Just read on Yahoo! that part of the Valley is looking to secede from LA.

Yesterday also marked another flare-up in the gay pro athlete sweepstakes, with Mike Piazza the target this time.

What do these two things have in common?

A professional baseball player comes out while playing for a team in the Valley in The Dreyfus Affair, a book by Peter Lefcourt. The book does add an interesting twist to this problem, as the player in question not only comes out, but has a thing for a teammate.

I read the book a few years ago when I was reading a baseball book a week during the season. This was, what, 1995 or 1996, and I was trying to rekindle an interest in baseball that had waned badly. I was commuting at the time, and thus had a lot of idle moments on trains during which I mostly read. While I didn't keep to schedule (like the Red Sox, I lost steam in September), reading all these books did bring me back to baseball, apparently in time for another work stoppage (though it's back to the table soon enough).

Other titles from that summer that I recommend:

Fleet Walker's Divided Heart by David Zang. A bio of the last African-American major leaguer until Jackie Robinson, a number of reviews take Zang to task for not necessarily connecting to Walker. It could be that Zang got hung up on his "divided heart" theory. I'd still recommend it.

The Year They Called Off the World Series by Benton Stark. I read very few books that involved teams from New York (thus saving myself all of David Halberstam's claptrap). Couldn't avoid that here, as the very heart of 1904's conflict was the AL's New York Highlanders and John McGraw, manager of the NL's Giants.

Wrigleyville by Peter Golenbock. Golenbock has a series of books that use a lot of oral history to tell the story of a specific baseball team (the Red Sox, Mets, and Brookly Dodgers) or a city and its baseball (St. Louis). I'm a theoretical Cubs fan, given that they are the NL's Red Sox analog, and the depth of history in the book was well appreciated. Oddly enough, it was Golenbock's book on the Sox, Fenway, that derailed my reading experience. Not sure if I was just burnt out or found the style less refined in this earlier book, but it was a chore to get through.

I'll have to see if I can find my full list.