Hey, everybody, I'm Justin McGuire, and this is Baseball by the Book, the only podcast that matters.

That's right, folks, you're once again listening to Baseball by the Book, a podcast in which we talk to authors of baseball books past and present.

Let's get right to it today. Today we're talking to Andy Strasbourg. For 22 years, he worked with the San Diego

Padres, and he later represented high-profile players as well as consulting for Major League

Teams and for the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Today he's here to talk about his book, My

1961. Let's get started.

Hi, Andy. Welcome to baseball by the book. Thank you very much, Justin.

You grew up in the late 50s, early 60s as a New York Yankees fan, but you must have had something of a contrarian streak because you write about how you decided Mickey Mantle was not going to be

your favorite player, despite the fact that he was the favorite player of pretty much every Yankee

fan of that era, and even people who weren't Yankee fans.

And you indeed actually decided that Roger Maris was your favorite player before 1961,

which I really found remarkable that I can't imagine there were a lot of people who

picked Roger Maris as their favorite Yankee, even before the things that he did in 1961.

So why not Mantle? Why Maris? I think it talks about my personality as a kid, which also happened

as an adult.

I didn't want to be, go along with the crowd.

That was very important to me.

I wanted to be different.

I wanted to be unique.

And the fact that I'm actually selecting a baseball player,

unlike the favorite of everybody else's, that was important to me. So I was searching for a baseball player and didn't realize it was going to be Roger Maris. I just knew it wasn't

going to be Mickey Mantle. And then when Roger came on the scene, Sport Magazine wrote this great article about Roger Merrittes

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