A baseball fan since birth, a baseball writer for most of his adulthood, Mike Christensen has always been a student not just of the game, but of the people and stories in it.

“I’m watching MLB Network right now,” he said with a chuckle on Tuesday, during the deadest part of the offseason.

Throughout his career, Christensen quietly tucked those stories away. He compiled a few of them once for a book, but it never went anywhere and they sat untold.

Until now.

Christensen, a former baseball beat writer for the Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, broke out a few of those old stories and unearthed some new ones for his book “Of Mudcat, Boo, The Rope and Oil Can … An Informal History of Mississippians in Major League Baseball.”

The book was published in October by Sartoris Literary Group and is available in paperback at Bookland in the Vicksburg Mall, where Christensen will hold a book signing Saturday from noon to 2 p.m. It’s also available as an e-book through most major online distributors.

The book’s subject matter is exactly what its lengthy title suggests — a collection of nuggets, facts and stories about our state’s connection to and history with America’s Pasttime.

Some of the chapters focus on players who never made it or never got a chance to.

“One of the more interesting things was looking at the first of the black Major League Baseball players and the ones that never made it because they came along before Jackie Robinson,” Christensen said.

Other chapters focus on some of Mississippi’s baseball families like the Hairstons of Crawford, who have sent three generations of players to The Show, or odd coincidences that make the state an integral part of the game’s past.

“Babe Ruth’s first ever at-bat in the big leagues, he faced a Mississippian, Willie Mitchell, who was from up in the Delta,” Christensen said. “People don’t realize his last at-bat was also against a Mississippian, and so was his last home run. There’s a lot of little things like that.”

Christensen no longer works at the Clarion-Ledger, but he’s still collecting stories for the next volume. He operates a blog devoted to Mississippians in the major leagues called “AllMississippiBaseball.net” and is a fixture every summer at Trustmark Park when the Mississippi Braves are in town.

The book, he said, was “probably just a side project.”

“Sitting here at this moment, it’s overwhelming,” he said with a chuckle.

The book, though, is a labor of love and well worth the effort. Check out a copy, and stop by Bookland if you have some time on Saturday afternoon. Just because it’s the middle of winter doesn’t mean it’s too early to talk some baseball with a guy who loves the game. You might hear a few stories you never knew about.

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Ernest Bowker is a sports writer. He can be reached at 601-619-7120 or by email at ernest.bowker@vicksburgpost.com