Toby Smith will be at the UNM Bookstore Thursday, Feb. 19 at noon to sign copies of Bush League Boys: The Postwar Legends of Baseball in the American Southwest (University of New Mexico Press, 2014). This event is free and open to the public.
In Bush League Boys, Smith brings to life the forgotten period of minor league baseball history in New Mexico and West Texas. Smith uses oral histories of players, umpires, fans, sportswriters and team officials to resurrect the West Texas-New Mexico League, Longhorn League, Southwestern League and Sophomore League from 1946 to 1961, when the last of them folded. Star players Joe Bauman and Bob Crues get special attention, along with assorted brawls, a fatal beaning incident, home runs and marriages conducted at home plate.
Toby Smith is a former Albuquerque Journal reporter and the author or coauthor of nine books, including Little Gray Men: Roswell and the Rise of a Popular Culture (UNM Press, 2000). Smith has taught writing and reporting courses at the University of New Mexico, Ohio State University, and at universities in South Korea and Romania, the latter where he was a Fulbright Senior Fellow for two years.
Smith has been an IREX Fellow in Yerevan, Armenia, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at Harvard, and a James Thurber Writer in Residence at Ohio State. He is currently a Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellow, which takes him to small, independent colleges across the country. Smith lives in Albuquerque.