• Why Do Hitters Step in the Bucket?
• Sa-Faire'
• The Hobbyist Blacksmith
• Wizard Mountain
• Diamonds From the Sky
• MUFOC 
  (The Milford UFO Club)

Scroll down to view a short synopsis of each title.

Why Do Hitters Step in the Bucket?
Baseball hitting secrets and solutions from a pro.

Hitting mechanics have evolved into two competing schools: “rotational,” populated by devotees of Ted Williams, and “linear,” by followers of Charlie Lau.  Theses two camps argue with great enthusiasm for their respective causes - with the close-minded stubbornness of political parties.

While this controversy rages, hitters suffer from partial understanding.  Full understanding is required for hitters and hitting instructors to reach their maximum potential.

The problem with both schools is that many examples of excellent hitting can be found in either of them.  Each discipline has its superstar athletes with superstar numbers to refute the other. 

My premise is that neither school can claim to have the definitive style because there are superstars who hit with rotational mechanics (Albert Pujols) and other superstars who use linear mechanics (Ichiro Suzuki).  Many have traits of both schools, so, it seems logical that both camps have excellent points. 

There should be a way to explain the successes, and failures, of both systems.  My method of understanding, critiquing, and improving a swing does exactly that.
 
I call it the Correct Performance Zone(sm) method and it explains how hitters can be successful in both schools of mechanics. 

The truth is that both schools perform WITHIN certain Correct Performance Zones(sm) that will be quite evident once the reader learns what they are.

This book will teach you how to critique and improve ANY swing, including your own if you are a player.   Coaches will be better hitting instructors, players will be better hitters, and parents will know that their children are getting the best instruction available.  Once we know what is really going on, we can stop arguing about which school is best, and use the one, or parts of both, that best suit the hitter’s own native capacities.

My proven Correct Performance Zone(sm) method of analyzing and improving a baseball swing answers common questions with an easy to understand set of objective tools that work at any age level.  I know they work because I used them for five years in my Baseball Technical School (co-founded with Jeff Knox, formerly of the Yankees organization).

Every book on baseball mechanics written to date, regardless of which school it promotes, leaves players, coaches, and parents with hundreds of instructions that are at best confusing and often conflicting.  Frustrated players, coaches, and parents struggle to understand why one player steps in the bucket, then another player pulls her head off the ball, another pops up every pitch, one pulls everything, and another hits everything to the opposite field.

Strife abounds in hitters, their parents, and coaches, because they don’t have simple tools with which to analyze hitting mechanics.  Hundreds of suggestions come from every corner but the suggestions don’t always work.  Few of the advice givers really know what they’re talking about.

Why Do Hitters Step in the Bucket, for the first time in the history of the game, provides simple "prime" indicators that point to the problems then show how to fix them. Four imaginary rods point to every common problem which hitters can encounter.  The rods, or Prime Indicators, in combination with Correct Performance Zones(sm), define the relevant facets of hitting mechanics.  The indicators and performance zones were developed through my expertise as a ten-year Major League veteran who hit .300 twice in the big leagues, and who has taught hitting for more than 30 years.

My Baseball Technical School  used these simple methods to teach hundreds of players, coaches, and parents over a five-year period.  Each student was videotaped and improvement was measured over a six-week class period.  Classes were 3 hours long, once a week, and students ranged in age from eight year-old Little Leaguers to college players in their early 20’s, including female players.

Most hitting manuals are technical tomes that are difficult to read, but Why Do They Step in the Bucket is filled with stories from baseball that help to keep readers interested. My purpose in using anecdotes is to instruct and entertain at the same time.  Relevant stories accompany most of the instructional discussions, and humorous anecdotes are interspersed for interest.

I know this book is needed because I’ve seen what other methods of instruction are doing to young hitters.  The goal of my work is to help any hitter, parent, or coach, learn what they need to know to become expert hitting instructors themselves.  Using my methods, hundreds have already achieved that goal, and many more will learn from my book.

Contact me for a copy of the completed book proposal.

Sa-Faire'
Discovering the Writings of Jesus' Personal Scribe 

Sa-Faire' is a phonetic pronunciation of the Aramaic word for Scribe. 

Didn't you ever wonder why Jesus, one of the most influential figures in the history of the world, never wrote anything down?  Jesus read from the Holy Scriptures in synagogues as a youth, and taught from scripture more effectively than the Pharisees.  He came to fulfill the Law of Moses, to revamp an entire culture, but nobody wrote anything down until the letters of Paul, 25 years after Jesus' death.

The premise of this work of fiction is that Jesus did write things down, through a personal scribe (a boyhood friend who chose law over carpentry) who went with him everywhere.  The Scribe knew Jesus better than anyone, even the Apostles, and he recorded Jesus' ministry.  When Jesus was crucified, the Scribe fled with Mary Magdalen, and sealed up the records to keep them from being destroyed like the temple of Solomon.

Modern day anthropology students stumble on the Scribe's cache' of ancient documents and embark on a quest of discovery complicated by highly organized treasure seekers in an adventure romp that might reveal the true character of Jesus.

While this story shares the idea that Jesus had friends as a child, my work is nothing like "The Gospel According To Biff."  My work is set in modern times and is an action adventure based on the concept that there are documents from Jesus lifetime that are discovered by young anthropology students.

The Hobbyist Blacksmith
If you can hammer a nail, you can be a blacksmith.

You’ve probably admired ironwork gates, fences, tables, candle-holders, sconces, fireplace tools, hooks, hangars, and a myriad of other useful as well as decorative hand forged iron pieces. You probably like the nostalgic, retro look; the weight, and durability of iron. But it’s too expensive so you pass it by, opting for a mass-produced piece of goza to hang your flower baskets, pots and pans, or to hold your candles.

That’s what I did before I learned to make those things myself. Now I can enjoy the classic, artistic, robust nature of forged iron, through the incredible satisfaction of crafting something with my own hands, at low cost.  And I found that it's not as difficult or as expensive as I thought.  Anybody can enjoy blacksmithing with a little instruction and a few basic tools.  This book shows how it's done.

Wizard Mountain

This fantasy pits a group of ordinary children against newly awakened dragons in the caverns of Washington State's Mt. Si.  It's a bit like the Boxcar Children running into Smaug, Tolkeins' famous worm.  Children with no special powers other than their keen intellect and an array of individual native capcities must awaken an entire underground city before the dragons regain full consciousness. 

The wizard who froze the city thousands of years before, did so to protect his people from evil.  The wizard had no choice but to suspend animation in all living things within his protected realm, which included himself.  All remained asleep through the millennia, long past the age of wizard wars and real dragons, waiting for the the pure at heart to awaken them.  How will a small group of modern era children protect the world from an ancient maelstrom they have unwittingly released?

Diamonds From the Sky

When the "big one" hits the west coast, enough earth is moved to uncover an ancient kimberlite pipe in the Mt. St. Helens region.  A highly decorated military spy satellite image analyst discovers the pipe and has a decision to make, should he be true to his oath and creed, or succumb to the temptations of avarice beyond his wildest dreams? 

Of course, he succumbs, and so must betray his oath, making him an enemy of the organization that he loves - the US Marine Corps.  He devises machinations to conceal the discovery, and his identity.  He sets up a black market pipeline to move his diamonds and becomes a target for his former friends and associates in the military.  Entering the underworld creates enemies on that side as well, making him a target for the good guys and the bad guys too.  

Staying one step ahead of his pursuers and building a network of subterfuge keeps the pace high.  A new, secret life in the jet set crowd contrasts with "grunt" life as the main character struggles with separation from his former life. 

Are the benefits of immeasurable wealth worth trading for ones' family, friends, identity, and ideals?  . . .Oh yeah, rich is worth it, if you can stay alive long enough to enjoy the money.

MUFOC
The Milford UFO Club

It's 1965 in the little town of Milford, Ohio, where a group of young boys join on a quest to find real evidence of alien life.   They form a "UFO Club" with an adult adviser who shows them what to look for, how to report to the correct authority, and what to do in the event of a close encounter.   That summer the boys mingle pranks and pratfalls with moments of terror that change them forever.  They not only have a close encounter, they make friends with aliens who take them on adventures that span Galaxies.

This story takes the small town boyhood experience, reflective of Stand By Me, and slams it together with Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and a little bit of The Fourth Kind too.

Here is a sample:
(BACKGROUND: Bob and Jack are the founders of MUFOC.   They are stargazing with the members of the club in the middle of the night after their first meeting where they sent Morse code signals into the sky, challenging aliens to visit.  They have a simple magnetic field detector that they call a UFO detector.)


Back at Bob’s picnic table Jack took the plastic jar off of the UFO detector.  He stabbed the knife into the side of the jar and sawed out four window panels all the way around, leaving an inch-wide support between them.  Then he wrapped the plastic wrap around the jar a couple times making view ports.  He put the jar back on the detector and switched on the power.  About a minute later it went off.

“Jack, what are you doing, turn that thing off, you’re going to wake up my dad,” Bob ordered.

“Hey man, it’s going off on its own - I’m not touchin’ it.  Besides, you remember how quiet it was in the laundry room when we were out here.  We could barely hear it.  It isn’t going to wake anybody up.  Look, the magnet’s pointing to the southwest,” Jack said as he shined the flashlight in through the newly crafted windows.    He turned the buzzer off because the boys were already alerted and Jack watched the magnet move slowly from southwest to directly west.  “Look at this, it’s tracking something.”

The guys all crowded around the picnic table to watch the magnet pull against its wire, moving in twitches to slightly north of west.  The magnet pointed across the vacant lot toward the woods on the other side of Pleasant Hill road.

Then blue-green light shone above and through the tops of the trees.  They stood up as one and moved to the chain link fence on the west border of Bob’s yard, the side that adjoined the vacant lot.  The light moved slowly, casting shadows that drifted across the road like ghosts. 

“Maybe it’s a helicopter a couple hundred yards back from the edge of the woods shining a spotlight in our direction” Kelsey whispered.
  
But the light was bluish green in color, not the stark white of a spotlight.  There was no sound at all, just eerie blue-green light moving in their direction.

Jack’s hands were on the top bar of the fence, because he seemed to need something to hold onto, to steady his quaking knees, and he noticed a vibration in the fence.  He tore his gaze away from the light for a moment to see what was causing the fence to buzz in that peculiar way when he noticed that the metallic surface of the entire fence was covered in a shimmering blue-green luminescence. 

The boys had heard of St. Elmo’s fire before but none of them had ever seen it except in the movie version of Moby Dick. The fence looked very much like the rigging of the Peaquod on the night that Ahab quenched the supernatural fire on his harpoon.  Jack seemed to suddenly know that in the book, Ahab had extinguished the “corpusant” with his breath, not his hand.  The movie was different.

Why is this in my head, where is it coming from, Jack thought, and then realized the information was somehow coming to him through the fence.  Then a blast of information rushed into his brain, shocking him with its intensity.

“The fence!” Jack shouted and realized that his hands were clamped to it, as if his very flesh was magnetic.  He forced his hands open and pulled away with a backward lunge.

When his hands separated from the fence a shower of sparks and blue green lightning bolts passed between his fingers and the top rail.  Elbowed lances of fire, flashed into his brain as the bolts danced between his hands and the metal.  He felt a slight tingling sensation that made his fingers twitch - then a subtle numbness dissipated through his hands a little way up his wrists.

Jack looked at his hands and then looked at his friends all attached to the fence, each one with both hands on the top bar, still staring at the blue-green light progressing toward them from behind the trees.  The guys were quaking slightly as if an electric current was passing through them from the fence to the ground at their feet.

Jack suddenly became aware of a buzzing noise like bees in a hive just over his head.  He looked up; there was nothing but night sky with stars blazing brighter than he’d ever seen them before.  He looked back down at his friends and saw the blue-green light dancing over their fingers and then their hands and then their wrists.

“The fence, the fence – let go of the fence,” Jack shouted as he grabbed Bob and pulled him off, then Bill, Mike, Dick, Mark, and David in turn. 

All of them came to their senses after a moment of staring at their hands, and then the curved top of a flying saucer broke over the edge of the woods.  It glowed with the same light that still played on the fence and slowly the saucer hovered into view above the trees, still moving in their direction.

They stood rooted to the ground, mesmerized by the sight before them as the saucer came closer.  Slowly it cleared the trees, descended into and nearly filled the field next to Bob’s yard.  The ship was about a hundred feet in diameter and at least thirty feet thick, tapered to about a three-foot radius at the edge of the disk. 

The blue-green light that emanated from it seemed to have a liquid depth to it.  Several feet from the surface of the saucer the light played and shimmered like a pool of water surrounding the entire craft.  The light was so bright that it hurt their eyes but none of them could look away.  The sight held them all fixed in place.

As the craft settled toward the ground, the boys felt the tingling in their hands again and Jack forced himself to hold out his arms to see what was happening.  His hands glowed, covered in the same light that danced on the fence, now several inches thick around the chain link, liquid and deep like the saucer. 

Jack’s hands, wrists, and arms were progressively covered with the same light, and he shouted at the guys.  “Look, look at your hands!”

They all obeyed in somnambulant motion, as if they were hypnotized.  David seemed to wake up at the sight of his glowing hands and arms.  He brushed at the light, trying to wipe it off.  Then he snapped his hands out to flick it off.  He wiped and flicked over and over, faster and faster, and began to shout, “Get it off, get it off.  Help me get it off!”

The rest of the group simply stared at their hands for a moment and then went back to gazing like zombies at the saucer now extending three landing legs.  David frantically wiped and flicked without affect and Jack just stared at him wondering why he wasn’t going to David’s aid. 

David realized that he was helpless and couldn’t move, even though he wanted to, while his panic continued to increase.  Pushed by the terror of a life-or-death need to flee; David forced his feet to move.  He picked up his feet one at a time, trying to run away but he could only run in place.

Elbowed lances of fire danced from his feet to the ground at every step.  He wiped and flicked and picked up his feet, hopping around screaming to get it off.  Running in place like that, with lightning bolts extending from his feet as he picked them up higher and higher each time, David would have looked comical if the boys could have brought their minds into control long enough to laugh.  But David wasn’t laughing, he was terrified and finally the spell over him snapped.  He broke into a sprint toward the glowing gate with elbowed lightning bolts extending from his feet with every stride.  When he reached the gate he kicked it open and dashed around the corner of Bob’s house, screaming to get it off the whole time, headed toward the safety of his own home.

When David was gone, Jack looked back at the saucer that had already extended a cylinder from the center of its bottom that the boys somehow knew was an entrance.  The cylinder had come out while Jack watched David hopping around, and the buzzing had ceased.  Two beings had exited from an opening in the cylinder.  They were about the same size as the boys, but the aliens wore shiny green jumpers.  Their garb reminded Jack of the bunny suits that small children wore to bed in the winter, only made of green tin foil.  They had a large head with massive almond shaped slanted eyes.

The aliens walked toward the fence, already half way there by the time Jack had turned back from watching David run away.   The blue-green light had diminished to almost nothing. 

The next thing Jack remembered was waking up in his sleeping bag, policemen shaking the boys and urging them awake.