On Thursday night I got together with Bronx Banter‘s Alex Belth and Cliff Corcoran and SI.com’s Jake Luft for some burgers and balltalk. It was typically rambunctious, with the four of us barely restraining ourselves from talking over each other like sugared-up six-year-olds as we discussed Bernie Williams, fantasy baseball, Ronnie Lott (how’d he get in there?), Steve Rushin, Tropicana Field, spring training and the Hall of Fame. If only I could remember what I was supposed to check out on YouTube…

Cliff, who edited Baseball Prospectus 2007 for Plume (a division of Penguin), showed up carrying his hot-off-the-press copy of the book, promising mine would arrive Friday, albeit with slighly less ketchup on the cover. It did, and aside from a couple of surprise commas — them’s the breaks when you play subordinate-clause chicken as often as I do — I couldn’t be happier. My contributions to the book were the Dodgers and Red Sox chapters, as well as a back-of-book collaboration with Will Carroll on the effects of the amphetamine ban.

The book is 48 pages longer than last year, weighing in at 602 in all (biggest BP ever, I’m told), and the switch in publishers from Workman to Plume looks like the difference between Scranton and New York City. Hats off to BP editors Steven Goldman and Christina Kahrl, as well as Cliff, for a job well done. We at BP like to say that we write the baseball book that we’d want to read. Here’s hoping you readers come along for the ride and enjoy the advances we’ve made.

On the promotional front here in NYC, the March 22 Columbia University time and location have been changed:

March 22, 6 PM
Columbia University
Lerner Hall
2920 Broadway (@ 114th Street)
New York, NY

The changes inadvertently accomodate my previous commitments (Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard and Ray Price getting their Western Schwing on at Radio City) and thus shift me from tentative to probable, with a 60 percent likelihood of watermelon smashing. Consider yourselves warned.