Raley in town to read from his book about the old hometown ball team

That stuff up there under the Blogolfosphere heading is all about the blog being all about golf. Except for days like today, when it’s about Raley, who isn’t much about golf at all these days.

Dan Raley, lately of Atlanta, Ga., is plenty busy with other things.

In another venue a couple years ago, I wrote about Raley’s 30 years at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

He covered lots of golf on assignment, but was a weekly golf columnist for only a relatively short time before the fall.

He got to know the historic figures of the game, including Gene Sarazen and Byron Nelson. He argued with Greg Norman.

“Jack Nicklaus walked me through Snoqualmie Ridge with his arm around my shoulder,” he says.

His work appeared in Golf Magazine, Golfweek and the Wall Street Journal.

He wrote a piece in the P-I about the seedy side of Augusta, Ga., site of the pristine Augusta National and The Masters. It’s not “the slice of Southern heaven” the ruling fathers of the Masters would have us believe, he says, and when he wrote it that way it raised eyebrows and won a national award from the Golf Writers Association of America.

Raley is now a story editor at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. It pays the bills, and was not a bad place to land after the P-I imploded in 2009.

But he hates the weather. And misses his family. The Seattle native has kept his house in east King County, with an eye toward getting back home someday.

All the while, he’s an author.

His first book, the well-received “Tideflats to Tomorrow,” about Seattle’s Sodo district, came out last year.

His third book, about a star NBA player with Seattle ties, has fallen through with one publisher, but can’t yet be called dead. A fourth book, which he’s chipped away at for years, is about 90 percent done and, he believes, sellable.

But it’s book No. 2 that brings Raley to Seattle today. He’ll be at Elliott Bay Books, 1521 10^th Ave., at 5 p.m. for a reading and signing of his “Pitchers of Beer: The Story of the Seattle Rainiers.”

Reviews have been warm: Bruce Baskin in www.seamheads.com wrote, “I’d recommend “Pitchers of Beer” highly to anyone who wants a well-written, well-documented history of what still stands for many as the true Golden Age of Seattle Baseball.”

And this from http://sportspressnw.com: “In baseballese, Raley not only jacked his story of the Seattle Rainiers out of the park, it’s a four-run, tape-measure, walk-off shot. Rarely does a book fuse history, humor and storytelling as well as this one.”

It ain’t golf, but that’s OK. Raley notes the irony that he lives in golf country – a couple hours from Augusta National – and doesn’t play.

“I do have my clubs,” he said this week.