In Store Event with Michael Travis

Baseball has long been synonymous with Kansas. Go back to the late 1800s and the birth of Walter Johnson and George Sweatt, Humboldt kids who played baseball at the highest level but in different leagues due to racism. Learn about the sixteen-year-old signed by the Kansas City Athletics, who left the University of Kansas campus to play his first game at Municipal Stadium the next day. Read about pioneers in the game named Joyce, Katie and Alex, determined and talented women who are part of our national pastime. Author Michael Travis shares his love for the game, rounding the bases from its beginnings in Wichita with League 42 to the Major Leagues.

Michael’s love for baseball began in 1967, during a hot August night at his family’s lakeside cabin. He listened to Ned Martin and Ken Coleman narrate a Red Sox win at Fenway Park. Yaz, third in the league in batting at .321 and second in homers with twenty-eight, nailed Kansas City A’s Mike Hershberger, who tried to score from second on a single. The Sox were just two games behind Chicago in the standings after the 5–3 win. Was the impossible just a dream?

Michael’s childhood in Andover, Massachusetts, was loaded with baseball memories, the pomp and circumstance of opening day in the Little League season, the drama linked to a roll of the dice while playing Strat-O-Matic baseball, the daily consumption of the Boston Globe baseball news and the endless summer days of playing wiffle ball with his childhood buddy Charlie.

Michael’s days of playing ball are in the past, but the deep connection to the game is ever-present, whether he is at a ballgame at Eck Stadium or turning pages of Shoeless Joe, a 1982 classic by W.P. Kinsella. Michael’s better half in life, Ivy, is in pursuit of her master’s mental health PA degree while helping those in need as a charge nurse. Michael and Ivy spend idle time enjoying their grown daughters, Katie and Meg, as well as their son-in-law, Chris, and their three grandchildren, all angels, Jude, Luna and Jonah. Of course, one cannot forget that Maci, their goldendoodle, is the queen of their castle in Lawrence, Kansas.

Baseball in Kansas is Michael’s second book to be published. He pursued his love of Kansas craft breweries and their communities and stories in his first book, Celebrating Kansas Breweries: People, Places & Stories, published in 2022.

Michael’s love for the great game of baseball, the thrill of unearthing stories that need to see the sunshine and the joy of writing have come together in his first baseball book. Stay tuned for his next journey around the bases!

Host or Publisher Watermark Books & Café