The Board of Directors of the Baseball Reliquary is pleased to announce that Dan Epstein will deliver the Keynote Address at the Shrine of the Eternals Induction Day on Sunday, July 22, 2018 at the Donald R. Wright Auditorium in the Pasadena Central Library, Pasadena, California. The festivities will include the induction of the 2018 class of electees to the Shrine of the Eternals (Tommy John, Rusty Staub, and Nancy Faust), and the presentation of the 2018 Hilda Award and the 2018 Tony Salin Memorial Award.
An award-winning journalist, author, historian, and raconteur, DAN EPSTEIN writes about baseball, music, film, beer, and other things that make life worth living.
Dan is the author of the acclaimed baseball books Big Hair and Plastic Grass: A Funky Ride Through Baseball and America in the Swinging ‘70s and Stars and Strikes: Baseball and America in the Bicentennial Summer of ’76, both of which examine baseball’s most colorful and tumultuous decade and its overlap with American popular culture. He is also the author of 20th Century Pop Culture and Honky-Tonk Tourist: The Night Buck Owens Almost Got Me Killed. He is a regular contributor to Rolling Stone, Revolver, The Jewish Daily Forward, and October, and has written for Baseball Digest, Fox Sports, Vice Sports, The Hardball Times, Guitar World, and dozens of other publications. He has also appeared in several baseball documentaries, including No No: A Dockumentary, The Bird, The Swingin’ A’s, and Lenny Randle: The Most Interesting Man in Baseball.
Dan was born in New York City to a mother who grew up rooting for the Milwaukee Braves, and a father who loved the Brooklyn Dodgers (and then the New York Mets), so baseball was in his blood from the very beginning. He spent most of his childhood in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he played shortstop in Little League and became a Detroit Tigers fan for life; he spent his childhood summers in Los Angeles, where he rooted for the Dodgers, but transferred his National League loyalty to the Chicago Cubs upon moving with his family to the Windy City in 1980.
A resident of Southern California for over twenty years, Dan moved back to his former home of Chicago in 2015, and fully credits his return for the Cubs’ resurgence and eventual World Championship. He lives on the North Side with his wife Katie, their cats Oscar and Otis, and possibly way too many books and records. His home office contains a shrine to legendary Detroit Tigers pinch-hitter Gates Brown, with whom he shares a birthday. As his first two favorite ballplayers were Ron “The Penguin” Cey and Mark “The Bird” Fidrych, he deeply laments the lack of avian nicknames in present-day MLB.
