About

Hi everyone! Tom Stone here, author of Now Taking the Field, a baseball email newsletter and blog.

I’ve had a successful 25+ year career in corporate HR and learning and development, but have also been a long-time freelance baseball analyst and writer. (I welcome connections on LinkedIn.)

After writing for several years at a previous personal blog and Seamheads.com, I finally published my first baseball book with ACTA Sports in early 2019: Now Taking the Field: Baseball’s All-Time Dream Teams for All 30 Franchises (see the book also on Amazon). I plan to write several more baseball books, but for now this email newsletter and blog is my primary baseball writing outlet.

If you are new here, consider taking a look at the archive of over 200 posts for some of what you’ve missed, such as:

• Unique player profiles called “Best, Worst, Outliers, and Oddities” on players such as Rickey Henderson, Dave Parker, Brooks Robinson, Joey Votto, Gaylord Perry… and more to come!

• All-Time Dream Teams for players born in each of the 50 US States, as well as various countries

• All-Time Dream Teams for players born in each of the 12 months

• My annual SABR Convention write-ups starting with SABR 50 in 2022

• My bi-monthly series “The Baseball Listicle Lineup,” which includes curated links to my favorite articles written by other baseball newsletter authors, as well as the fine folks at MLB.com.

A few other recent articles of note:

• The Baseball RIP Roster for 2024 (January 8, 2025)

• Individual and Team-level Franchise Records Set in 2024 (November 30, 2024)

• Overall 2024 MLB Stats in Historical Context (October 16, 2024)

• Are Career .300 Hitters a Dying Breed? (March 25, 2024)

What’s next?

Plenty! For one, I will continue to write about the kinds of topics I have been for the past 2+ years. And as noted, I have further full-length baseball book projects coming in the future, and a series of e-Books as well.

But in 2025 the big change will be the introduction of daily (or near-daily!) in-season “Baseball Buffet” newsletter series here at Now Taking the Field. For a sample of what this will look like, see the prototype I did on 9/22/2024. For this series there will be both a free version and a longer paid-subscriber version.

Thank you for reading my email newsletter and blog Now Taking the Field. Please subscribe (free!) so that you get each issue directly in your email inbox, and don’t miss out any of the fun!

Please also feel free to send me a note with any feedback you have—I can be reached by email at nowtakingthefield at gmail.com.

- Tom Stone

More about my first book…

The result of over 20 years of research, writing, re-writing, etc., I gave my spin on the question: Who is the best at each position throughout the history of each major league baseball franchise?

Now Taking the Field provided robust 30-man, all-time dream team rosters, selected based on Wins Above Replacement (WAR), traditional statistics, awards, and post-season accomplishments. Additional features for each all-time team chapter include starting lineups, depth charts, comparisons with numerous past authors and fan surveys, and more.

The book is over 600 pages, and did pretty well—at least for a first-time baseball book author. I appeared on MLB Now on the MLB Network in February 2019, gave a presentation at the Baseball Hall of Fame, and did over 100 radio and podcast interviews during the first 18 months after its release. Loads of fun, and you can learn more about the book at my website www.nowtakingthefield.com.