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That's right, folks, you are once again listening to Baseball by the Book,

the podcast in which we talk to authors of baseball books past and present.

Author David Krell returns to Baseball by the book.

He has previously appeared on the podcast to talk about his books, Our Bums,

the New York Yankees in popular culture, and the New York Mets in popular culture.

Today he's here to talk about his new book. It's called 1962, Baseball and America in the time of JFK. Let's get started. Hi, David. Welcome back to baseball by the book. Thanks, Justin. It's great to be back.

In the book, you write that your original idea was to write a book about the two 1962

NL expansion teams, which of course were the Mets and the Houston Colt 45s. But eventually that

idea expanded to the book that it became, which is a book about

1962 baseball generally, but also even deeper than that, about 1962 in the United States

generally. So why did that happen? Why did you go from a narrow focus like these two expansion

teams into a much broader focus?

The book was originally called The Amazing Season, and that was a takeoff on Casey Stengel's

quote, amazing, amazing, amazing, amazing, amazing to describe the Mets. But when I was in this

writing workshop, you'll recall that we had a show together where you interviewed me about our

bumps, which is about the Brooklyn Dodgers. Well, that book was born in a writer's workshop,

and when I returned to that workshop with this idea, the instructor, who's a literary agent,

said, I know you're a baseball guy, but books with broader topics

get broader readerships. So think about that. And when I came home that night, I started to

Google all of these things that happened in 1962. I knew certain things happened. I knew John Glenn

...