate, I totally will. Amazing.

We're flying home this Saturday... Hope to see you sometime soon.

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In other news...

I have two big baseball-related things in the works. They're not quite 100 percent official at this point, so basically, get READY for some news. Maybe next week. Big stuff. I mean it.

My aunt Judy recently unearthed some OLD photographs of me that I'd never seen. Check 'em out...

This one was taken in my very first bedroom (not the one with the baseballs) with my dad when I was just a couple months old:



Here's one with my cousin Nicho in early 1978 (when I was still just a few months old):

I just found out that my book Watching Baseball Smarter has been translated into Taiwanese and is coming out this spring.

(?!?!)

Check out the front cover:



(Is it just me, or is the runner being called safe before touching the plate?)

Here's the back cover and the spine (which I hear will be 1.2 centimeters thick):




















It appears that this version will have a dust jacket, and it appears that these will be the inner flaps:






Now...in case you're wondering what all this Taiwanese text means, I got a translation from my editor:

A great book for baseball fans
By Zack Hample
translated by Tzu-hsuan Chen, Tang-yao Kao & Chi-jen Chen

Recommended by,
James Wang, Anchor, Major League Baseball on FTV
Chun-da Lin, Anchor, Videoland Sports
Cheng-dian Yang, Anchor, Videoland Sports
Ching-long Yang, renowned baseball commentator and coach,
Keith Hernandez, 1979 batting champion and MVP, World Champion in 1982
 
About the translator:
Tzu-hsuan Chen
Assistant Professor, Department of Journalism, Shih-hsin University
PhD, Mass communications, University of Wisconsin - Madison
 
Tang-yao Kao
Master, Department of Journalism, Shih-hsin University
 
Chi-jen Chen
Graduate student, Department of Journalism, Shih-hsin University
 
Ready for a few sample pages from Chapter One? Here goes:

I've been hearing from lots of people that there's a brief clip of me in one of the MLB Network's commercials. Remember when I caught a Jason Giambi home run on September 16th and then snagged a Johnny Damon homer the next night? Well, the network is using a clip from my celebration after the Damon homer, and two people have been kind enough to send me photographs of their TVs. Here's the first...



...and here's the second:

I don't really want to think or talk about A-Rod. The whole thing sucks, and if it's true that he used steroids even once, then I think HE sucks. Will I still root for him? I'm not sure. I need to wait and see how it all plays out, but most likely he and I are done. It's sad. And I'm done talking about it.

What I really want to talk about is my last trip to the New York City Scrabble club. I'd mentioned in a comment last week that I was going to blog about it, so here goes...

I went with my friend Leon Feingold, who's not only a former minor league pitcher and a competitive eater (and a whole bunch of other cool/wacky things), but he also loves Scrabble. He and I have played about half a dozen times, and although he still hasn't beaten me, I once beat him by just ONE point...so yeah, he's good. He'd never been to the NYC club, so I made sure to let him know that he was in for a real challenge. As a result, he spent ten minutes studying a word list before Round One. Here he is (in the white sweater):



For all you people who've read Word Freak and/or watched Word Wars, the guy sitting at the table in the photo above (organizing yellow score slips in order to determine the match-ups) is former world champion and current club leader Joel Sherman.

Leon had a choice of playing in the beginner or expert division. He chose the latter, and although he didn't end up winning any games, he held his own against some top players.

As for me...
I had a surprisingly good night. In my first game, I played two bingos--MINTIER for 63pts and OUTSpEND for 77--en route to a 17-point win over a good player named Phil Polsky. Final score: 384 to 367. Here's the board (with the unplayed tiles sitting along the bottom edge):



Leon was still playing when my game ended so I wandered over and took a photo. Look closely and you can see that he has seven letters of an eight-letter word on his rack:



Unfortunately he had no place to play it.

My second game was also a success. I faced against another solid player named Judy Kass and squeaked out a 27-point win, 389 to 362. I only played one bingo--SWANKER for 94pts--but it swung the momentum in my favor because my opponent challenged and ended up losing her next turn. Here's the final board:



Round Three was a disaster. I got CREAMED by one of the top-rated women in the world. Her name is Lynn Cushman. She played two bingos--TRACHEID for 78pts and DEMOTES for 93--and beat me by 146 points. Ouch! So much for my cumulative point spread. Final score: 431 to 285. I had both blanks and still didn't manage to play a bingo. It was such a miserable performance on my part that I was too embarrassed to take a photo of the board.

The good news is that in Round Four...



...I beat a guy named Andrew Friedman by 126 points, so I ended up feeling a little bit better about myself. The final score was 429 to 303, and I played two bingos, one of which was worth 107 points! The word was JESTING; the jay was on a double letter score, the whole word was doubled, and the ess hooked onto the end of DEAFEN. Not bad. But I'll admit that it was all very lucky. My other bingo was HIDEOUtS (lowercase tee because it was a blank) for 66pts. Here's the board:



Here's my final score slip...



...and here I am with Leon (as Joel accidentally lunged in front of the camera while cleaning up):



Good times.

Thanks for indulging me while I blog about non-baseball happenings...