Identifying the questions you must ask and the data or evidence you will need is the first step in decision-making, and you can do that more effect
Identifying the questions you must ask and the data or evidence you will need is the first step in decision-making, and you can do that more effectively once you’re aware of the pitfalls posed by the cognitive biases and illusions I’ve cited in this book.
Bob Feller is reported to have said “Baseball is only a game, a game of inches, and lots of luck.” There is plenty of truth in that. But with the technological advances we have seen in the last decade, it may be that baseball has become a game of microns and milliseconds.
The benefit of having so much more data available today than has ever been at the fingertips of field or general managers, not to mention bookmakers and bettors, (that means you, Pete) is that what’s been considered revealed wisdom in the national game can now be subjected to ever more penetrating analysis. What that analysis reveals is that many presumably valid ideas have now been shown to be demonstrably false. So why do so many baseball pros continue to rely on notions that are nonsense? Keith Law has some answers for that. [image] Keith Law - image from The Athletic
In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith argues that what makes a so-called free economy productive is that people will act with a rational self-interest to pursue desired ends. Did Smith ever actually meet people? Sure, we have the capacity for rational thinking. And we even use it sometimes. But it is only one factor in how decisions are made. Decisions must, for good or ill (mostly ill), pass through a gauntlet of possible errors and biases. Law has pulled together a rich collection of poor excuses. We are all subject to biases, fallacies, aversions, and other non-rational forces of one sort and another, but ferreting out where irrational tilt lies is in the realm of psychology, and its dismal relation, economics.
Law has been known to take on purveyors of bullshit before. You might enjoy his Twitter exchange with evolution-denier, Kurt Shilling, here. ESPN actually suspended his Twitter account for a while (without suspending Shilling’s) which suggests that they have a lot of evolving to do. He took considerable umbrage with purveyors of baseball-related bullshit in his first book, Smart Baseball. Tilting at the windmills of bovine droppings is clearly Law’s thing. And we are all the better-informed on account of that.
In the highlighted paragraph at the top of this review, Law makes clear that while it is baseball that he is using for his examples, it is a wider reality that he hopes to influence. In doing so he espouses the wisdom to be found in a seminal work of behavioral science, Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, which is referenced throughout. He bolsters his analysis with references to research done by other experts as well.
There are thirteen chapters in the book, well fourteen if you add the Conclusion, each looking in some detail at particular types of bias, showing how that bias, or those biases impact decision-making, by players, umpires, field managers, team owners, and probably you and me. He offers not only backup on the theories behind each, but demonstrates the applicability of the theory with very real-world baseball examples. If you are averse to strong-opinions, Law may turn you off. He showed some rough tonal ledges in his first book, mostly absent here, but if you still believe that your best hitter should bat third, and that Joe Dimaggio deserved the MVP over Ted Williams in the year when the former hit in 56 consecutive games and the latter hit 406, you should be prepared to back those opinions up with facts, because Law can, and he makes perrsuasive arguments.
One thing that Law does not do is dabble much in politics. It is clear from his introduction that it is his intent to show how biases enter into our judgments in all sorts of ways. Baseball is the lens through which he shows how diverse biases impact decisions in a bad way. But he wants to show how they impact all our decisions. Political creature that I am, a full Notre Dame (before the fire) of clanging bells was pushing my application of Law’s lessons to the political arena. Here are a couple of examples.
Law looks at the success of manager Bob Brenly’s 2001 World Series vs the Yankees. The D’Backs won the series despite, not because of, Brenly’s decision-making. Law offers a considerable stack of judgmental errors Brenly made that should have resulted in his team being drubbed. Yet, the D’Backs won, and thus Brenly will evermore be known as a World-Series-winning manager. This is outcome bias. Results matter more than anything. But only if you are not interested in the future. Could a bad manager expect to have success going forward with the same set of instincts? Not bloody likely. Law quotes Thinking, Fast and Slow for this:
We are prone to blame decision makers for good decisions that worked out badly and to give them too little credit for successful moves that appear obvious only after the fact.
Fifty two Americans were taken hostage in Iran on November 4, 1979, after Iranian students took over the American embassy in Tehran. In April, 1980, President Carter ordered a rescue mission. The attempt failed, and Carter’s re-election prospects were irretrievably damaged as a result. There were plenty of other forces at play, including the GOP indulging in secret negotiations with Iran to encourage them to hang onto the captives until after the November 1980 elections, and the ABC show Nightline dedicating their nightly coverage to the “Hostage Crisis,” making sure to keep the issue at the top of everyone’s consciousness for the entirety of the election season. Whatever one may think of Jimmy Carter as president, it was a daring move to attempt a rescue. The failure was not his. It was in the implementation of Operation Eagle Claw. Yet, Carter took the blame for it, unfairly in my view. Results matter, but they are not all that matters. The unsuccessful resolution of the hostage crisis before the November 1980 elections doomed Carter, even though he made the best decision possible under impossible circumstance. He might have lost anyway, but the failure of the rescue mission made that loss a certainty.
The illusory truth effect.
Why do we cling to truths long after they’ve been disproven or lost their usefulness? Is it really just a matter of hearing something preached as true so frequently that our minds accept them not just as fact, but as the default perspective that must be actively dislodged by the jaws of life? Yes, as it turns out.
In his examples, Law writes about batter protection in a lineup. (A batter will get a juicier selection of pitches to swing at if the batter following him is a more dangerous hitter.) Turns out there is no real statistical evidence to support the notion. Yet, through persistent repetition over time, by people who should know better, belief in lineup protection persists.
Can any of you offer a real-world number for how many times you have heard Donald Trump speak the words “no collusion?” I doubt any of us who do not live in caves really can. And if you are an adherent to right-wing media, Fox, Rush, Sinclair, or the like, you are probably speaking it aloud in your sleep, to the alarm of your bed-partner. Despite a detailed commission report that offers fine detail on just how that collusion was carried out, there are still people who believe that Trump did not collude with Russia in his 2016 presidential campaign. There are probably even people who are not of the cultish right who harbor doubts about it. It is pretty clear that repeating something over and over and over and over and over…continued ad nauseum, has the same effect on reason that the Colorado River had on the landscape of the Grand Canyon.
I could go on, but you get the idea. Law identifies a passel of these, including anchoring, availability, hindsight, optimism, order, outcome, recency, status quo and survivorship biases. He tosses in a handful of fallacies, some aversions, and a soupçon of other irrational tiltings.
I do not really have any gripes with the book, but there was one instance in particular in which I thought Law tilted the wrong way.
When a specific fact or example comes to mind more readily, we tend to overemphasize that fact or example—maybe we ascribe too much importance to it, or perhaps we extrapolate and assume that that example is representative of the whole. This phenomenon is called availability bias, and I think it’s one of the easiest biases to understand but one of the hardest to catch in yourself, because it’s not just natural, but easy. Your brain is just doing what you asked, right? You thought about some question, and your brain went right to the hard drive and pulled out something relevant. Your brain didn’t go to the archives, although, and it probably just gave you one thing when you actually needed the whole set.
I believe Law dismisses a concern that should be obvious. For example, he regards the selection of the last place Cubs’ Andre Dawson for the 1987 MVP as a travesty, given that his numbers were bested by several players in the league. But that presumes that numbers are the only things worth considering in casting those ballots. Dawson, as Law notes, had taken on collusion by MLB ownership in their attempt to protect the notorious reserve clause. He offered the Cubs a contract with the salary left blank. He would play for any amount of money. It forced the Cubs’ owner’s hand, and helped advance the cause of possible free agency. His statistical value as a player may have been well below that of some other players, but his courage, and sheer value to the game was unparalleled. It was for this that he was likely rewarded by MVP voters. In this instance, Law contends that it was Dawson’s being in the news every day in coverage of the free agency issue that won him the award, the availability bias of frequent and recent repetition that moved voting Dawson’s way.
But do not be put off by that. There is a vast amount to love in The Inside Game. It offers a way to explain not only why so much misunderstanding bedevils baseball, but how such misunderstandings permeate all human activity. It is a look not just inside how baseball decisions are made, but how perspectives and decisions are arrived at inside our own heads.
2020 was a lost year for baseball, entirely for the minors, and largely for the top tier. 2021 again offered a 162 game season. Given that hospitalizations for Covid in Spring 2021, despite increasing numbers of people being vaccinated, have been increasing, made that prospect less than certain. The first game of the season for my Mets, for example, did not go off as hoped because at least one Washington Nationals player had come down with Covid, and at least four others were contact-traced into quarantine. You may find yourself with a few baseball-watching hours freed up by such forms of misery. If so, you can sustain your connection to the national pastime by passing some productive time with Keith Law. It will help you prepare for what games are actually being played in MLB, given whatever plague is making the rounds when you get to it, and offer you the bonus of offering insightful information about the wider world, and how we frail humans function. Check this one out. It’s the right call.
You should know that his personal site is for things unrelated to sports. He had a blog on ESPN, but one must sign in to get the full benefit, and he no longer work there. These days he is a sen ior baseball writer for The Athletic, also a pay site. You can find his podcast for them here.
My review of the author’s prior book -----2017 - Smart Baseball
Interview -----Hittin' Season - Episode #376 - with John Stolnis Thanks to GR friend (although, sadly, a Phillies fan) Regina Wilson for letting us know about this excellent interview
I confess I find soccer, what the rest of the world calls football, boring. This is not the same as believing that soccer/football actually is boring.I confess I find soccer, what the rest of the world calls football, boring. This is not the same as believing that soccer/football actually is boring. I am certain that it is not. But as someone who knows pretty much nil about the game, I lack the vision, the knowledge, the insight to be able to identify the finer points, to be able to articulate why this formation or that player are well set up to create a scoring opportunity or defend against a powerful offense. Sometimes it is pretty blatant when a player takes a dive hoping to generate a colored card for an innocent opponent, but other times it is not so easy for my uneducated eyes to judge. I do not know how to evaluate whether the goalie is premier league material or should still be playing in AYSO. But with baseball it is an entirely other story.
[image] Keith Law
Those who look down their noses at baseball, seeing a painfully slow contest are, as I am with soccer, simply not attuned to the detail, the minutiae of the game. (There are others, of course, who are so insanely driven by the need for constant dopamine drips from their electronic devices that they are probably unable to attend to much of anything for more than the attention span of a goldfish. But those are not the people at issue here.) They see a pitcher taking for bloody ever to throw the ball to the plate. I see a contest between the baserunner, pitcher, catcher, first baseman, second-baseman and shortstop as one attempts to gauge the possibilities of a successful steal, and the defense feints, jabs, and maybe thrusts to prevent it. Will the pitch be a fastball, to give the catcher the most possible time to make a throw toward second? Will the pitcher and catcher opt to focus on the batter at the possible cost of a steal? Maybe the catcher will call for a pitchout. Every pitch has a purpose. Every shifting defensive alignment has the strengths of a particular batter in mind. When you know the details, the game becomes incredibly more interesting, a collection of hundreds of smaller contests within the larger game. One of the small pleasures I have always enjoyed is trying to predict what the next pitch will be. I am fairly adept at it. Baseball is a game I have loved since I was a small child. That love was a gift from my father, one for which I continue to thank him, and one that will accompany me to whatever, if anything, comes next.
One can certainly enjoy the game for the skills on display, the balletic artistry of a fielder making a particularly challenging defensive leap, a powerful and accurate throw, maybe from his knees or worse. You might be impressed by the power of a pitcher throwing a fastball past an overmatched batter at over a hundred miles an hour; the gift of a knuckle-ball practitioner making that same five and a half ounce ball dance its way toward the plate as if the laws of gravity had been temporarily suspended, leaving a hapless hitter swinging at empty space, slamming his bat into the dirt and muttering expletives on his way back to the dugout. But it is nice to know that if we care to indulge, there are now new, finely honed tools available that can deepen our appreciation for and understanding of the game we love.
There have always been diverse views on how to measure the game of baseball. How can you tell if this player or that is the best hitter, pitcher, fielder or baserunner? We use numbers of course, thousands, millions, who knows, maybe billions of numbers to gauge the value of players, specifically professional players, of what remains America’s pastime. They have changed over the years since 1869 when the Cincinnati Red Stockings played the first professional baseball game. The sport had been around a while before that. For example, there are tales of Rebel and Union soldiers laying down their arms to engage in a friendly competition.
While I have no doubt that he appreciates the beauty of the game, it is the numbers that are the substance of Keith Law’s Smart Baseball. And he has the background to offer an informed opinion. He is a senior baseball writer for The Athletic, was a senior baseball writer for ESPN, wrote formerly for The Baseball Prospectus, and worked in the front office of the Toronto Blue Jays.
He has many unkind things to say about some of the measures we have used for decades and decades as the basis for assessing the value of a given player. He takes pains to explain why this or that statistic offers a false image of a player’s true worth. His explanations are persuasive. For example, he takes umbrage at Batting Average as a measure of offensive worth, arguing that On-Base Percentage is a much better indicator. This is pretty much old news among baseball fans, but Law adds further tweaks, generating something that probably looks foreign to the casual fan. “wOBA” is not a typo. It stands for Weighted On Base Average, a more precision tool for measuring a player’s offensive production.
He takes particular umbrage, as well he should, at the overvaluation of the Win for pitchers. Even the average fan knows that Wins are often assigned to pitchers who do not deserve them, and Losses given to pitchers who have performed admirably. One of the reasons for this, and a theme that permeates Law’s analysis, is that there is a mismatch in traditional baseball stats between team and individual analytics. A pitcher might deliver a no-hitter and still take a loss if his team musters no offense of its own. Not the pitcher’s fault. Likewise, a less than stellar pitching outing might be masked by a superior defense, or a particularly productive offense. Law also looks at the history of futility baseball has had attempting to come up with sane metrics for measuring fielding prowess.
One of the big changes in baseball, of very recent vintage, is the broad introduction of Statcast. In the last few years, every major league stadium has been outfitted with advanced tech that allows measurements unavailable before. Things like exit velocity, home run distance, launch angle, pitch rotations per minute, perceived pitch speed. Law points out that this might inform how baseball executives’ evaluate players, but also how the tech might prove useful for medical purposes. For example, a decrease in the spin rate of a pitcher’s fastball might indicate fatigue or even injury. The amount of data being handled is staggering. Teams now must hire tech experts just to keep up with this new store of intel.
Law can get a bit literal and harsh.
You’ll hear announcers say a pitch must have looked like a beach ball to him, or that his confidence is through the roof. The problem with this myth, as with others, is that the evidence from reality shows that this effect either barely exists or doesn’t exist at all. It’s merely our brain’s attempts to find patterns in data that are pretty close to random.
There is certainly room for a line between what qualifies as myth (Babe Ruth pointing for #60) and what is a fair application of metaphor. Griping about the latter goes too far. I found this tone present in the beginning parts of the book, but, thankfully, it tapered off as things got rolling.
You will come away from reading Smart Baseball with a greater appreciation for some players, present and retired, than you had before, and will find your analytical toolkit significantly enhanced should you care to avail when considering why so-and-so is such a bum, or why whatshisname is so underappreciated, or why your team really, really should not trade Crash, particularly not for Nuke. I suppose there are many for whom these new measures will inform their decisions in Fantasy Baseball leagues of one sort or another.
I consider myself a baseball aficionado somewhere in the upper middle of the fandom bell curve. I played a little, and have watched a lot. I have managed little league teams, and struggled with designing batting orders and fielding assignments. I have some appreciation for the uses of numbers to inform decision-making. I was never a sabermetrics geek, although I did apply some of those lessons in my managing. I can appreciate that new ways of looking at the sport are not intended as hostile attacks on the traditions of the game, but are intended to improve our understanding. In the same way that using a CT scan instead of an X-ray can offer a better, more detailed view of what is actually going on. Law has brought together a collection of tools that will be very useful for people who care about baseball. He has made clear where some flaws lie in our current stat-keeping, and shown how some of these errors can be fixed. Smart Baseball offers a very accessible and readable intro to new ways of seeing baseball, making a bit of sabermetrics understandable, without burying readers in mountains of data and cryptic diagrams. While it cannot offer the visceral thrill of a perfectly implemented steal of home, it can help fuel the satisfaction of readers who apply the tools offered here to predict when it will happen, and to be able to explain why.
6/24/17 - NY Times - a fascinating article on Statcast. It includes the surprising bit of intel that in 1926, in a post-season exhibition game, Babe Ruth is reported to have hit a home run 650 feet! The particular tickle for me is that this took place in Wilkes Barre, PA, my new digs. - That Was Hit a Country Mile, or 495 Feet if You’re Into Hard Data - by Filip Bondy
It would seem to have almost nothing to do with their biceps muscles or fast-twitch fibers or even their vision, which, for most baseball players is largely the same. It would seem to have much more to do with the neural signals that impel our every movement. “It’s like saying people who can speak French very well have a very dexterous tongue,” John Krakauer, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University, told me. “It would be the wrong place to assign the credit.”
Bob Costas, one of the smartest sports commentators of his time, makes his argument for revenue sharing in baseball and for the elimination of the wilBob Costas, one of the smartest sports commentators of his time, makes his argument for revenue sharing in baseball and for the elimination of the wild-card from post-season consideration.
Basically, he claims that the vast income differential between the large and small market franchises means that small market towns will almost never have an opportunity to fully compete. He points out that in recent history the teams with the highest payrolls are almost always the ones in the playoffs. (There are notable exceptions of course. The Oakland franchise mastered the art of using advanced metrics to get the most bang for their bucks, and there is the KC Royals success of recent vintage.) Of course, a high payroll does not automatically get one onto post-season, but it is a prerequisite for contending. He proposes that both national and a portion of local broadcast and gate revenue be pooled and distributed evenly. This would reduce the top to bottom ratio from one-to-five (as it was between the Yankees and what was then the Montreal Expos) to a less drastic two to one. He also proposes that teams have a minimum player salary budget to ensure that greedy small market owners do not pocket the extra cash. In addition he proposes capping player salaries, while increasing the minimum salary players might receive. The net effect is to put significantly more money into the hands of players, at the expense of the highest paid players.
[image] Bob Costas - from ABC News
He is opposed to radical realignment, claiming that baseball is linked to its history like no other sport, and mixing and matching national and american league teams would be the wrong thing to do. Instead he proposes a slight shuffle that would put the Houston Astros in the American League West. (which did indeed come to pass)
Re playoffs, he contends that the wild card, far from ensuring access to the playoffs for small market teams, has worked to the benefit of big market teams, almost exclusively. He says that there is no clear evidence that attendance figures are enhanced by the increase in the number of contending teams. He claims that the wild card, instead of enhancing the end-of-season races, in fact eliminates them, since what might once have been meaningful games are frequently reduced to exhibitions played by teams who both know they will be in post-season. He proposes instead that there be simple division winners, and no wild card. The team with the best record in the league would get a first round bye, while the second and third place teams play in the first round. There would be fewer games, but they would be more meaningful, and would reward those who finished atop their divisions.
I am not certain I agree with Costas on his proposals. Perhaps it is just the fan in me wanting the Mets to have a chance to make the playoffs each year, while saddled with what was then the Atlanta Braves dominance in their division. But the wild-card does keep me interested in September when I could easily fade away as Atlanta (then) or the Nationals (now) surge to another title. I confess that I am less concerned for the small market teams than Costas. I imagine if lived in one of them I might feel differently. And Billy Beane has shown that smarts can compete with cash. And as for revenue sharing, my only real problem with it is that if players must accept a cap on their salaries, there should be some mechanism by which owners would be capped as well, all, of course, for the good of the game. And while we are at it, baseball executives should be subjected to drug testing as well as players. We would not want executive decisions about our favorite teams being made by people who were under the influence of whatever.
PS - I must add a caveat here. This book was published in 2000, which was when I read it and wrote this. I made small edits to update some details, but it remains as I wrote it a lifetime ago. I have not checked back to see if Costas has changed his views since then....more
For 130 years, pitchers have thrown a baseball overhand, and for 130 years, doing so has hurt them. Starter or reliever, left-handed or right-hand
For 130 years, pitchers have thrown a baseball overhand, and for 130 years, doing so has hurt them. Starter or reliever, left-handed or right-handed, short or tall, skinny or fat, soft-tossing or hard-throwing, old or young—it matters not who you are, what color your skin is, what country you’re from. The ulnar collateral ligament (UCL) , a stretchy, triangular band in the elbow that holds together the upper and lower arms, plays no favorites. If you throw a baseball, it can ruin you. When the UCL breaks, only one fix exists: Tommy John surgery…More than 50 percent of pitchers end up on the disabled list every season, on average for two months—plus, and one-quarter of major league pitchers today wear a zipper scar from Tommy John surgery along their elbows.
Major League Baseball (MLB) currently spends about $1.5 billion a year on pitchers. There is considerable financial incentive for organized baseball to find a solution to this epidemic of injury. And there is certainly plenty of human need on the part of players and their families for something to be done. How did this plague of injuries come to be and what can be done about it?
[image] Jeff Passan - from the Sports Journalism Institute
Jeff Passan is currently a sports journalist at ESPN. He got loose, picking up his journalism degree at Syracuse in 2002, did some soft-toss, covering Fresno State basketball for two years, warmed up his baseball writing in the hardball beat at the Kansas City Star for two years, and was been in the starting rotation with Yahoo for thirteen before taking his latest gig.
“My dad worked at The Cleveland Plain Dealer for 40 years, so I knew what I wanted to do when I was 12 years old,” Passan said. “I was very lucky. My dad has been editing my stuff for 20 years now and I can say he’s the best editor I’ve ever had.” - from SJI article
Mostly, I wanted to understand this for my son. He was five years old. He loved baseball. He wanted to play catch every day. He was hooked, like his dad. And the more I heard stories from other parents—of their sons getting hurt or boys they know quitting baseball teams because their arms no longer worked—the more I needed to figure out what was happening to the arm.
Passan takes parallel approaches to his subject, mixing hardball facts with softer stuff. There is a lot of information to impart. He compares the current injury rate and occupational environment to those of the past. He looks at the structure of the arm, considers the stresses it endures and presents competing theories on the causes of the current epidemic. He spends time with experts in the current state of UCL injury medicine, and talks with several proponents of alternative approaches to injury prevention and rehabilitation. One of these is Doctor Tommy John, Jr. And yes, Passan does talk with TJ Senior as well. He examines promising models for the future, including one new surgery that could have a dramatic impact on recovery time and another training approach that shows promise as a way of preventing the injury in the first place. He follows through, making a large point of showing that many of the current approaches to prevention and rehab are based more on wishful thinking than on hard science. He also goes the distance, traveling to Japan to look at how things are done there, and seeing if their approach is better or worse for arms.
[image] Todd Coffey - from redmtnsports.com
While I revel in theory and data, there are many for whom it is much more informative to see how this widespread and growing problem affects actual humans. Analyzing the causes and effects, lost revenue, and lost time can leave one remote to the impact on living players and families. Passan’s other, softer approach comes in here. He had hoped to find one pitcher who would allow him to tag along through the entirety of his Tommy John process. He managed to find two. The emotional, human heart of The Arm lies in the stories of professional pitchers Daniel Hudson of the Diamondbacks and Todd Coffey. Coffey succumbed to a need for Tommy John a second time while pitching for the LA Dodgers. Passan is our eyes and ears as we accompany Hudson and Coffey on their painful sojourn from the Major League venue, through surgery and rehab, and their daunting struggle to make it back to the show. It may take a team to win a pennant, and a medical team to stitch up a damaged limb, but it takes supreme dedication to a lengthy and tedious rehab program, persistent optimism and a supportive family, to lift a player from the depths of a career-threatening injury back up to a place where the lifetime dream of pitching in the major leagues (and the income associated with that career) might again be realized. The physical pain of a UCL tear can be intense. The emotional pain on display here is heart-rending. The struggles the players endure are intense and long-lasting, the triumphs uplifting, the defeats crushing.
[image] Daniel Hudson - from ESPN
One of the joys of The Arm is when surprising bits of information drift past like an Eephus pitch or an RA Dickey knuckler. There was a time when surprising solutions were tried to address arm problems. In the 1950s in Brooklyn (not Victorian London) doctors working for the Dodgers actually extracted teeth from prize pitching prospect Karl Spooner. “They thought poison was coming down his shoulder,” said Sandy Koufax. One shudders to imagine what they might have tried when faced with a knee injury. Passan offers some chin music to organizations like Perfect Game, an entity that, among other things, organizes tournaments for promising young (sometimes absurdly young) amateur players, and has played a significant role in youth baseball. I had never heard of it before, and had no notion the impact such entities have had.
In the absence of a better solution to this ongoing plague, and looking to biotech for an edge, I would expect that at some point in the not too distant future, MLB teams will require players to provide DNA and maybe even tissue samples for use by advanced labs so they can grow the parts that might someday need repair or replacement. (It does conjure a ballpark image for me of stadium hawkers peddling cold ones of a different sort from a beer cooler. “Getch yer tendons, heah,” but that’s just me.)
[image] A nifty look inside – from TopVelocity.net
There are some hopeful signs (one finger for likely, two for less certain?) for being able to stem this problem in future. Flush with a large sack of TV moolah, the Dodgers have invested some real money in an in-house think-tank looking at player health issues. As Passan points out, it would be better for the resulting intel to be available league-wide, rather than held by one team for competitive advantage, particularly as the Tommy John plague has struck children at an alarming rate. There is some promising research that looks to the relationship of forearm muscles to the UCL. Maybe forearm training can do for torn UCLs what increased shoulder muscle training did to reduce career death by torn rotator cuff a few decades ago.
Jef Passan has the smooth delivery one would expect from someone who writes every day about sports. He drops in occasional dollops of absolutely lovely description like a 12-to-6 hook.
The Currents Lounge inside the Hyatt Regency Jacksonville is a paint-by-numbers hotel bar, with a few flat-screen TVs, a menu of mediocre food, and a broad liquor selection to help people forget they’re drinking in a hotel bar in Jacksonville.
It generates an urge to look around and find out where the down-at-the-heel PI is hoisting another ill-advised shot while waiting for a femme fatale client. Another:
Nothing beats a major league mound, a ten-inch-high Kilimanjaro that few get to climb. Nobody in team sports commands a game like the pitcher. He dictates the pace and controls the tempo. A goalie in hockey or soccer can win a game with superior reaction. A pitcher prevents action. There is great power in that.
So, a sweet, writerly changeup to go with his intel-rich heater.
I have a particular interest in the subject matter here. A baseball fan since gestation, a Mets fan since their birth, I have been drooling over the possibility of (no, not tossing up a wet one) another trip to the MLB finale for my team, an organization with a collection of elite arms rarely seen in the history of the game. As a Mets fan forever, I am also far, far too familiar with the impact injury can have on the team, on any team. My Metsies’ chances flow nicely down the drain should the arms on which team hopes rest succumb to injury. Three of the five have already had Tommy John surgery, Zach Wheeler, Jacob DeGrom and Matt Harvey. How long can it be before Noah Syndergaard and rookie Steven Matz fall prey? As I was preparing this review, I came across an item of particular interest on the NY Mets site. Mets rotation features rare trio of flame-throwers, which focused attention on Noah Syndegaard, possessor of one of the most blazing fastballs in the game, and was reminded of one of the bits of intel in The Arm, namely that the higher the pitch speed, the likelier a pitcher is to be injured. The path from flame-thrower to flame-out is well worn and covered in the ash of lost dreams. And what if one of the already cut three should fall again? I am sure baseball fans everywhere share similar concerns. Even though, as followers of the national sport, we really have no impact on what happens on the field, it would be nice to at least be able to talk about the injury horrors from a base of knowledge, instead of the more usual dugout of pure, ill-informed bias. Passan’s The Arm offers fans that opportunity.
If, like me, you get a bit queasy, reading detailed descriptions of bodily innards, if, like me you experience what seems phantom sensations in your joints when reading about things that may go wrong there, if, like me, you still have tenderness or feel far too vulnerable in body parts like those under consideration here, The Arm will lean on all those buttons and feed your inclinations toward physical discomfort. On the other hand (the good one) if you are a baseball fan (check), player (sadly, no), a coach (once, for many years) a parent of a player, or several (long ago), or a friend or a relation of a player, get over the quease, have a drink, or apply whatever substances, legal or prohibited, ease the condition (no, not an ice-pack to the elbow, but if that works, well, sure, why not), whatever will get you past the discomfort, and shake it off. Jeff Passan's opus is truly a sight for sore arms and must read for you.
Review first posted - February 5, 2016
Publication Date – April 5, 2016
BTW - November 16, 2016 - Rick Porcello of the Boston Red Sox was awarded the American League Cy Young award. In April 2015 he had Tommy john surgery. Pretty frackin' amazing!
==========In the summer of 2019 GR reduced the allowable review size by 25%, from 20,000 to 15,000 characters. In order to accommodate the text beyond that I have moved it to the comments section directly below.
There is a lot of used-to-be in Wiley Cash’s sophomore novel, This Dark Road to Mercy. Wade Chesterfield used to be a baseball player, used to be a huThere is a lot of used-to-be in Wiley Cash’s sophomore novel, This Dark Road to Mercy. Wade Chesterfield used to be a baseball player, used to be a husband and used to be a father. But he went oh-for three and now, as a guy who used to hang drywall and is on the run, he is mostly a crook.
Bobby Pruitt had been a ballplayer too, but his damaged youth led him in a dark direction, and now he is an enforcer for a local thug. He would like to apply his professional skills to Wade, not only in service of his current employer, but as personal payback for something Wade had done to him on the ballfield. He presents a clear and present danger not only to Wade but to his family.
[image] Wiley Cash - image from Hoover Library
Brady Weller used to be a police detective, but after he was involved in an event that left a boy dead, he became an installer of home security systems, working for his brother-in-law. There is more going on with Brady, though. He is also a court-appointed guardian to children in need of such protection in Gastonia, North Carolina. This includes two young girls.
Easter Quillby hasn’t been around long enough yet to have much in her rear-view. But more than most pre-teens. Wade had surrendered custody of her and her little sister, Ruby, a few years back, and mom died recently of a drug overdose. Have a nice childhood. She and Ruby live in a state-run orphanage.
Writing in the voice of a child has its risks and rewards. Children often lack the power of reflection that adults possess, so their narratives can charge forward without the breaks of reflection or evaluation. Adults are more cautious, especially about what they divulge. If a child is an unreliable narrator it’s probably because he or she doesn’t fully understand what he or she is talking about. If an adult is an unreliable narrator then it means that he or she is hiding something. But child narrators also offer a challenge in terms of their emotional make-up. Their reactions to tragedies great and small are often displayed in similar ways. A young child’s reaction to the death of a pet can be similar to the reaction to the death of a family member. With that in mind, you have to be very careful about how you portray a child’s emotional scale. You want the reader to be able to intuit its depth even if the child’s reaction doesn’t reflect it. - from the Crime Fiction Lovers interview
Easter, Brady, and Pruitt are the three alternating narrators through whose eyes we see the events in Cash’s tale. We see Wade mostly through Easter’s eyes.
The action of the novel consists of Wade re-entering the girls’ lives after years of absence, snatching his daughters to join him as he flees dark elements in Gastonia, Pruitt pursuing Wade do him harm, and Brady trying to protect the girls. There are white-knuckle moments in this chase.
One of the true strengths of Wiley Cash’s debut novel, A Land More Kind Than Home, was his portrayal of children. That gift is manifest in full power here. Easter certainly reminds one of Scout from To Kill a Mockingbird, and the usual Stephen King pre-ad heroes and heroines. And with a name like Easter you’ve gotta figure she is gonna be reborn someway, somehow. Name a girl Ruby and I expect most of us might think of slippers and “There’s no place like home.” That would make sense here, for a girl who is hoping to have a family again. But it is Easter who will hold your attention and your affection. When there is danger afoot you will really, really want for Easter to be ok. She is not only a tough and decent kid, she is a very well-drawn one, and the best thing about this book
There are several threads (maybe red stitching?) running through The Dark Road…. Baseball figures large. Page 1 introduces Easter on a ballfield. Wade was a professional player, as was Pruitt. And when baseball is in play, one need not look too far to bring in the element of steroids. Wade and Pruitt have a history with them, and one of them still imbibes. And speaking of steroids, the time is 1998, and McGwire and Sosa are engaged in the most famous ‘roid-fueled home run derby of our age. The contest is large in the consciousness of these characters, and a subject of widespread daily conversation in the environments they inhabit. The heavy-hitters’ contest is even used in a very Hitchcockian way to provide a dramatic backdrop for the climax.
[image] The Race is On
Another seam here is parenting. Wade is not a complete screw-up. He may not have made the best choices, and he may not be, exactly, the best person, but he does love his kids, and wants to be a father to them. But abandoning them for several years and snatching them on his way out of town was probably not what a good parent might do. Pruitt’s upbringing comes in for some inspection as well. And Brady copes with having a surly teenager he only gets to see some of the time. Finally, atonement comes in for a look. Wade may be a criminal, but he does want to make up for having left his children. He really wants to make a better life for them. Brady wants to atone for his part in the fatal accident, and does so by acting to protect vulnerable children. Pruitt is more interested in payback than atonement.
Another item you might keep an eye out for is the notion of what’s in a name.
Mom always said that she’d named us what she’d named us because those were her favorite things: Easter was her favorite holiday and rubies were her favorite jewels. Me and Ruby used to ask Mom all the time what her other favorite things were, and we’d pretend those things were our names instead…It seems crazy to say we played make-believe like that now, but we used those names so much they almost became real.
Easter has to contend with a real-world decision concerning her name, and there is at least one adult in the story with a temporary alias, and another who has adopted a new name permanently.
Finally, this is a road trip, (it is even in the title) and that usually means a journey of self-discovery. The girls’ fondness for the computer game Oregon Trail foreshadows their later journey with Wade. What will these characters discover, how will they change, grow or wilt on this trip? A Catcher in the Rye mention does let us know there is some of coming of age going on. The girls are looking for a family. Pruitt is looking for revenge and Brady is looking for redemption. Wade is looking for some sort of gateway to a Promised Land.
”Oklahoma, Texas? California?” His eyes got bigger as he listed the names. “We could keep going clear on to the Pacific Ocean if we wanted to.” “Then what?” I asked. “We can’t live in this car forever.” “I don’t know,” Wade said again. “I guess that’s why they call it an adventure.”
This is an engaging and fast-paced story. A pretty fair read. I do have some gripes of course. While the attempt for a North by Northwest moment was ambitious, it was not fully realized. Of course by then you have already enjoyed 95 percent of the book so it is not a huge issue. I still read Stephen King and I usually do not much care for his endings either. I did feel that some decisions made by characters here were stage-managed a bit too much. Why such and like has to take place here and then might fit into the author’s desire for the most dramatic possible setting, but did not make all that much sense to me as something the characters would actually do. There are also some convenient events that are inserted into the story to prepare one for the finale. It seemed to me that these were artificial and a bit jarring. Fine, whatever. It’s still a pretty good read, and those elements might not make your Spidey senses tingle the way they did mine.
This Dark Road to Mercy is indeed dark, but illuminated. There is plenty of road to contrast with a desire for home, and sufficient dollops of mercy to soothe sundry pains. This road is one worth taking.
In the 2002 ML baseball draft, Matt McCarthy, a Yale lefty with a fastball that had occasional familiarity with 90+mph was drafted in the 26th round bIn the 2002 ML baseball draft, Matt McCarthy, a Yale lefty with a fastball that had occasional familiarity with 90+mph was drafted in the 26th round by the Anaheim Angels. He was urged by friends and relations to keep a journal of his experiences, and those journals form the basis of this 2009 story of his single season in the sun of professional baseball.
When the book came out, there was a bit of a firestorm. McCarthy got some of his names, dates, and possibly facts wrong enough that the New York Times highlighted them in two articles. (The links are at the bottom of this review.) It does sound to me that he got a few things wrong. It is even possible that his characterization of this player or that might cause those people some harm. I have no way of knowing the truthfulness of McCarthy’s writing. But I am familiar with how difficult it can be to reconstruct events several years after the events, based on handwritten notes, so am inclined to give McCarthy the benefit of the doubt, and ascribe no malice to his writing. I expect that mistakes which do appear in the book are simply off the plate and are not intentional beanballs. In several instances, I expect that people are simply embarrassed at some of the revelations and it is easier to deny them than to take responsibility.
[image] Matt McCarthy
There are some items in the book that might be troublesome for some of the players. McCarthy describes behavior between players that indicates a gay inclination. And that is a barrier that MLB has not yet faced up to. McCarthy also reports on his Rookie League manager’s antics. These include directing his pitcher to hit an opposing batter in retaliation for Provo players having been hit, some mood-swinging, and a remarkable and humorous substitute for the team’s rally monkey. Some players are reported to be milking their disabled list status to avoid playing, and the ethnic separation of players is distinctive, with all Hispanic players, of whatever national origin, designated as “Dominicans” and all others as “Americans.”
So what’s the big deal? Frankly, I do not think there is one. I have read my share of baseball books, and I did not find this one to be exceptional. There were some bits of information that were not at all surprising, such as the use of steroids, (The only surprise might be that there were players who were not using) and the horrors of massive bus rides, the low-wage life that most of these players endure, and the mix of fresh blood on the way up and older players on the way down, high draft picks being handled with kid gloves, and lower draft picks being treated with far less kindness. Class as defined by draft rank may be different from class as defined by wealth or race, but the results are similar. The eagerness of some families in Provo to take in players for a season was a bit of news for me. Aside from a laugh here or there it was mostly pedestrian material, IMHO. That the coach was a character offered some spice. And a ballpark visit by Larry King, his much younger trophy wife and a vile offspring was amusing in a horrifying way.
While McCarthy writes in a very readable, breezy style, there are plenty of baseball books that offer more substance. Jim Bouton’s Ball Four remains the standard beaver-shoot-and-tell example if you are looking for player shenanigans. Bottom of the 33rd: Hope, Redemption, and Baseball's Longest Game is another that offers a look at the minors, although for a much more defined moment in time. Slouching Toward Fargo by Neal Karlen gives the reader some sense of the non-ML minors.
McCarthy, realistic about his pro-ball prospects, always kept a hand in his other career option, and continued working and studying towards a life in medicine, no, not sports medicine, but infectious diseases. He is now a practicing physician.
Odd Man Out, worth a look, particularly for those with an interest in minor league baseball, is neither a grand slam nor a strikeout, but more of a seeing eye single ahead of a stolen base.
He has written two more books, neither about baseball: The Real Doctor Will See You Shortly, 2015 - about his intern year (the medical minors?) and Superbugs: The Race to Stop an Epidemic, in 2019
In the song Take Me Out to the Ballgame there is a particular line that comes into play here. Buy me some peanuts and cracker jack. I don’t care if I In the song Take Me Out to the Ballgame there is a particular line that comes into play here. Buy me some peanuts and cracker jack. I don’t care if I never get back. That sentiment was put to the test on April 18, 1981, in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, when the Pawtucket Red Sox and the Rochester Red Wings played the longest game in professional baseball history. Given that the song is generally sung in the middle of the 7th inning, or after six and a half innings of play, the fans, had they been of a mind, could have sung the tune four more times before the game was finally concluded.
Dan Barry, a sports columnist for the New York Times, a guy who had lived in Pawtucket for four years, uses this singular game as a structure around which to build his depiction of minor league baseball, more particularly Triple-A level baseball, using the example here to stand in for the whole.
[image] Dan Barry - image from Roger Williams University
His approach is one that would give anyone with a generous dose of OCD a thrill. I did not keep track of the number of individuals who are mentioned and for whom Barry offers at least a little biographical info, but I expect it easily squirts past the defenders into triple digit territory. There is no index available for cheating and coming up with a credible number. Leave it that if a cat had wandered into the field during that game, Barry probably interviewed it, and I expect had he been able to identify the gulls that were in attendance, they would undoubtedly be pretty sick of him asking them about the game, and checking their eggs to find out if the unborn heard anything their feathered parental units might have mentioned about it. I do not mean this as a knock, but merely to offer a sense of Barry’s overall approach. It is reminiscent of an actual baseball field, a wide swath, covered in grass, only inches deep, but with particular parts that emerge, and form the more significant elements of his story, the mound, the bases. One or two deserve mention.
In one of the true rarities in baseball, the owner of the Pawtucket Red Sox sounds like he was a pretty decent guy. We learn about him lending a helping hand when the help really was for someone else and not just a roundabout way of helping himself. The best element was Barry’s look at Dave Koza, a career minor-leaguer who was known for his home runs, but whose major league career only had warning track power, a Crash Davis sort. Barry looks at Koza (really, some wag must have nicknamed him “Lost,” but we never come across that here.) His story carries all the hope-and-dream elements that drive so many of these young men. Dave was the fellow who would get the game-winning hit in the bottom of the 33rd.
Barry gives us an illuminating look at the history of the stadium in which the game was played, tells us about the umpires, the ball boy, the intern, the security guard, the where-are-they-nows, the whole nine yards innings, or in this case thirty three. In a way it struck me as having something in common with rain delays, when hapless broadcasters (yes, he looks at those guys too) have to work extra hard to come up with material to cover the dead air between pitches. Barry certainly does work hard, and manages not only to fill in the blanks, I think he may have actually created some to give himself more time to fill.
If you are a baseball fan, this is a fun book. It is nice to know that Rich Gedman, Wade Boggs, Bruce Hurst, Cal Ripkin Jr,. Bobby Ojeda, and a few other eventual pros took part in the game, and that a game of such duration was ultimately made possible by a cut-and-paste failure in the updating of the league rule book. It is nice to learn of Bobby O’s role in sparking behavior that had once gotten a batboy ejected from a game. It is fun to hear that Mike Hargrove’s extended at-bat preparations earned him the moniker “The Human Rain Delay.” If you are not a baseball fan, Bottom of the 33rd offers a look at a piece of American culture that is as true today as it was forty years ago.
I can tell you from painful personal experience that it is generally a bad idea to go to a ballgame in New York City in April. Hell, May, and maybe even June, can feel like a wind-blown tundra in NY stadiums. Farther north and east it must be even worse. It is no shock that only nineteen spectators made it through the entirety of the game. The book will take a lot less time to read than the game took to be played, and you will not be in danger of having bodily parts crystallize and drop off while you are completing it.
Bottom of the 33rd may not be a grand slam, but it is at least a hustle-triple. And it is definitely a good idea to Root, root, root for the home team.
5/12/21 - A follow up to the above, Barry looks at the state of McCoy Stadium now that the PawSox have become the WooSox of Worcester, MA, and the aging facility stands empty - The PawSox Moved, but Pawtucket Has Yet to Move On...more
I’ll never understand why it’s easier for a female to become an astronaut or cop or fire fighter or soldier or Supreme Court justice than it is to
I’ll never understand why it’s easier for a female to become an astronaut or cop or fire fighter or soldier or Supreme Court justice than it is to become a major league umpire."
Pam Postema tells the tale of her twelve year minor league umpiring career. She does not present herself as a model citizen, or as someone with a cause other than her desire to make it to the show in blue. She does not seem like a particularly nice or insightful person. What she does offer is a hard-scrabble view of what it is to be an umpire, living on sub-coolie wages, dealing with usual and unusual (sexist) abuse from players, managers and almost everyone associated with the game. She remains bitter about what she sees as the bias and blatant unfairness of the system that denied her what she believes to be a well-deserved shot at the bigs. The language is harsh. The characters are sometimes amusing, often unpleasant. She has unkind words for many. This is not a book for kids, but adults or adolescents might be able to read it as a picture of minor league life and the the reality of sexism in baseball.
[image] Postema officiating at an MLB game in Spring Training in 1988 - image by Ron Modra – from the National Baseball HOF
It does not appear that there has been significant improvement since Postema told her tale in this book. It is long past time for this glass ceiling to be shattered, preferably with a nice piece of ash.
QUOTES I didn't know it at the time, but Christine Wren was only the second woman ever to umpire a a minor League game. The first was Bernice Gera, a Jackson Heights, New York, housewife who sued for the right to become a professional umpire. Gera went to umpire school in 1967, but was told by minor league officials that she didn't have the necessary physical requirements. According to officials, Gera was too short (she was five two) to qualify for a position. She took her case to court, and in 1972, the New York State Human rights Division Court ruled in her favor, forcing the minor leagues to finally offer her a contract. (p 20)
Baseball is about respect - earning it or losing it. Baseball is about survival. You're only as good as your last pitch, your last hit, your last victory, or in my case, your last call. All that other stuff about romance and charm is fine if you're sitting in the mezzanine level at Dodger Stadium, munching on Cracker Jack and sipping on a beer. But if you're an umpire, baseball is your worst enemy. All you want is a quick, two-hour game with no bangers, no foul tips off your knee, no rain delays, no extra innings, no bitchy catchers, no whiny pitchers, and no dead-above-the-neck managers, with nothing better to do than complain about every other call.
Of course that almost never happens, which is why umpires have learned to adapt. In a war, you have to. (p 196)...more
Ron Darling was a pretty good pitcher, although you might never know that listening to him work color commentary for the New York Mets. He sustains a Ron Darling was a pretty good pitcher, although you might never know that listening to him work color commentary for the New York Mets. He sustains a level of modesty that would lead one to think he was a mere journeyman. He was not a great pitcher, although he did pitch some great games. He is, however, simply the best color commentator working baseball today. While he may not be a future hall-of-famer as an athlete, I expect he will make it to Cooperstown for his work covering the game.
[image] Ron in his pitching prime - from thehistoryreader.com
In The Complete Game, Darling combines his experience as a player, his factual knowledge of the game and just enough personal, emotional content to give the narrative zest well beyond mere “information.” He lets all us non-pitchers know what it is all about up there on that hill, sixty feet six inches away from home plate, both physically, psychologically, and emotionally. His format is to sequence his chapters into innings, a bit of a cliché for baseball books. He uses specific innings from both his career as a pitcher and as a commentator to illustrate various aspects of pitching. In the chapter “First Inning: Getting Started,” for example, he writes about his first major league start.
There is plenty of information in the book, as one would expect. It was news to me (although, as a baseball fan for over 60 years, I suppose it should not have been) that pitchers were considered non-athletes by baseball people. Darling offers diverse examples of how pitchers prepare for their starts. One in particular naps! It was informative to learn how different baseball organizations go about training their pitchers, some trying to stamp all their mound talent with the same cookie cutter, others allowing for more individuality. It was enlightening to see how one encounter with the right coach could turn a career entirely around. And there is plenty more.
[image] Ron in 2016 - from The New York Daily News
In addition to knowledge and observation, Darling offers some of himself as well. He does a great job of describing the experience of coming up to the majors for the first time, and the not-so-inviting demeanor of some of his teammates. Ron Hodges’ reaction stands out. He offers insight into both the jitters that pitchers must overcome and the experience of getting into a zone where everything works just as desired, and offers excellent examples of how that degree of focus can vanish in an instant. He tells moving personal tales in small doses. I was much taken with a story he relates of encountering his father on the field at the beginning of a crucial game. The best chapter, for me, was of his experience of an epic college game against Saint John’s, one that was immortalized by Roger Angell as perhaps the greatest college game ever played.
I wish Darling would write a true memoir. I would love to hear more about his childhood, his family, how he came to go to Yale, what it was like off the field being a major leaguer. I would like to hear more of his take on teammates, other baseball professionals, sports media, the impact of foreign substances on the game, and what he might have seen of that, how he went from being a player to becoming a top-level commentator. You won’t find that here. Maybe in some future work.
Each chapter ends with a summary of what happened in the focus-inning of that chapter. It seemed gratuitous and uninformative. Some editor must have though it was slick. It was annoying. But that is a very minor quibble.
I believe that Darling’s best written work lies ahead. He is an extraordinarily articulate and knowledgeable pro. That said, this is a good book, with solid, grounded information and insight, mixed with a bit of heart. A must, I would say, for any aspiring pitcher....more
Death is something we do not usually associate with the playing of baseball. It usually comes up when we consider the passing of greats, like Lou GehrDeath is something we do not usually associate with the playing of baseball. It usually comes up when we consider the passing of greats, like Lou Gehrig, from illness or time, or off-the-field misadventure. But when a small, hard ball, whistles through the air at speeds over a hundred miles an hour the human body is at risk. Heart of the Game looks at a terrible event, the death in 2007 of minor league coach Mike Coolbaugh from a sizzling foul ball to the neck, how he got to be there on that dark day, and how it came to be that Tino Sanchez, a journeyman minor league utility player, came to be the instrument of Coolbaugh’s untimely passing.
[image] Author S.L. Price - from KSJC.com
Price uses the biographies of these two men to paint a portrait of what it means, in cold, hard detail, to be professional participants in the great American past-time. The focus is on the minor leagues, for neither Coolbaugh nor Sanchez ever achieved significant major league experience. Coolbaugh brought an athletic passion to playing that had been formed and reinforced by a very focused and very demanding father. Sanchez took longer to reach his cruising altitude, beginning as a kid with a chip on his shoulder, but developing, under the tutelage of a gifted, sensitive coach to a mature player-coach.
[image] Mike Coolbaugh - image from DickAllen15.com
This is a book about how frustrating it can be to forever watch the shimmer of The Show ahead in the distance, always to see those less talented, less dedicated, less unlucky cruise past. True to its title, the book looks at what constitutes actual heart, respect for the game, and pokes its nose here and there into the appeal of minor league ball to our public perception.
After having offered bios of Coolbaugh and Sanchez, Price veers off into another tale of pitching prospect Jon Asahina, who was creamed in the head by a line drive. It struck me (no, not intended) at first that this was a diversion, that Price had exhausted his core material and was casting about for supporting filler. But it turns out that there were many individuals involved in the game on the day that Coolbaugh died who had been touched by such events, whether as the victim of a speeding ball, or a close personal witness to a prior on-field horror. More such connections follow.
[image] Tino Sanchez - image from MiLB.com
Once the broad background has been prepared, the back third of the book returns us to the death of Coolbaugh, the specifics of that day, and the impact of his death on both participants and relations. Keep a box of tissues handy.
Price’s is not the first, nor will it be the last book to offer a close look at minor league sports in America. It is not the first, nor will it be the last to peer past the romantic image many of us have of baseball to glimpse some of its seamier aspects. His picture of how harsh it can be to remain a minor league lifer is very detailed and rich. His look at the personal impact of Mike Coolbaugh’s death is very moving. With writing that is mostly reportorial, but with occasional bursts of poetry, Heart of the Game is a worthwhile addition to the library of anyone interested in baseball specifically, sport generally, or in life in America beyond the big cities.
An inside look at the 1986 Mets, the entire season, this is a very compelling read, with information that w[image] Jeff Pearlman - image from his site
An inside look at the 1986 Mets, the entire season, this is a very compelling read, with information that was new to me. It reads quickly and does not pretend to be more than what it is, a recollection of a magical season. (unlike most of the very unmagical seasons since then). A must-read for lifelong Mets fans like me, and a should-read for serious baseball fans, even if they are not afflicted with need to root for the Metropolitans.
**spoiler alert** [image] W.P. Kinsella passed away in 2016 - he was 81 years old - image from the NY Times
W.P. Kinsella is best known for his novel **spoiler alert** [image] W.P. Kinsella passed away in 2016 - he was 81 years old - image from the NY Times
W.P. Kinsella is best known for his novel Shoeless Joe, which was made into the mega-hit film, Field of Dreams. Kinsella takes the field again in this impressive collection of baseball short stories. In a Caribbean outback, a player routinely transforms into a wolf, and continues to play. No one bats an eye. In The Fadeaway, an aging hurler conjures up Christy Mathewson, who teaches him how to throw a screwball. But the player never gets to try it out, and is doomed to fade away anyway. In The Darkness Deep Inside, a violent player finds Jesus and confronts a whole new set of problems. In Eggs a player tries to hang on while his Russian wife makes traditional nesting eggs in their Canadian home. In How Manny Embarquadero Overcame and Began His Climb to The Bigs, a city boy scams the game, pretending to be mute, and works his way up from the Latin American Leagues on the basis of his unusualness. In Searching For January, Roberto Clemente emerges from the fog and sea fifteen years later, and is surprised to learn that he is dead. In Feet of Clay, Mike Wheeler is determined to be in the best possible shape for old timers games. What he does not realize is that the fans want to see old timers get old. Lumpy Drobot, Designated Hitter manages to take a manager’s suggestion that he take more hits for the team to the point where one is absorbed into his skin. In the title piece a non-draftee is made an offer by a team in the Midwest. It turns out that he, and the other players on the team were scouted as those who choke under pressure, and thus were unlikely to make in pro ball anyway. They townsfolk are really trying to keep small town America alive by bringing in some fresh blood, something to counter the population loss of the genre. They go out of their way to be nice to the players and to get them set up with work, girl friends, a nice life. The protagonist, once he discovers the scam has to make a decision, to stay or go.
This is a warm, interesting collection. I suppose Clemente will always be alive and at the age he was at his death. I suppose the time comes to fade away for us all, and who could help but admire the enterprise of the mute Latin ballplayer. Nice stuff, with content enough mixed in with style. Not a must-read, but I am glad I did. Any true baseball fan will enjoy these stories....more
This was a bedside book that I wound up reading elsewhere. Donald Hall is a poet who also loves baseball. The[image] Donald Hall - image from Wikipedia
This was a bedside book that I wound up reading elsewhere. Donald Hall is a poet who also loves baseball. The book is a compendium of baseball and some other sports essays written between, I believe, 1974 and 1982. The major piece here, the title work, tells of Hall’s spring training with the Pittsburgh Pirates. It is quite nice, warm, the sort of writing that makes one feel comfortable with the writer. There are smaller pieces in here having to do with the meaning of life, old-timers games, writing in baseball. Poetry informs his style, enriching the work in places to the level of literature. Although not a great book—there is enough landscape bereft of visual satisfaction—it is a satisfying one.
Harvard and Oxford graduate Donald Hall was the Poet Laureate of the United States in 2006. He wrote more than fifty books, including fifteen books of poetry, several memoirs, and some childrens books. He won a Caldecott for one of those, Ox-Cart Man. Hall passed away in June 2018 at age 89....more
[image] There really was a pot of gold at the end of this rainbow for the Oriole owners - photo from The Baltimore Sun
Ballpark tells the tale of how B[image] There really was a pot of gold at the end of this rainbow for the Oriole owners - photo from The Baltimore Sun
Ballpark tells the tale of how Baltimore’s much lauded new field, Camden Yards, came to be. It includes satisfying depictions of the personalities involved, the owners, architects, politicians, and of how a perfectly serviceable, if uninspiring Memorial Stadium was shunned to make way for a shiny new (and old-looking) money-making machine. The focus is off the players here, but there are some nice depictions, particularly of the history of Camden Station and Yards. There is also a wonderful quote from Cal Ripkin about needing to write something the day his consecutive inning streak ended. It is a good, but not great book. I would recommend it to serious fans, but not to those less committed to the subject.
The Ball is a very good small book surrounding the acquisition and sale of Mark McGwire’s record setting-70th home run ball. It covers a lot of territThe Ball is a very good small book surrounding the acquisition and sale of Mark McGwire’s record setting-70th home run ball. It covers a lot of territory, from the physical structure of the ball, now and historically, to information on where it was made, to the mud used to coat baseballs, and why. We learn much about the collectibles world. Paisner explains the secret information that was printed on the final batch of baseballs used while McGwire was setting the home run record. There is a cast of characters here far beyond the ball’s recipient. One entrepreneur wanted to cut the ball up and sell the pieces. We learn that MLB used extraction teams to remove from the crowd any catcher of potentially lucrative baseballs. It is a fascinating tale, enjoyable and informative, despite the taint that the steroids scandal has cast over the era.
[image] Daniel Paisner-from Linked in
Paisner is a ghost writer with an impressive list of credits. It is nice that he can get top billing for his work for a change. Check out his website for a taste of his delightful sense of humor.
This is one of the seminal shoot-beaver-and-tell books. It opened up the field for sportswriters to come and got Bouton into a fair bit of trouble. ItThis is one of the seminal shoot-beaver-and-tell books. It opened up the field for sportswriters to come and got Bouton into a fair bit of trouble. It is a must-read for its look at the Yankees of Mantle and Maris days, showing them as the very human people they were. A classic of it's genre.
Was he a US spy? A very interesting bio of a Jewish catcher who was (or maybe he wasn't) recruited by the OSS to spy against Germany d[image] Moe Berg
Was he a US spy? A very interesting bio of a Jewish catcher who was (or maybe he wasn't) recruited by the OSS to spy against Germany during WW II.
[image] Nicholas Dawidoff - image from Princeton Alumni Weekly
--------------------------------------- Clearly, I was not actually writing reviews way back when I began at GR in 2008. I had read this book five years earlier, in 2003. Not sure what I would do with it today, were I reading it for the first time, but I do well recall that the subject matter was fascinating, and the reality-based content was very surprising and intriguing. Too bad the film seems to have swung and missed on what should have been a fat pitch down the middle.
The Catcher was a Spy was Dawidoff’s first book. He has, since, had a successful writing career, working at Sports Illustrated, Rollingstone, The New Yorker and The New York Times. He authored or edited four more books, the most recent being Collision Low Crossers: A Year Inside the Turbulent World of NFL Football, released in 2013.
Nicholas Dawidoff wrote The Catcher Was a Spy — on a manual typewriter, I should add — while subletting my Village apartment in the early ’90s. He was a fine tenant under trying conditions (i.e., a neighbor who played ghastly original songs at all hours) and my baseball cap is off to him for his subsequent good fortune.
Paul Rudd as Moe Berg? Really? Have not seen it so I cannot say it was horribly miscast, and will keep an open mind, but I will watch the movie someday with that expectation.
[image] Paul Rudd as Moe Berg - in the film - image from Borg.com...more
This is one of the best baseball books I have ever read, and that is saying something. Lewis’ focus is on Bil[image] Michael Lewis - image from Forbes
This is one of the best baseball books I have ever read, and that is saying something. Lewis’ focus is on Billy Bean, the GM of the Oakland Athletics. Because Oakland is a small-market team, Bean must use his brain to tease out the players who can help his team, at a reasonable cost. This makes him a sort of anti-Steinbrenner. Lewis goes into some detail on how Bean manages to field competitive teams almost every year under dire fiscal constraints. Must-read for any true baseball fan, and a source of hope for fans of small-market teams. The film version was a top-notch interpretation of the book, a lovely surprise.
Some other books that deal in baseball analytics in whole or part -----The Inside Game by Keith Law -----Smart Baseball by Keith Law -----The Arm by Jeff Passan
4/13/18 - NY Times - How Do Athletes’ Brains Control Their Movements? - by Zach Schonbrun - Fascinating article. Maybe the next level in the expanding realm of the sort of baseball analysis someone like Billy Bean might employ to get an edge over wealthier franchises
It would seem to have almost nothing to do with their biceps muscles or fast-twitch fibers or even their vision, which, for most baseball players is largely the same. It would seem to have much more to do with the neural signals that impel our every movement. “It’s like saying people who can speak French very well have a very dexterous tongue,” John Krakauer, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University, told me. “It would be the wrong place to assign the credit.”
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