Dan Hirshberg Author Talk and Q&A

In his travels, longtime Warren County resident, Dan Hirshberg, discovered amazing stories about baseball people in Pinellas County, Fl. These stories led him to write his new book, Baseball in Pinellas County.

While Pinellas County is known for hosting spring training for Major League Baseball teams over the years, such as the Yankees, Mets, Cardinals and currently the Blue Jays and Phillies, as well as the Tampa Bay Rays calling St. Petersburg home. Yet there is another side to that county’s baseball history—its local people and teams.

“You don’t have to be from Pinellas County to enjoy this book,” said Hirshberg, the former Sports Editor of The Star-Gazette. “It’s a book with stories about people who could be from anytime, anywhere. I love to tell stories about people and this is what the book is about.”

Although the book does feature some chapters on former Mets and Yankees, for the most part, Hirshberg speaks to the “other side” – those who weren’t necessarily headline grabbers.

Hirshberg, who covered local sports in Warren County for many years, shared that a few of the players in the book made it to the Majors with a great deal of success, such as former Met Howard Johnson, Casey Kotchman, and Toby Hall. However, not necessarily everybody crafted a major league resume of note. Some played briefly in the majors, some in the minors, and a few have coached or scouted in the pros, including Tom Kotchman, Tom Zimmer, and Tim Wilken. Hundreds of Pinellas ballplayers have been drafted by Major League Baseball, forty-four alone out of Seminole High School. Tom Kotchman, a highly touted longtime minor league manager, and a scout for the Angels and Red Sox, wrote the foreword for the book.

The book also relates the tragic tale of Steve Georgiadis, whose life ended during routine surgery, as well as many chapters highlighting other people with unique stories to tell.

Dan Hirshberg is an award-winning author, publicist and columnist who has written feature stories about baseball for the Tampa Bay News Group and previously authored a biography of Phil Rizzuto (Phil Rizzuto: A Yankee Tradition). For a younger audience, he’s written books about John Elway, Lawrence Taylor, Emmitt Smith, and Tim Hardaway, as well as being published in Baseball Digest and other national publications.