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Baseball Lifer Shares Story Of The Road To Major Leagues In Monroe Talk

MONROE, Conn. — The Edith Wheeler Memorial Library in Monroe offers a revealing peek behind the boxscores of Major League Baseball with a talk by baseball authority Bob Wirz of Stratford. 

Baseball expert and author Bob Wirz of Stratford

Baseball expert and author Bob Wirz of Stratford

Photo Credit: Contributed

There is no charge for admission to the talk on Tuesday, May 23, but registration is recommended at www.ewml.org.

Wirz, author of “The Passion of Baseball,” takes fans into the media fishbowl that he headed for more than a decade in New York and through three decades of running his own sports public relations and marketing company.

He handled publicity for the Rolaids Relief Man program, ground-breaking anniversary planning for Little League Baseball and helped IBM become the first company to put reality into home run measurements. 

Along the way, he fell in love with the touching stories of undrafted players who worked their way from the smallest of Independent baseball leagues to Major League fame and financial security.

Wirz tells the story of rubbing shoulders with the biggest names in baseball without ever swinging a bat or throwing a ball beyond the scruffiest of diamonds, living the dream of a tiny town boy who grew up in the Sandhills of Nebraska.

His insights extend over the early years of the Kansas City Royals—where he was publicity director--to White House trips, sitting with manager Bob Lemon on the New York Yankees' victory flight after the history-making Bucky Dent home run of 1978, surviving the early years of the sport's anger-filled free agency to helping market the dream marketing slogan "Baseball Fever, Catch It."

Wirz also describes his experiences during the 1989 San Francisco-Oakland earthquake-interrupted World Series, chatting with actor Jack Nicholson during an All-Star Game, the joy of induction weekends at the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., and a visit that stretched into four hours with former MLB Commissioner Bowie Kuhn who had gone from being his boss to his friend and business partner.

Wirz’s presentation will run from 6:30 to 7:30 pm. in the Ehlers Room at the library. "The Passion of Baseball" is available through Barnes & Noble, Amazon, iTunes, Kobo or WirzandAssociates.com. eBooks also are available from B&N and Amazon.

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