Marinerds, etc.

Look! It is me with a famous baseball-related person that is not a baseball player, for once:



Yes, I met one of my heroes tonight -- the "Godfather of English Yakyu Writing", Robert Whiting. He was speaking at a book event at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan, and I was lucky enough to be invited as a guest.

It was a little hard not to be starstruck there -- as a wannabe Foreign Correspondent, being surrounded by tons of industry names was pretty intimidating. Even worse, being a harmless English teacher by day and crazy baseblogger by night, I had totally forgotten to bring business cards. Oops.

Anyway, if you are not already aware, this year they released a 2009 Edition of You Gotta Have Wa, for the 20th anniversary of the book.

I'll tell you -- the core of the book itself is exactly the same as the old edition. If you are expecting an actual revision, that isn't the case here. There's just a new introduction and afterword, of about 12,000 words. Most of the new content just discusses what Robert considered the two most significant changes to the culture clash since Wa was written: the influx of Japanese players to the US along with the WBC competition, and the influx of American managers who came to Japan, and the trials and tribulations facing them.

Robert gave a speech for about an hour, essentially talking about those subjects covered in the new parts of his book, and telling a few bonus stories uncovered during his research. Then there was a Q&A for a while, where many people asked him questions like "What's the deal with Matsuzaka?" or "Why didn't guys like Darvish just go straight to the MLB?"

For once, I actually piped up and asked a question, though mine was probably a bit odd: "My favorite chapter in the original book is the one on interpreters -- if you were going to update that one, what would you do?" He answered mostly by saying "I probably wouldn't write that chapter at all now, thanks to them getting real bilingual people who have a clue about baseball as interpreters. The crazy mistakes that used to happen 20-30 years ago just aren't an issue anymore, since the interpreters aren't just guys cracking open their old JHS English textbooks or guys who speak perfect English but know nothing about baseball. You're not going to have an interpreter these days who thinks a 'hit-and-run' is a crime rather than a play."



I finally did get to chat with him for a few minutes way after most people had cleared out. I told him how he's been one of my heroes nearly forever and how I moved to Japan with only 8 books and 3 of them were by him, and how he's an inspiration to the rest of us who try to convey the craziness of Japanese baseball to the rest of the world. And he had a lot of encouraging words for me as a fledgling wannabe baseball writer, and even suggested that I really *should* try to write a book about my crazy experiences infiltrating the ouendan, as it were.

I asked him to sign my copy of the new You Gotta Have Wa edition. And he wrote -- I am not kidding --

"For Deanna -
It was a pleasure finally meeting you.
WRITE YOUR BOOK!
signed, Robert Whiting, 9/24/09, Tokyo"

Them's fightin' words!

But seriously, he was a really nice guy, and it was a pretty good event. I got to see several familiar faces, meet a few new people, and even learned a few new things.

On Sunday November 9th, at the Tokyo American Club in Roppongi, Rob Fitts and Wally Yonamine will be doing a book reading and signing, for the book "Wally Yonamine: The Man Who Changed Japanese Baseball".

You can find more official details about the event on the Yonamine book official site, including a map and an official timeline of the event.

We've discussed the book a little bit on japanesebaseball.com, but since I haven't been able to get my hands on a copy yet here in Japan, I haven't read it and can't offer any opinion; I plan to buy a copy at the book event. Copies will be available there for 3000 yen.

I did read and review Rob Fitts's book Remembering Japanese Baseball a few years ago, and it was a great read. It also has a chapter with Yonamine's stories, but the new book is all about his life, instead of just a few selections.

If you don't know about Rob Fitts, he is largely known for being the biggest collector of Japanese baseball cards in the US.

If you don't know about Yonamine, he's often referred to as "the Jackie Robinson of Japanese baseball". He was the first American-born player to play in the NPB after World War 2, and despite being a nisei, a second-generation Japanese-American from Hawaii, he had to put up with a lot of resistance from fans, players, and people in general, for both his birthplace and for his playing style (he was known as a "dirty" player just for doing things like sliding into second base to break up a double play; but he was also known as a hard worker for hustling to first on a sacrifice bunt or an easy grounder). His contributions to the game make him one of the famous characters in its history even today.

I'm very much looking forward to reading the Yonamine book and, of course, to meeting Mr. Yonamine himself. Hope to see you all at the book event!

In preparing for my transpacific move, I took a box of (non-baseball) books to Half Price Books the other day, and during the 15 minutes I had to wait for them to decide to give me a whopping sum of $8 for the whole box, I stumbled on this book, which I started reading in the store and then decided to just go ahead and buy. It was $5.50, which after tax left me with a remainder of about $2 to put towards a Chipotle burrito for dinner.

But I digress.

Roger Maris: A Man For All Seasons, by Maury Allen

I've read one or two other books about Roger Maris, but this one was actually written in 1986, for the 25th anniversary of the 61 in '61 year. Sadly, it was also written right after Roger's death, which means that a lot of the interview quotes in the book talk about what the speaker was thinking or doing when Roger died, or at his funeral, and so on.

About 70% of this book is straightforward history and prose, and about 30% is sections of text transcribed from interviews. I thought that this style of writing would grate on me after a while, but I actually enjoyed a lot of the short vignettes related by the different people, who ranged from Roger's friends and family to his teammates and opponents from various points in his baseball career. Most of the time there's a few paragraphs of lead-in, then a short blurb introducing the next speaker, and then several pages of prose that follow from whatever the speaker had to say. It's very different than just reading a lot of prose with various one-line quotes thrown in from interviews, and there's often funny little things that come out, like the guy who gave up Roger's first home run in 1957 (Jack Crimian, who only pitched in 4 games that year, and went to the same high school as my dad) describing it, or Jim Bouton relating how when he first came up to the majors, Roger gave him a new glove, or the story about how Mantle sent Roger a wooden carving of a hand extending the middle finger, which Roger would keep on his chair when he didn't want to talk to reporters.

There's some pretty sad parts -- I was on the bus home from work reading the chapter where former Yankees and fellow pallbearers Moose Skowron and Johnny Blanchard were talking about Maris's funeral in detail, and I nearly started to cry. I had to put the book down for a bit to make myself stop sniffling, which was sort of embarrassing on the bus.

If there's any failing of this book, it might be to provide the reader with some more details of Roger's life away from his baseball career. The bulk of the book is about Roger as a baseball player, though to its credit, it evenly covers his entire career, not just the 1961 season that everyone knows about. In a 12-year career he played in 7 World Series and got 3 rings -- and 2 of those series (one win) were with the Cardinals after he left the Yankees. The author was just getting started as a sportswriter during Maris's career, so he has some interesting quotes and observations from Maris's games and postgames, especially from the later years.

And really, given how Roger wanted to be a private sort of guy and keep the media and public away from him as much as possible, it's not surprising that a lot of details about his life either don't exist or aren't that interesting. "Roger worked as a beer distributor in Florida for 20 years" probably isn't that great of a story anyway. And in all fairness, after I got so freaked out reading Luckiest Man and the details on Lou Gehrig's medical condition, I'm actually kind of glad that Maury Allen didn't make a point of going too deep into Maris's condition and how it deteriorated from the lymphoma.

Anyway, this was a pretty good read, and a relatively good bus book as well. If you're interested in borrowing/buying my copy and local to Seattle, let me know, as I'd feel silly putting such a good book into indefinite storage.

When I was growing up, I always hated history classes. History, as it was presented in school, was just a bunch of names and numbers; a bunch of uninteresting words on a page that we had to learn in order to pass exams, nothing more. In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. You got the dates, you got the grade. It wasn't until college, when history papers required a little bit more thinking about who was behind the historical events, and what were they like, rather than just when did this happen? that history classes started becoming interesting rather than drudgery.

Sports fans can definitely sometimes end up reducing their sport's history to the same thing, in the end. Given baseball and other sports having a tendency towards statistics and numbers, there are times when all we really can do is describe a man by he hit sixty-one home runs in 1961, he hit 755 career homers. And sometimes you wonder, I know what he did, but who was he? What was he like?

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Babe Ruth. Bobby Thomson. Roger Maris. Hank Aaron. Willie Mays. Duke Snider. Mickey Mantle. Eddie Mathews. Whitey Ford. Joe DiMaggio. Catfish Hunter. Pete Rose. Jack Dempsey. Muhammad Ali. Reggie Jackson. George Steinbrenner. Jackie Robinson. Roberto Clemente. Ring Lardner. Pee Wee Reese. Robert Frost. Stan Musial. Carl Furillo.

No, these aren't even all athletes. But feel free to pull up a chair and visit with them for a while through the eyes of Roger Kahn as he captures these men at various points in their lives and careers in Beyond the Boys of Summer. It's all about painting portraits, and casting off numerical anchors, and I for one really enjoyed reading this book, getting to know more about the people behind the names and numbers. There's even a bit of non-sports writing mixed in from time to time for variety.

I'm back from Pittsburgh. Since the Mariners managed to get yet ANOTHER game postponed today, I might as well put off catching up on the weekend games a little longer and write a book review instead. (Seriously, is there any reason I should catch up at all? Getting swept by the Twins and Angels isn't exactly my idea of a fun thing to watch.)

This is the second book in a row I'm reviewing where I actually sort of know the author, although in this case it's mostly that I've been following the chronicles of Zack's baseball collecting for the last year or so on his blog. Zack and I share the viewpoint that writing about a game shouldn't just be about the events on the field, although he takes it to much more of an extreme than I do. Anyway, his FIRST book was about getting baseballs, but this one is his second book, and it's about... everything.

Watching Baseball Smarter: A Professional Fan's Guide for Beginners, Semi-experts, and Deeply Serious Geeks by Zack Hample

A week or two ago, there was a thread on Lookout Landing asking what would be some good ways to teach a friend or significant other more about baseball, if they were interested in learning but didn't really know where to start. At the time, I'd read about 60 pages of Zack's book, and already wholeheartedly recommended it. I haven't changed my opinion since finishing the rest.

What's great about this book is that it actually manages to be something that can be read and enjoyed by all sorts of baseball fans. The subtitle is not a joke; Zack manages to make sure that there's fun stuff in the book for fans of all interest and knowledge levels. Whether you don't know what a ground ball is, or whether you know all about the infield fly rule and what year it became official, you'll still learn something from this book.

To be fair, it's hard for me to evaluate exactly how good it would be to a complete baseball newbie, though I could definitely see a lot of the same sort of tricks that I used to use when I worked as a technical writer, trying to cater to a wide variety of audience skill levels. Italicizing jargon words and keeping a glossary at the back keeps the text flowing well, but the reader shouldn't feel awkward if they don't understand the usage of a particular word; they also know that an explanation is readily available if needed. The book organization is pretty good overall, and it does cover all of the bases, no pun intended. There's even a chapter on umpires (with a situational quiz on "foul or fair?" that I could only get 7 out of 11 correct on), and a chapter on Baseball Stats For Dummies, interweaved with fun little factoids and quotes so that the advanced reader doesn't get bored. (The second half of the chapter is about scorekeeping and boxscores, and the sample boxscore has all of the players ending in -ez. You know, that badass Tavarez-Ibanez-Ordonez-Benitez lineup we've all dreamed of. Just kidding.)

There's a lot of good pictures and diagrams, too, showing anything from the way to grip different pitches to how fielders position themselves, to how they hold the bat in different situations, and so on. Lots of good explanations of things a lot of us take for granted, too, especially "what the hell are those guys thinking out in the field when it looks like they're just chewing gum," and "why are baseball contracts so thoroughly ridiculous?" There's even a poem made out of the "151 Ways To Hit A Ball".

Of course, there's no mention of Bill Wambsganss in the section on triple plays, but, hey, I think I can forgive that given the wealth of information on everything else.

My recommendation is to buy this book, read through it yourself, and then keep it in your backpack or on your desk at work -- and the next time you're in a conversation about baseball and feeling like "I don't have the time to explain all of this stuff!" to a friend or coworker, you'll have a book to lend them instead. Tell them it's even got an explanation of why baseball players are always grabbing their crotches, if they seem iffy about reading it. Of course, they're never actually going to give the book back to you once they realize what an indispensable baseball guide it is, so maybe this isn't the best plan, but you get the idea.

It's really rare that I actually review recent books here. It's even rarer that I review books written by people I've actually met in real life. This book was both released in the last month AND is by someone I know, which makes it a little strange to write about.

However, being as I'm all for book events and going to bookstores and heckling local authors, I figured I better review this one soon, especially because Derek will be at Third Place Books on April 11th at 7pm -- that's this Wednesday night -- talking and signing and being his usual entertaining self. If you're in the Seattle area, you should try to come out for this. It'll be fun.

The Cheater's Guide To Baseball, by Derek Zumsteg

Cheating is not a laughing matter.

Someone'll have to inform Derek of that, though, because most of this book is pretty funny.

The first thing I should probably mention is that this book is not really a guide for cheating in baseball, though you could probably figure that out on your own. A more accurate but less witty title might be "A Historical Account Of Ways People Have Broken, Bended, Ignored, Folded, Spinned, and Mutilated the Rules of Baseball Over The Years". Derek basically presents the stories of various figures through baseball history who have sought to gain an unfair advantage over their opponents, often by breaking the rules (or occasionally, those who sought to gain a little extra cash by giving their opponents an unfair advantage).

All of the things you're probably thinking of as baseball cheating are covered in this book -- corking bats, throwing spitballs, stealing signs, doctoring the ball, the 1919 Black Sox, etc. But there's a lot more details about each one of these than most casual fans would know. For example, the physics of how a corked bat provides an advantage; a detailed explanation of why doctored baseballs do what they do, and several examples of who used them and how; a long treatise on Gaylord Perry, the legendary spitball master; and recountings of fixed games going back 50 years before the infamous World Series fix. There's even a chapter on steroids. It's a pretty interesting chapter, and that's all I'm going to say on the matter.

If you've been reading Derek's writing on USS Mariner and elsewhere for the last few years, most of the writing style will be fairly familiar to you -- informative with a dash of sarcasm and wit mixed in. Pretty much every sidebar, whether serious or silly, has a punchline at the end of it. Sometimes this detracts from the main flow of the writing; sometimes it doesn't. If you're like me, you'll eventually just skip the sidebars and read them after you finish the chapter.

(As an aside, this actually made a great bus book due to the length of the chapters and the lack of chapter-to-chapter context -- everything's pretty well-encapsulated. The book's got plenty of substance in it, no pun intended, but at the same time, the writing is light enough that you won't have any trouble keeping yourself in it.)

Some of the best parts of the book are the drawings. They range from funny things like a cartoon diagram of Gaylord Perry's secret hiding places for substances and a comic strip entailing the Hidden Ball Trick, to serious things like a corked bat or an illustration of how to doctored illegal baseballs work... to things that are both funny and serious, such as one "showing" a bunch of "signs" that teams may use. (The signs diagram was funny enough that I was reading this book on the bus and started laughing. My best friend was sitting next to me wondering what was so funny. He doesn't know much about baseball, but I handed him the book and told him to read through that page, and he also cracked up.)

Oddly, if I have one complaint about the book, it was that I heard Derek had to cut out a few chapters, notably those on equipment and on trying to deliberately injure other players, and well, I would have rather read about those than the chapter on fan riots and heckling, which didn't seem quite as relevant to the central theme to me.

It's a good thing the groundskeeping chapter stayed, at least, because that's some great stuff. If you ever wondered exactly what things could factor into "home-field advantage" besides simply having the last opportunity in the game to score, you'll love learning about the various ways people have (legally) tampered with the field in the past to get conditions that work for their team and against the opponents. (And no, I'm not just saying that because I was the first bug finder with that chapter. It's seriously fascinating stuff.)


So yeah, I give this book a thumbs up. It's a solid effort from Derek to serve up an interesting slice of baseball history. As a paperback-only release, it's worth the $14, and again, you can buy a copy and get Derek to sign it at Third Place Books this Wednesday night, or later in the month I believe you can also bug him at Powell's on Hawthorne, if you're in the Portland area.

Veterans Stadium: Field Of Memories, by Rich Westcott

This book recounts the history of Veterans Stadium, the Philadelphia multi-purpose concrete sports venue that stood from 1971 to 2004. There's background on how the stadium came to exist in the first place, stories about the opening and transition to the new park, recounting of various great moments in Phillies and Eagles history that took place in the new park, lists of great football/baseball players and their best moments in the Vet, stories of various promotions and other crazy events in the park, about the birth of the Philly Phanatic, stories about the South Philly residents, and eventually, of course, stories about moving the teams out and blowing the place up.

Just like any other Rich Westcott book, it reads a lot more like an extended newspaper article rather than like a great novel, but to be honest, for once, I didn't mind all that much. I grew up in Veterans Stadium, pretty much, so there were times where I almost had tears in my eyes remembering some players/moments/games/etc. I actually mostly skimmed through the Eagles chapters because they're not as interesting to me -- and to be fair, most of the time the Eagles were complaining about the stadium anyway. The book is a lot more Phillies-heavy than Eagles-heavy in general.

Basically, if you live or lived in Philadelphia and spent way too much of your life in Veterans Stadium, this is a good book to read through, and you'll remember many fond memories. Also, if you're like me and it opened before you were born, it'll be pretty neat to hear about some of the stories from the early years of the park that your parents never told you (like in my case, I don't remember ever hearing about Karl Wallenda walking a tightrope across the field between the foul poles without a net). It even makes a pretty decent bus book -- the writing's pretty pleasant, not too dense, at times humorous, and it splits well into chapters to read one or two per ride.

Plus, the book won me over when it said "Traded to the Phillies from the Cleveland Indians for five players, Von Hayes never quite won the hearts of Phillies fans. He should have."

The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg

This is going to sound like an odd way to start a book review, but I think this book would have been a lot better to read when it first came out thirteen years ago than it is now, because of the internet. See, ten years ago if I'd wanted to find out more about Moe Berg, I would have pretty much had to go to the library, find books like this one, look up old articles on microfilm, etc. But nowadays, you type "Moe Berg" into Google, and you'll come up with plenty of information on him -- stats, stories, images, etc -- probably enough to sate your curiosity, at least.

If you don't know who Moe Berg was, he was a major league baseball player -- and not a particularly great one, but good enough to stick around for almost 20 years -- who also happened to graduate from Princeton, get a law degree from Columbia, learn to speak several foreign languages, work in the OSS and CIA, and served as a spy for the US in World War II in Europe. Legend also says that he learned to speak Japanese fluently while on the boat to Japan in 1932, and that during the infamous MLB all-star baseball tour of Japan in 1934 he shot videos of Tokyo that were used for air raids in WWII. (But the research in this book indicates that neither of those were actually the exact truth.) And after WWII, he was basically a freeloader for the rest of his life, wandering all over the place.

The problem with this book is that it's basically one big research project on a guy who tried to make sure nobody would ever find out what the hell he was doing with his life -- and who didn't really DO anything with his life after World War II -- so, at least for me, I found the first half of it pretty fascinating, with the baseball and the trips to Japan and the war stuff. Once Moe Berg's life became aimless, so did my attention span for the book. So many people wander in and out of the pages, and there were so many people whose lives Moe Berg wandered in and out of, that it's just hard to keep track of all the fragments. I actually had stopped reading it for a few days' worth of bus commutes, but then Berg's birthday last week (on March 2nd) reminded me that I should finish it.

This book is the reverse of your typical baseball biography that mostly involves baseball and then a little bit of other stuff. It's definitely about one of the most unique people in the history of baseball, and full of anecdotes, but yet, maybe it's TOO comprehensive a volume on "what the hell was the deal with Moe Berg?". It's just that it doesn't work very well as a bus book, and my guess is that someone who doesn't have a deep curiosity about Moe Berg is probably also going to lose momentum reading it halfway through. The latter half of the book is arranged by geography rather than chronologically, too, which gets a little confusing at times -- I kept finding myself mentally doing math to try to remember how old Berg was at any point in which he was wandering around some location or another.

Oh yeah, and there were a bazillion typos in the spelling of Japanese names and places, but my guess is that most people reading this wouldn't even notice or care about most of them, and I'm just picky.

I'm glad that Dawidoff did the research to put this book together, and I think it's a pretty useful historical source, but my recommendation on this book for the typical baseball book fan is to check it out from the library and really read the first half, and then skim the rest for interesting people and places that jump out at you on the pages. It's probably a little bit too much to get through for someone who just has a casual curiosity about Berg.

Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig

I was given this book as a holiday present in 2005, and I put off reading it for two main reasons: one, I had read Ray Robinson's "Iron Horse" book relatively recently at the time, and two, reading about Lou Gehrig can be awfully depressing. But the Rattler Radio blog, which covers the Mariners minor league Wisconsin Timber Rattlers, has been putting up excerpts of "Luckiest Man" all winter, and so early last week I decided to start immersing myself in the world of Lou Gehrig for an hour a day while riding the bus to and from work.

Reading this book is a lot like watching the movie Titanic, only it doesn't suck. Titanic, in all fairness, was a beautifully crafted work, with gorgeous sets reconstructing the extravagant ship. The first two hours of the movie set up the plot and the romance amidst wonderful scenery. But everyone knows what happened to the Titanic -- and when the iceberg hits the ship, you know you're in for another hour of water water everywhere, lots of people dying, several times where it looks hopeful that they might survive, and a sad ending where the guy dies and the girl lives on. And to be honest, when I watched Titanic, I actually fastforwarded through most of the last hour -- I just didn't feel like watching it.

Well, the story of Lou Gehrig is similar, especially as told in this book. The amount of detail that Jonathan Eig has extracted from history is impeccable, painting Gehrig into a crisper image than has ever been done before. But everyone knows what happened to Lou Gehrig -- and sure enough, about two thirds of the way through the book, you hit the sentence "Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis struck Lou Gehrig in 1938." There's the iceberg. And then you know you're in for another three years of his life, watching him waste away, several times getting false hope from doctors with experimental cures, and eventually a sad ending where the guy dies and the girl lives on. And to be honest, I started reading a little bit quicker when I hit the iceberg in this too -- the amount of medical detail explained at times was just a little too intense to bear.

Despite the fact that the story of Lou Gehrig is a sad one, and that Lou Gehrig himself was said to be a boring guy in general, this book has a lot of humor injected into it, to make sure the tone is never too serious when it doesn't need to be. To some extent, there's just a lot of things that are somewhat ridiculous about that time period when viewed from the present. Alternately, Gehrig's dryness itself also manifests in wit. In addition, Lou played the straight man to the craziness of Babe Ruth for a while:

   When asked at a press conference how he planned to spend the winter, Ruth said, "I ain't doin' a thing, except you know what!"
   The reporters knew what, but they couldn't print it.
   Gehrig said, "I plan to play a lot of basketball."

Another strength of this book is the amount of detail paid to the supporting characters in the story. Eleanor Gehrig has written her own books, of course, and everyone knows about Babe Ruth and Joe DiMaggio, but many of the other Bronx Bombers that played along Gehrig have mostly faded away into history. In this book, though, the people close to him live on in vivid detail, such as his best friend on the team, Bill Dickey:

   William Malcolm Dickey was four years younger than Gehrig. Born in Louisiana and raised in Little Rock, Arkansas, he was one of seven children. He was a quietly elegant man, long-legged and strong. Yet his face was that of a boy, with ears that stuck out like handles on a jug, and a sweet, wide grin. He looked like a lazy old horse when he walked, as if each section of each limb required a separate call to action. For such a young and lean athlete, though, he was a terribly slow runner. Everything about him seemed to operate in slow motion, most of all his speech. He didn't talk much, but when he did, his smooth Southern drawl made even the most urgent plea sound calm.
   "I signaled for a fast ball and you threw me a curve," Dickey complained once to the pitcher Lefty Gomez, in his most furious tone.
   "How are your bird dogs?" Gomez replied.
   It was nearly impossible to feel threatened by Dickey. Even Gehrig approached without fear.

The visual descriptions of people and places stand on their own, but Eig even manages to capture sensory images of history in sound as well, both in the sounds of baseball and in the sounds of people. One standout example of this is in the growth of radio, which paralleled Gehrig's career. (It seems that Gehrig would have most likely been a case of "Video killed the radio star", had he played a decade or two later.) It had somehow never occurred to me that radio broadcasts of baseball games were not always as we think of them now, but were originally essentially oral box scores, with sparse announcement of plays and vast stretches of silence in between. It was during Gehrig's first year as a player that one man changed all that:

   The sportswriters used radio the same way they used their pencils and scorecards, to record all the necessary details and none of the atmosphere. They saved their creative flourishes for their newspaper readers.
   But in 1923, a former concert singer named Graham McNamee was hired to sit beside the sportswriters and liven up their broadcasts. McNamee had a deep, rich voice, and he loved to ramble. He didn't know much about baseball, but he had a terrific eye for detail, and he described what he saw in marvelous terms. When frustrated fans put their fists through their straw hats, when Gloria Swanson arrived at her seat wrapped in ermine, when John McGraw flashed all but invisible signals to his players, McNamee called it as he saw it. He was radio's first color commentator. "The crowd is ready, yowling, and howling," he said in one typically excited moment. "I never heard such a crowd in my life... Strike one!"
   McNamee gave baseball a common language. He took the game out of the ballpark and into homes and made it a part of the sound of American life, so much so that a New Yorker could walk down the street without missing a pitch as McNamee's voice boomed from window after window. In the process, he became a celebrity -- bigger perhaps than all but Ruth. When he dropped a Thermos full of coffee and stained his suit while on the air, the incident made news the next day. Naturally, the sportswriters were jealous, and they tried, in vain, to point out that the broadcaster often seemed to mistake right-handed hitters for left-handed hitters, couldn't keep track of which man was at bat, and put runners on the bases when there were none. "I don't know which game to write about," Ring Lardner wote after one World Series game, "the one I saw today or the one I heard Graham McNamee announce as I sat next to him at the Polo Grounds."

As you can see by these excerpts, the prose in this book is absolutely fantastic. Even the times of Gehrig's life that could become dull if presented in black-and-white, such as his yearly statistics, salary negotiations, and especially, details about some games and slumps and such -- much like McNamee's broadcasts, these are given color and detail that was not touched upon before. There's always a quote or an anecdote to bring to life anything from Lou's fishing expeditions to his playing stickball with kids in the neighborhood after he'd come home from the ballpark.

And of course, Eig managed to get copies of all of Gehrig's correspondence with the Mayo Clinic, which sheds a lot of light on exactly what his condition was like in various stages of ALS, and what treatments he tried, and who he tried them from. There were details of the house he and Eleanor lived in during the last years of his life, down to the number of steps it took to get to the front porch, to the first floor, and so on (it doesn't seem like much until you remember that Gehrig was basically losing the ability to walk). Some stories have also been set straight from the versions portrayed in The Pride of the Yankees, or in Eleanor's tales. The saddest part is probably how long it seems he held out hope that he would be cured.

Anyway, this book is a solid piece of work and well worth reading. It's even reasonable as a bus book, though I recommend reading the last chapter or two at home if you're prone to crying when the profound sadness of the entire situation really hits you.

The Era 1947-1957: When the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers Ruled the World, by Roger Kahn

Roger Kahn is a fantastic writer. The 1950's were an awesome time to be around New York baseball. And if you agree with the previous sentences, you will thoroughly enjoy the book "The Era". If you don't, you probably won't. But that doesn't make the book itself any better or worse.

In the prologue, Kahn explains with conviction why he believes that this time and place were an "era" in baseball, and concludes by saying, "You should have been there. I mean to take you." In the rest of the book, he pretty much does exactly that.

It's hard to evaluate this book independently of his better-known book "The Boys of Summer"; and granted, almost any time you read anything by Kahn, there'll be shades of Boys of Summer in it. However, in context, it makes sense, as the 1952 Dodgers was his first real writing gig, and thus he lived and breathed Dodger Blue for two years. It'll sort of be like myself with the 2004-2006 Mariners -- these are the guys I started writing about on a daily basis, so these are the days and the players I'll really remember for the rest of my life. Long after the current generation of baseball players have retired, gone gray, managed, general managed, had kids of their own in the major leagues, and so on, I'll still probably still want to wax historic about the time when we had a young King Felix, a crazy Aussie named Doyle, the twilight of the great Gar, and exaggerate how fast Ichiro could beat out a bunt.

And thus you can't blame Roger Kahn for spending more page space talking about Carl Furillo than most other authors ever have, or for the chapters upon chapters about Jackie Robinson and Leo Durocher, or the way Pee Wee, Campy, Jackie, Oisk, Pistol Pete, Preacher, Skoonj and Newk are always sitting around chattering on the edge of all his pages. You'll feel like you were actually in Ebbets Field, or in the Yankee clubhouse, or at the Polo Grounds.

It really is pretty crazy if you think about it. In the "era" that Kahn writes about, an 11-year period, there was only one year where no New York team was in the World Series, 1948. The Yankees won 9 pennants in that time, the Dodgers 6, and the Giants 2. I was trying to come up with some sort of comparable time period and comparable locale, but there simply isn't one. No other metropolitan area with multiple baseball teams ever had such a long period of dominance with so many legendary and memorable characters playing a part in the saga. In one chapter Kahn is chatting with Dr. Bobby Brown, former Yankee player and AL president; Brown shows off a photograph of him getting a base hit in a World Series. The notable thing about the picture is not his line drive, though that is pretty cool in itself, but the fact that you can spot seven Hall of Famers standing on the field (as baserunners, fielders, and a coach).

I feel like it's really hard to capture exactly what it was that I loved about this book so much. It's not really a brilliantly architected work or anything. There's a timeline to it, of course, but the storylines of the various players and teams wander in and out as they become important to the particular time. It's engaging, it's wonderfully amusing, but it's also a little discombobulated. If anything, a lot of it reads the way you'd expect a bar conversation to go, if you sat down and asked Kahn to tell you about DiMaggio, Mantle, or Mays. About Jackie. About the time Larry MacPhail and Tom Yawkey almost traded The Dago for The Skinny Kid, straight up. The stories aren't white-washed, and the players are painted as they were, with Kahn several times using quotes that he had promised not to print at the time as a journalist, but has been released of that vow by outliving the sources.

To be honest, the Casey Stengel quotes alone are worth reading this book. Even if you've read Robert Creamer's Stengel book, which is fantastic in its own right, the way the Stengel quotes are worked into "The Era" with the absurdity of various situations is just hilarious. And at the same time, the serious discussion of how Stengel used various platoon matrices and other innovative managerial techniques -- such as warming up several relievers at a time, and bringing out appropriate players per leverage situations -- is fascinating to read when viewed through a modern-day telescope.

Basically, it's no Boys of Summer. But it's damn entertaining all along. I'd say that if you had to choose only one Kahn book to read, this isn't the one, but if you are looking for a good bus book, and a laugh, and perhaps, like me, to feel nostalgic for a time period that you never actually experienced, this book is well worth your time. If you see it in a used bookstore, by all means pick it up and give it a read.

The Only Game In Town, aka "Baseball Stars of the 1930's and 1940's talk about the game they loved".

This is yet another baseball oral history book, and the fact of the matter is that no baseball oral history book will ever live up to Lawrence Ritter's "The Glory of Their Times", which is the original and defining book for the genre.

What The Only Game In Town tries to do is focus more on the integration years of baseball -- when the Negro league players were coming into the MLB. Though, to be fair, while every player in the book talks a little bit about that, only maybe a third of the stories are only about integration, mostly the ones told by the former Negro league players themselves.

I think there are two major weaknesses of this book, though.

The first is minor; it's that there are too many pictures in it. Pretty much each story is a deceptive 25 pages long or so, as compared to the 10ish pages that each ballplayer's story would take up in previous oral history books I'd read. The reasons the chapters appear longer is spacier typesetting and a metric ton of photographs. Photographs in general are a great thing for history books, but most of the ones in this book are not well-chosen. Some of them aren't very good pictures, and then many of them seem pretty random, like "Oh, he mentioned Lew Burdette in a sentence, let's plaster a picture of Lew Burdette in here."

The second is major. The editing is inconsistent and ranges from godawful to merely non-intrusive. I almost didn't continue reading this book after the opening chapter, which was Elden Auker's; the fact that he'd mention how so-and-so player did in such-and-such year and there'd immediately be brackets to correct it, or lots of brackets all over the place with these helpful little titles for people which mostly just detracted from hearing the player's voice.

As if to compensate for completely interrupting Auker's voice, they mostly didn't do that in other places in the book. Instead, there were times where they kept so strongly to the players' voice that the meaning is either obfuscated or obscured. At one point in Johnny Pesky's story he remarks how Ted Williams told him, "For crying out loud, Johnny, why can't you get this? You've got a high school diploma not like me," and I'm sitting there thinking "Wait, what the hell does that mean? Ted Williams didn't graduate from high school, or Pesky didn't?" Or in Buck O'Neil's story, he says how his dad said he was going to take him down to see some "other great baseball players", which sounds like a great leadin to a story, only there's no story there.

Another big issue with this book is that almost all of these players have been interviewed in other books. I'm pretty sure I'd heard almost all the stories in here before, mostly even from the players themselves, either in their own autobiographies or in various other oral history books. A lot of the stories in this book were pretty bland, too; I thought Ralph Kiner's and Dom Dimaggio's chapters were probably the most entertaining, and Buck O'Neil's was good to read just because of the timing.

If you haven't read any oral history books at all before, and don't know much about the players of the 1930's and 1940's, this might not be a bad book to read, but if you've read a lot of baseball books and the prior oral histories by Lawrence Ritter and Donald Honig, you won't really be missing out by not reading this one. It does make a good bus book, though, as oral histories usually do. I finished it at a rate of one chapter per ride, so it took ten rides or so.

Supposedly this is the first in a series by Fay Vincent, too, so hopefully the upcoming volumes will be more groundbreaking and more entertaining.

Okay, I guess technically the book is really called Clearing the Bases: Juiced Players, Monster Salaries, Sham Records, and a Hall of Famer's Search for the Soul of Baseball, by Mike Schmidt with Glen Waggoner. But whatever. I actually got my copy of this book several months ago -- Schmitty was doing some book signings around Philly when it first came out, so my dad went and got me a signed copy as an early birthday present.

I finally got around to reading this book this past week. It took me about eight 30-minute commuting bus rides to get through it. It's really a very good bus book, actually -- I could get through at least a chapter per bus ride, sometimes two, and there wasn't a lot of context to worry about since the subject matter jumps all over the place.

The first six chapters of this book are really awesome; they're basically the autobiography section, where Schmidt talks about his career from the time he signed out of Ohio University, to the day he retired. He just tells a lot of stories in a really fun way; there may have been a really big "oh my god! Mike Schmidt!" factor for me, given that I spent the first 12 years of my life watching him play third base for the Phillies, but I think that the stories do stand on their own just fine.

Unfortunately, just as his career ends, so does the light part of the book. The rest of it deals with his opinions on a bunch of the current issues surrounding the game, and while the tone is still light in most places, the subject matter really isn't quite so much. I think the last eight chapters could be summarized as such (no, these are not direct quotes, I'm just paraphrasing from his point of view):

7,8. "You know, I understand why guys did steroids. They were looking for an edge. I briefly thought I might have done them too if the opportunity had existed when I was a player, but now that I researched stuff for this book and found out what that crap does to your body? No way, man. No way."
9,10. "Hitters today are a lot better than they used to be. The balls and bats are lighter, too. So when you're looking at all the records set nowadays, the numbers guys are racking up, they're legit, you just have to remember to take them in context. Hank woulda hit a thousand homers if he'd played thirty years later. Hell, I might have had 700. Remember, I used to lead the league with 38 homers, after all. Context."
11. "The Hall of Fame selection process kind of sucks. Writers can be jerks. And personally, I'd vote McGwire in, regardless of the controversy."
12. "Oh, for the love of god, will you guys forgive Pete Rose already? I think he knows he screwed up."
13. "Managing a minor league team is really hard. But I think I had a lot of fun. Why, though, do teams invest millions of dollars in prospects and then pay some random dude in single-A $30,000/yr to teach these kids fundamentals? Shouldn't they invest more in lower-level training?"
14. "Okay, so now that you've read my rant, let me just remind you all: Baseball rules. I may be an old-timer and I may sound bitter, and I definitely think today's stars are way overpaid and there's no team loyalty and all that stuff. But who cares, you're reading this because you love baseball as much as I do. Anyone know who's starting for the Phillies tomorrow?"

Anyway, I think this is a pretty entertaining book overall regardless, a fairly quick read, it has some very good points made within it, and it's definitely worth it for Phillies fans or for anyone who was a big Mike Schmidt fan. There'll definitely be moments when you're left shaking your head thinking, "Oh, come ON, whatever, get over it," (which he's very self-aware of and pokes fun of within the book, even), but plenty of moments of "that's awesome", or "yeah, that's a really good point," or "huh, that's an interesting idea, I wonder if it could work" as well.

If nothing else, if you read it this offseason, there'll definitely be moments when he's talking about contracts in the 1970's where you'll suddenly be struck by the amazing salary inflation since free agency -- Schmidt mentions signing a 6yr/$3.3mil contract, making him the highest-paid player in the NL in 1976 at $550k/year. Nowadays, that's not that far above the major league minimum salary. Later he'll remind you of the early 80's when Nolan Ryan was making a million dollars a year for playing baseball. Even I remember my parents saying how ridiculous that was. Funny how things have changed.

Interestingly enough, Mike has his own website now and even a blog.

When I was about five years old, my mom decided to move our Phillies Sunday season tickets up to section 543 (we'd previously been in 330, from my grandfather's ticket plan. Sure, you never got rained on there, but Mom wanted to get a suntan if she was going to sit out at the games on weekends, plus we needed a third seat for my younger brother). During one of our first games that year, I looked out across Veterans Stadium, and I could see a yellow star with an S in the middle of it over one of the concourse entries in the 600 level.

"Mom," I asked, "What's that yellow star up there for?"

"Well," she told me, "That star shows where Willie Stargell hit a home run off of Jim Bunning. It was so high, they put a star in its place."

"Oh," I said. I knew who Willie Stargell was, even if he would retire after that year. "Who's Jim Bunning?"

"Remember what I told you about 1964? He was the reason we got there. And he was also the reason we didn't get there."

---

Jim Bunning: Baseball and Beyond by Frank Dolson

I'm not sure there's a single other name besides "Jim Bunning" that you can type into Google, and the first page that shows up is the page of a U.S. Senator, and the second page that shows up is a Baseball Hall of Fame biography.

While I may not agree with his political views, and while it's true that most of what I knew of him was that he was a no-smile, hard-working competitive player, I have to admit, this book really opened my eyes up to understand a lot more of his life. And honestly, I'm really glad I read it. I enjoyed it a lot -- there are a lot of really funny scenes interspersed all over the book where you'd least expect them, perhaps to echo Bunning's real personality.

It's true that this book may have been a little better as a first-person memoir rather than a third-person biography, and delved a little deeper into things, but if you're looking to hear the story of a guy who spent seven years in the minors before getting called up, then proceeded to win 100 games and notch 1000 strikeouts in both major leagues, as well as pitch a no-hitter in each league, the second a perfect game, and after a long and illustrious career settled down to try minor league managing, then being a player agent, a stock broker, a city councilman, state senator, and eventually get elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame and to the US Congress at about the same time... well, then you want to hear Jim Bunning's story.

I laughed at the stories of his mishaps with the Mud Hens, and of creative bed check duckers. I almost cried when reading about the second half of the 1964 season. I learned some new stuff about government and candidate campaigning. All in all, I found this book very entertaining. There were a few parts where it dragged on, notably in the story of him running for Kentucky governor in 1983, and during the part where he got fired from the Phillies farm system. There's definitely a bit of propoganda strewn around the book, both about the Phillies and about the Democrats. But there are enough parts that are overly engaging to make up for that, notably the story of his first no-hitter, where apparently the Red Sox actually were stealing signs and knew everything he was going to throw before he threw it, and it still didn't matter.

Plus, it had the best reference to my alma mater that I've found in a baseball book yet:

    "It was so known I used pine tar," Bunning said, "that when I was traded to the Pirates [general manager] Joe L. Brown had a study done so the pine tar we would possibly use was clear."
    Brown figured it would be difficult to accuse somebody of using something you couldn't see. "I got a guy from Carnegie Mellon to develop a pine tar that was white and had no smell," the retired general manager confirmed. "Jim wouldn't use it. He said, 'I'm doing all right with the black stuff.'"
    Bunning's version of the Great Pittsburgh Pine Tar Experiment differed somewhat. "Unfortunately," he remarked, "I didn't stay in Pittsburgh long enough for them to develop it."

So, yeah. This book will probably only really be interesting to Phillies phans or for people who are really interested in hearing rants about the Players' Union and such. But, it's definitely different from your typical baseball biography -- they don't usually include a second career in politics.

---

Oddly enough, in terms of other Phillies books, today Phlogger Tom G pointed out that Mike Schmidt has a book coming out next week. In related news, my father, who still lives in Philly, is really good at getting hints, because when I sent him an email saying, "Hey, did you see this? Mike Schmidt's going to be signing copies of his new book at the Rittenhouse Square Barnes&Noble in two weeks!" he wrote back, "So, you're saying you want an autographed Schmitty book as an early birthday present? I'll see what I can do."

Mind Game: How the Boston Red Sox Got Smart, Won a World Series, and Created a New Blueprint for Winning, by Baseball Prospectus Writers

(I feel a little weird reviewing this book, since I sort of know a few of the authors, which is why I've procrastinated on it)

The amazing part about this book is how it's written by 20 different people, but it flows really well, for the most part, as if one author wrote it. Towards the end of it I almost felt myself playing a game with the book -- I'd be reading a chapter and come across a particularly witty phrase (for example, "...ever since Bill James discovered America...") and immediately think "Okay. Who wrote this chapter?" Sometimes I'd be right, sometimes I'd be wrong. The fact that I was more often wrong than right says something about the quality of editing and the ability of most of the authors to keep to one style and produce a homogeneity of writing quality.

The unamazing part of this book is the numbers. While I'd say about half of the numbers in the book were genuinely useful, interesting, timely, and proved a point, I'd say there were plenty of superfluous ones as well, which mostly just interrupted the flow of the book for me as I paused to look at them; often they were based off Prospectus equations which aren't easy to find or remember, even if you're familiar with the results and the use of the statistics. Fortunately, most of the time the gratuitous numbers segments were at the end of chapters, which meant you could look at them, decide whether you wanted to spend the time to really grok them, and then either go on to the next chapter or immerse yourself in math for a few minutes. I have to admit that I just skimmed the 40 pages of lists at the end.

As a result, this was a terrible bus book for me; it was slow-going and had a lot of context to keep, if I didn't finish a chapter on one ride. I have a feeling it'd be a bit better if I had read it at home and was able to look up the stats that I didn't recall offhand, although that too would have interrupted the reading flow, I think.

However, despite this, it was a genuinely interesting, informative book. I learned a lot from reading it. It was sort of cool to see them apply prospectus-isms to some older Red Sox teams, and some of the number-crunching actually really helped me better understand some points (the chapter on deconstructing Mariano Rivera was particularly good). I thought some of the tangents felt unnecessary (there seemed to be a lot about baseball brawls, although maybe that was a bigger part of the 2004 Sox than I personally recall?), but overall, things were good.

The "Caveman Cleans Up" and "Holy Gospel of On-Base Percentage" chapters were particularly amusing to me since I recently read "Idiot" and revisited "Moneyball". Infact, in general, this was a very odd book to read right after reading "Idiot", because it was a complete 180 on viewpoints. Johnny Damon would tell you something about a player being a great guy, and BP will give you the numbers about exactly how great he was.

So, while "Idiot" is a pretty quick read if you want to revisit the 2004 Red Sox for fun, "Mind Game" will be a much longer read, but you'll learn a lot more. If you enjoy reading Baseball Prospectus articles in general, you will probably adore this book. If you're the sort of baseball fan that goes "Ack! Numbers! Whatever, you gotta have HEART!", then you probably won't like it.

I finished reading both of these books this week in tandem (you'll understand why in a second), and since I'm trying to do book reviews to also keep myself updated on my "what I've read" list, I figured I should write something about them.

Idiot, by Johnny Damon (with Peter Golenbock)

I am sure you've all seen or heard of this book already. The paperback edition even contains COOL PICTURES FROM 2005! Since, after all, this book was originally written and published in the winter of 2004 following the Red Sox winning the World Series.

Anyway, I found this book to be pretty entertaining, although it's not necessarily a "you absolutely must read it" sort of book outside of Red Sox fans, and even then, due to his new uniform, maybe not even then. As you'd expect, only the first 1/5th of it is about pre-Red-Sox Johnny Damon -- growing up, getting drafted, playing for the Royals and the A's, and then, BOOM, free agency, here we come Boston. After that, aside from bits and pieces of personal life details, the rest of the book is pretty much all about the Red Sox, mostly about 2003 and of course 2004. So, if you're a Red Sox fan, you still would probably enjoy reading this book, because it's sort of like re-living those seasons and championships, just through a different perspective. And if you aren't a Red Sox fan, you might enjoy reading this book anyway just because Johnny Damon's got crazy stories to tell about all the guys on the team (well, mostly he makes fun of Kevin Millar for being a loudmouth).

However, the biggest irony I must mention is that Johnny Damon spends a good half of the book always interspersing little details about how "We have to beat the Yankees" or "The Yankees and George are always trying new things to foil our plans" or "We're just proving that the Red Sox are not second fiddle to the Yankees", etc, etc. Lots of anti-Yankee stuff... and where's Johnny Damon playing now? The Yankees! Hee! So it's definitely pretty funny to read some of his sentiments during this book (and about his hair) now that we know where he'll be playing in 2006. On the other hand, he does spend a good chunk of time talking about how awesome Jason Giambi and Derek Jeter are, so I guess he's covered there.

You Never Forget Your First, by Josh Lewin

Now this IS a "you totally should read it" sort of book.

Also, as far as being a bus book, this is about as perfect as they get.

Basically, Josh Lewin (one of the TV voices of the Texas Rangers) went out and interviewed a ton of baseball players, asking them about their MLB debut, what was going through their head, what strange circumstances led up to it if any, what were they thinking when they got the phone call saying "You're going up!" and so on. So in a 250-page book, you have 120 players covered, each around 2-3 pages. Each player's section has a couple paragraphs summarizing who the player is and the highlights of their career, then has a couple paragraphs from the interview about their MLB debut, then has the box score of that game, plus little random factoids about the date, usually connected somehow with the player. (For example, Jamie Moyer's is "Also on June 16, 1986: Simply Red begins its rise on the pop charts with their hit single 'Holding Back The Years'. AUTHOR'S NOTE: 'Holding Back The Years' is precisely what Moyer has been doing since his mid '90s renaissance, pitching into his forties for Seattle.")

Almost all of the interviews are really interesting and entertaining, like Torii Hunter telling how he was put in a pinch-runner and Terry Steinbach messed with him pretending he wasn't going to get off base, and Hunter started running back to the dugout, only to have Terry yell "No, man, I'm just kidding with you!" as the stadium's all laughing like "Ahh, rookie." Or did you know that Mike Hargrove is the first person Roger Clemens ever struck out? And then there's Justin Morneau talking about how Larry Walker was such a big hero to him as a Canadian player, and his first game he happened to be playing against the Rockies, and Walker sent over an autographed bat for him saying "Welcome to the show. Make Canada proud." Joe Nuxhall (the youngest player ever, during WWII) mentions coming home the day of his debut like "School was fine, and oh, by the way, I pitched to Stan Musial!" And Eric Byrnes talks about how in his debut, he was doing okay, getting a few hits, then Steve Reed took offense at something and beaned him, which started a big brawl -- "Welcome to the big leagues. Two veteran teams going at it, and just because I had taken a big swing against Steve Reed, I guess. Whoops."

The biographies of the players are pretty cool too, with random trivia. Byrnes can name all 43 US Presidents in order. Tony LaRussa got his law degree the year before he became the White Sox manager. Kevin Millar himself described his bearded look as "Amish Porn Star". In addition, Millar trivia includes that he was never drafted for baseball, not in highschool or college, and worked his way up through the independent leagues, with the St. Paul Saints. Steve Stone is proud that he and Sandy Koufax are the only Jewish winners of the Cy Young. Alan Trammell snuck into Jack Murphy Stadium when he was a kid to watch Roberto Clemente take batting practice. Juan Samuel named one of his kids Samuel Samuel. And how did I never notice that the Tigers great Al Kaline's name spells out "alkaline"?

As if this wasn't enough to be fun reading, even just looking through the box scores of all the debuts is really awesome, and seeing names of players you'd totally forgotten about. Since this book features people who debuted anywhere from 1944 to 2004, there are all kinds of crazy lineups to see. Seeing the players who debuted in the early 80's either for the Phillies or against the Phillies just brought back a shock from lineups I hadn't seen since my childhood. A shocking number of people in this book, including Jamie Moyer, debuted against Steve Carlton. Heck, even A-Rod's debut in July 1994 made me think "whoa!" as he mentioned that the Mariners pitcher that day was Dave Fleming, a man I'd never heard of until a USSM post this week. And actually, the craziest Mariners-related debut featured in this book was that of Ron Wright, who basically appeared in exactly one game for the Mariners, managed to produce 6 outs in three at-bats by way of a single, double, and triple play -- and never got into an MLB game again.

This book is pretty fantastic, especially if you're the sort who's really interested in players' rookie cards and years and all. I happened to pick it up in a bookstore one day and read through a couple of the players' stories, but thought, "Gah, I don't want to pay $25 for this in hardback" and put it down. A week or two later I saw it in another bookstore, picked it up, read a few more players' stories, thought "Awesome! But ugh, $25, I wonder when it'll come out in paperback?" A week or two after that I was in yet another bookstore, saw the book again, picked it up, read it for ten minutes, and thought "You know, I'll be saving myself a lot of trouble if I just BUY THE DAMN THING ALREADY", so I did that. And I don't regret it -- this was not only a great bus book but also hugely entertaining.

You know how sometimes you pick up a book in a bookstore and start thumbing through it, and despite that your brain tells you that it's an awful book, you find yourself somehow morbidly fascinated with it and keep on reading, until you decide to actually buy the book and bring it home and read the whole thing?

Well, I went through that experience a few days ago, and since then have been sucking my brains out of my head through a very small straw as I read through the following two books:

Juicy : Confessions of a Former Baseball Wife by Jessica Canseco
Juiced : Wild Times, Rampant 'Roids, Smash Hits, and How Baseball Got Big by Jose Canseco

See, I don't really care about steroids. I really don't. I just don't find them interesting to discuss at all. Hence, I hadn't bothered reading Jose's book when it came out. And I honestly can't tell you what made me think Jessica's book was worth buying. Like I said, it was some sort of morbid curiosity, despite thinking with every word in the book, "Geez, what a goddamn bimbo!"

Let me give you some advice, if you do think of reading these books:

1) Don't read them.
2) If you absolutely must read one of them, read Jose's and not Jessica's.
3) And if you do read Jose's book, keep in mind that he's insane.
4) I dare you to find more than two consecutive pages in either book without the word "steroid" on it.
5) If you are going to read either or both, don't buy them, or at least, don't buy them for full price. Libraries exist for a reason, and Juiced has been out long enough that there shouldn't be a long wait for it at most places.

Reading both of these books back to back is almost like... it's almost like if two of your friends split up, and for some reason decide to keep telling *you* about all of their relationship issues, which means you get to hear both of them tell their side of what happened, which of course are completely different stories, and they want you to take their side and not believe their scummy ex, and you don't know who to believe, so in the end you decide they're both totally psychotic and ignore them both.

That said, Jessica's book isn't really a baseball book at all, so technically I shouldn't even be reviewing it here. She admits through most of it that she has no clue about sports or baseball. The entire book is pretty much her talking about how she met Jose, then how she slept with him for several years, during which he was a lying cheating bastard, and she stayed with him anyway, eventually got pregnant, got married, had a kid, split up, got back together, split up, got back together, split up... yeah. Whatever. Read this book if you really want to hear some deranged chick talking about having sex with Jose Canseco; otherwise, skip it.

Now, on to Jose's book. Since I read Jessica's book first, it was really sort of strange how Jose would talk about certain things, since I'd first heard her viewpoint on it, so I'd be like "Wait... he's lying. Wait... maybe she's lying. Oh for crying out loud, who CARES?" At least this was somewhat a baseball book, and I found some parts of it genuinely interesting. He talks about his life and career, which would probably be a lot more fascinating if he didn't punctuate most of it by injecting the word "steroid" into every paragraph to bulk up his word count.

The thing is, some people have compared this book to Ball Four, and that's an even bigger insult to Jim Bouton than the insults most ballplayers actually shouted at him. Ball Four was a genuinely hilarious and revolutionary book which gave readers a different look at the inside workings of baseball. Juiced is a vaguely amusing at times book which gives readers a different look at the inside of the bathroom stalls of various major league clubhouses.

At any rate, it felt like Jose wanted people to like him more after this book -- sort of like how Ty Cobb's biography by Al Stump had been tailored to make him seem like a good guy (until Stump published the "what a bastard" biographer's cut thirty years later, at least). And yet, this book just made me think he was more paranoid than I would have otherwise. Not counting Jessica's assertions of how Jose would spy on her, he spends a good chunk of the book saying how pretty much everyone in the world was against him -- his teammates, the media, the owners of the teams he played on, and Major League Baseball in general; sometimes he seems sure it's because he was Latino, and sometimes just because he was Jose Canseco, and sometimes I'm not sure what he's thinking. And maybe he's right to some extent, but it's hard to read his assertions without thinking "Err, um, really? Say what? Paranoid much?"

So, read his book if you want to hear a lot of stories about baseball players sticking needles into other players' butts, or if you're curious about the whole Madonna incident, or if you want to hear who he's calling out as juicers besides Giambi, Palmeiro, Bonds, McGwire, Sosa, etc. But if you're like me and don't care much about steroids, I would say you're no worse off if you don't bother reading this one, unless you were actually a Jose Canseco fan like pretty much every guy I used to trade baseball cards with as a kid. And in that case, you've probably already read the book anyway, and are about to tell me off for insinuating that Jose sucks.

(Which, to be fair, isn't really true. He doesn't have a co-author or ghostwriter listed for this, and if that's the case, then he actually did a pretty good job putting together a bunch of stories. Honestly, Jessica's book is just plain terrible in that aspect. So, yeah. Remember how I said a few weeks ago that I only talk about good books on here? I knew I'd find a way to break out of that streak...)

I meant to actually read this around when Bat-Girl picked it for her book club thingy, but I think at the time I was wading through a Cy Young book that took me far too long to get through, and I had to read a non-baseball book that a friend of mine from a writing group in college wrote, and... okay, let's face it, I didn't read it back then because I'm lame.

And quite frankly, I am lame. Because this book was incredibly, incredibly good.

The Numbers Game is not really a book about statistics. It is a book about the people who came up with the statistics. You could enjoy this book if you're a huge stathead, finding yourself nodding along as Schwarz describes the characters in this story, seeing those same qualities in yourself. You could also enjoy this book if you're just a casual baseball fan wondering how and where all of these godforsaken numbers came out of. You could definitely enjoy it if you're a baseball history nut, as the history of baseball statistics is firmly woven together with the history of the game itself.

The Numbers Game is to statistics as Moneyball is to general managing. Moneyball is not a book you read to learn about how to be a GM -- it is the story of Billy Beane and his approaches and innovations in the GM job. The Numbers Game is not a book you'd read to learn how to calculate statistics -- it is the story of many people and their approaches and innovations in baseball statistics.

It's really pretty amazing how much trivia you can learn from this book. Whether it's stories about the terrible inaccuracy of stats-stringing in the 19th century, or about Hal Richman in his basement coming up with the ideas for Strat-O-Matic, or Allan Roth figuring out why the Dodgers should trade Dixie Walker, or the quest to construct the Baseball Encyclopedia and the fallout afterwards, or of course, the rise and fall of Bill James -- there's a person and an inspiration behind each innovation. Often, you even learn that somebody came up with a "new" idea that was actually a hundred years old in concept, but never implemented previously.

From the eruption of Babe Ruth and the Home Run era needing new metrics to measure power, to the age of Rotisserie League ball and Voros McCracken coming up with DIPS to figure out which pitchers to use, you're reminded that the numbers revolution has largely been driven by people who never really played baseball. Some may argue that this takes the heart out of the game; that the new minds behind baseball are just that -- young mathematical minds, rather than old experienced players. Some may say that the past decade or two and the upswing of the internet have catapulted the growth of statistics beyond control. But the fact is, discussing players in terms of their numbers is a practice over a century and a half old, and that's where we stand now.

This book had a very curious property for me -- I found myself utterly engrossed in it, and truly fascinated by pretty much everything within -- however, for some reason, it took me about three weeks to finish reading it. I think it works just fine as a bus book, since most of the specific stories in it are very short, even if the story arcs are long. I had a tendency to read and reread things in it as I went along, though. Sometimes he'd present a story about someone, and then some equations, and I'd feel obligated to sit there and read through the equations and make sure I understood them before continuing, which also slowed me down a little. I don't think you necessarily need to do that while reading this book, unless you're a stathead. (And in that case, you should already understand them all. What's wrong with you?)

Another curious property of this book is that the entire time I was reading it, I kept telling other people they needed to read it, even before I was finished. It was like there was this entire history of the statistics of baseball that I'd been unaware of, that I felt they all needed to know. If somebody asserted that crazy statheads are a recent phenomenon, I wanted them to know that, say, a man named John Lawres had started recording players' stats in 1892 and kept doing it for 20 years, just because he had no other way to get their lifetime stats. I wanted people to know about Sandy Alderson and Eric Walker starting the A's OBP revolution twenty years before Moneyball.

And yes, the final chapter or two, where he's talking about Baseball Prospectus and Retrosheet and baseball-reference.com and other such modern overflowing fountains of statistics online, was sort of wacky to read. To his credit, the book is spaced out very well per timeline, and current events are more of an epilogue than a major focus.

I really enjoyed this book, anyway. I know I tend to only bother writing about books I really liked, but no, really, this one was pretty spectacularly well-done, in content, writing style, how well-researched it was, and just how fascinating and entertaining a subject matter it turned out to be. Have I mentioned that you need to read it?

The Goose Is Loose, by Rich Gossage (with Russ Pate)

The worst thing about this book is that I bought it in July and didn't get around to reading it until these past few days.

Goose Gossage is a funny, funny man. This is a funny, funny book. He had a very long and crazy career on many teams, and he's got a story about pretty much every guy on every team to tell you. Some are nice, some are not. Most are hilarious. Every page of this book crawls with random similes and jokes; if I open it to a random page, I get him describing the White Sox's state in 1972:

    The most unforgettable aspect of my first season in the majors had to be the brilliant performance by Dick Allen. At the risk of using the most overused and devalued word in the lexicon of sports--what the hell, I'll go ahead-- he was awesome. Capital A.
    Allen carried us to a record of 87-67 in 1972, five and a half games behind the AL West champion Oakland A's. Oakland, beginning its three-year run of world championships, had a star-studded lineup featuring Reggie Jackson, Joe Rudi, Sal Bando, and Bert Campaneris, as well as great pitchers like Catfish Hunter, Ken Holtzman, and Blue Moon Odom.
    We had Dick.
    Granted, having Dick was infinitely better than not having dick, er, Dick. But other than a few solid bats like Melton and Carlos May, we didn't have much punch in our attack.

The book pretty much just tells the entire story of his career. It's not all laughs, though. For example, in one string of stories, first he recounts a hilarious one about Dave Parker calling to his baseball bat like "Here, boy! C'mere!" and dragging it along with wire, but then immediately launches into a string of stories about really terrible injuries that happened to his teammates. I was reading the book on the bus and I went from laughing out loud to wincing as I imagined some of the accidents he described.

Similarly, one minute he has you laughing over stories of the 1978 Yankees, and then the next minute, you're in pages of emotional melancholy over Thurman Munson's death in 1979. I'd fortunately already read enough about Munson that I knew what to expect, but it was still yet another account from a close friend that made you realize what a loss it was to the team and the players. Very sad.

For me in particular, this book was fun to read for another reason -- that it recounted stories of a lot of teams and players that I remember from my childhood, since Goose's career pretty much spanned from a couple years before I was born until the 1994 strike, which was the year I dropped out of baseball to attend college. He talks about little details like going up against the Dodgers with rookie Fernando Valenzuela; he mentions the death of Ray Kroc and subsequently throwing Joan Kroc into a swimming pool the next year; then he's on the Cubs when youngsters Jamie Moyer and Raffy Palmeiro get traded for the Wild Thing, who replaced the Goose as closer. Even just the little details he gives from the half-summer he spent playing for the Hawks in Fukuoka are pretty fun to read.

Also, can you believe that the Goose developed an allergy to beer? What a travesty for any baseball player.

Goose was everywhere in baseball at one point or another, and saw a whole bunch of changes in baseball during his career. When he started playing, there were 12 teams in each league, 6 teams per division, no designated hitter rule, no free agency, heck, no Seattle Mariners, even. By the time he retired, there were 28 major league teams, 14 in each league, three divisions per league, and he was playing for the Mariners. The role of a closer was barely recognizable compared to what it is today when he started pitching; he was the second player to ever reach 300 saves, after Rollie Fingers, but today he only ranks 16th out of 19 players who've reached that number.

An interesting thing about this book is that there's no pictures section. Pictures seem to generally be pretty central to baseball biographies, and for some reason they didn't include one here. I'd be fine with that, except that I think any good story about the Goose has to have a picture of him and his crazy-ass mustache.

Anyway, vastly fun, vastly entertaining book about a vastly crazy guy. I guarantee you *will* laugh if you read this book, even if at times you'll be groaning as he stretches to put a joke on nearly every page.

I'm still having fun in Pittsburgh. My friend's roomate actually HAS the Steve Blass / Manny Sanguillen double bobblehead from this summer. It's so funnylooking. Manny has a catcher's mitt on his head, so if you shake the desk, Steve Blass's head bobbles all around, but Manny just nods. Hee. I'll take a picture at some point. I haven't made it down to PNC Park yet this trip. I'm disappointed to find out that they only do stadium tours from April to October; I'd never looked into going on an official tour there since I've been around most of the park during games. Maybe when I'm back here in April...

Anyway, the news tidbit of the day to me is that the Yomiuri Giants signed Kiyoshi Toyoda, the Seibu Lions' closer, who was a free agent this offseason. Cool. I know, I'm mean, but this just means more of an equalizer in the Pacific League.

So, I read this book when I was still jet-lagged the last few days. It was pretty
fun.

You Can't Lose 'Em All : The Year the Phillies Finally Won the World Series by Frank Fitzpatrick

First off, the neatest piece of trivia I never knew before and learned from this book: in all of Pete Rose's 24 seasons, 3562 games, 4256 hits, and 160 home runs, he only ever hit one grand slam in his career, July 18, 1964, off of Dallas Green, who managed the 1980 Phillies and who was a pitcher for the Phillies during that fateful 1964 season. Apparently, 15 years later, Pete Rose still teased him about it. (Though the book actually has the date wrong -- they say July 19, and I checked it on Retrosheet and Baseball-Almanac. I'm sure there's no way in hell most people would notice or catch that, unless they also were like "Whoa, no way! What a crazy coincidence!" when they read it. I assume the author probably found a July 19th newspaper clipping or something.)

Anyway, if you grew up in Philadelphia and were too young to really appreciate 1980 when it happened, as I was, but went to way too many Phillies games in your youth anyway, as I did, this book is really pretty great. I mean, I remember some of the guys clearly -- Schmidt, Carlton, Rose, Tugger, Bowa, Boonie, etc -- but a lot of the other names are really pretty fuzzy to me, aside from my 1980 Phillies felt pennant. So this is the story of all those guys.

It's sort of the story of everything leading up to the events of October 21, 1980, starting with an explanation of the doomedness of the franchise in general --

Let's say you were a Philadelphian born in the first decade of the twentieth century. You loved baseball, preferred the National League, and by 1917 had become a Phillies fan. Well, by 1948, assuming you hadn't been hospitalized or switched allegiances, you would still be waiting. Waiting not just for a World Series, not just for a pennant, not even for a near miss. Thirty-one years after you gave your heart to the Phillies, you would not yet have experienced a single winning season!

(Sadly, despite the great way this is phrased, it's actually not strictly true either. The Phillies did have a vaguely winning season in 1932, where they went 78-76 behind Chuck Klein and his 38 home runs. I do love the way he pointed out how in 1930, though, Klein hit .386 with 40 HR, Lefty O'Doul batted .383, the team batting average was .315, and those two plus Pinky Whitney each had over 200 hits. And where did they finish? Dead last, losing 102 games. I thought I'd looked at every embarrassing Phillies year, but I guess not.)

We go through the Phillies' early years, of course pointing out how by 1980 the team had only been in two World Serieses, and had only won one game therein, in 1915. Hell, in winning Game 1 of the 1980 NLCS, Steve Carlton became the first Phillies pitcher since Grover Cleveland Alexander to win a postseason game for the Phillies at home.

Now, most of the story starts in 1964. No, not exactly with them losing the pennant in the spectacular way they did, but with the building of the Phillies farm system, as it were. Paul Owens took over, and he started signing some talented kids. Bowa in 1965. Luzinski in 1968. Boone in 1969. Mike Schmidt in 1971. They managed to trade Rick Wise for Steve Carlton. (Apparently Tim McCarver only got back his catching job with the Phillies in the 70's because Carlton refused to be caught by Boone.) Other pieces fell into place, culminating in the signing of Pete Rose to kick everyone into shape. And suddenly, boom! 1980 Phillies. Then we get the story of the 1980 season, scratching and clawing for the division lead every day, and then the insane NLCS against Houston and the World Series itself, describing most of the crazier stories and plays and players and such. (George Brett, the "Preparation DH". 'Nuff said.)

I really had no idea how crazy the team's relationship with the fans and with the press was at the time, of course -- I could barely read in 1980, and I knew people booed at the stadium a lot -- but this book covers a lot of the crazy media fights between Dallas Green and the team, and the players in-fighting with each other, and whatnot. It's really pretty fascinating for me to read about all the different things that happened, and to bring a lot of the players to life more as characters than just as names on a pennant.

Basically, I guess what I'm trying to say overall about this book is that it's really a pretty entertaining read if you're a Phillies fan. There's a lot of humor in here, of course, and a lot of funny stories about games and all, and various insights from interviews with players and fans and front office folks and everybody. Like I also said, I'm sure there are a few facts in the book that are incorrect -- it's sort of funny that the few points I wanted to bring out as being cool about the book also point out the errors. If you read this, read it for the entertainment factor and the stories and just enjoy it. I did, after all -- if I hadn't decided to review the book, I wouldn't have noticed any flaws!

The Annotated Casey at the Bat, by Martin Gardner

The other day I hung out at the Elliott Bay Book Company with fellow blog citizen Ryan H, and he was very kind and let me geek out about baseball with him for several hours. (I hate the offseason. Everybody just wants to talk about that sport with the prolate spheroid and the Jacobsenesque guys slamdancing.) I wasn't intending to buy any books, but I found this book full of Casey at the Bat parodies and tributes, and well, I've kind of had that poem going through my head since a few weeks ago. So, I couldn't resist.

If you are a fan of Casey at all, you need this book. No, really, you do. I had no idea there were so many other parodies and versions and takes on Casey. It's all levels of awesome.

The book delves into the history of the poem itself and the various versions, as well as the actual characters surrounding Our Hero, including lineups for the Mudville Nine, assorted players for Centerville, Casey's family, the pitcher (James Riley "Fireball" Snedeker. I never even knew he had a name!) who fanned Casey, etc.

First, there are several versions by Thayer himself. Then there are several tributes by the legendary sportswriter Grantland Rice, which range from as simple as Casey actually hitting the ball, to a sad ballad about the desertion of Mudville, to a brilliant little ditty depicting Casey as "The Man Who Played With Anson on the Old Chicago Team", but culminating in the ultimate poetic snarkiness, as he writes a poem as a response to a letter he received saying "I enjoyed your Casey poem, but what is the original about?" called "He Never Heard of Casey!" An excerpt:

Ten million never heard of Keats, or Shelley, Burns, or Poe;
But they know "the air was shattered by the force of Casey's blow";
They never heard of Shakespeare, nor of Dickens, like as not,
But they know the somber drama from old Mudville's haunted lot.

He never heard of Casey! Am I dreaming? Is it true?
Is fame but wind-blown ashes when the summer day is through?
Does greatness fade so quickly and is grandeur doomed to die
That bloomed in early morning, ere the dusk rides down the sky?

Granny Rice's stuff is fabulous, but there's even more that follows. We have more "revenge of Casey" style poems where he actually gets the hit at the end. In some of these, Casey is in his forties, or even in his sixties. We have a few poems that try to pinpoint the blame for Casey's bad fortune -- a cross-eyed bat boy, a spitballing pitcher, what have you. We also have the rest of Casey's family come to the plate -- poems about his son, his daughter, his sister, even his wife's antics in the batter's box grace the pages of this tome. A couple of times, we actually have Casey as a pitcher, oftentimes getting his revenge on the Centerville team.

There's even, of course, the Mad Magazine "Get a teenager to translate it for you" version that was published in 1960. You don't even really need the explanatory paragraph to figure that out, honestly:

Ten thousand peepers piped him as he rubbed fuzz on his palms;
Five thousand choppers grooved it when he smeared some on his arms.
Then while the shook-up pitcher twirled the ball snagged in his clutch,
A hip look lit up Casey. Man, this cat was just too much!

And now the crazy mixed-up ball went flying out through space.
But Casey, he just eyed it with a cool look on his face.
Right at that charged-up sideman, the old ball really sailed--
"That's so far out," sang Casey. "Like, Strike One!" the umpire wailed.

The British writer J.A. Lindon contributes two pure gems as well - the first is Casey in outer space, aka Casey At The Cap, and the other is, of course, the Village Cricket Casey. They are both great, though I think the kicker is Lindon's excellent palindrome:

Won't I help? Miss it in mad stab? Yes, a Casey bats. Damn! It is simple -- hit now.

Anyway, there is a football version as well (boo!) called "O'Toole's Touchdown" which is immediately recognizeable as well ("And so when Cohen lost five yards, and Zipkin did the same / A sickly silence fell upon the patrons of the game.")

But I must tell you that none of these are even remotely comparible to the very last entry in this anthology, which is "Ahab At The Helm" by none other than Ray Bradbury. I'm not sure it gets much better than this:

It looked extremely rocky for the Melville nine that day,
The score stood at two lowerings, with one lowering yet to play,
And when Fedallah died and rose, and others did the same
A pallor wreathed the features of the patrons of this Game.

A straggling few downed-oars to go, leaving behind the rest,
With that hope that springs eternal from the blind dark human breast.
They prayed that Captain Ahab's rage would thrust, strike, overwhelm!
They'd wager "Death to Moby!" with old Ahab at the helm.

I think you've gotten the idea by now -- and in theory, if you enjoyed the few snippets I've included here, you'll enjoy the rest of the poems. It's a truly wonderful collection of literary, mostly-baseball-related delight. Hell, even the Amazon review I see (another Casey parody) is funny.

As an aside, though -- this is NOT a bus book by any means. This book is best enjoyed at home where you can read all of the poems aloud and enjoy the meter and imagery -- also, it's rather embarrassing when you burst out laughing on the bus, really. I think it'd be a lot of fun for a couple of baseball fans to read together, or perhaps for a parent to read to a child.