Baseball Books

ie, Malamud and Angell.

tho I miiiight have read the Breslin book on the Mets a very long time ago.

the coover book is great but not really about baseball

Ball Four is a tough read - the narrator is so, I don't know, unlikeable (and not a good writer, though why should he be).

Majorly, majorly disagree. Unlikeable, maybe--I find Bouton very likeable, more in love with the quirks and absurdities of baseball than an underpaid, aging reliever barely hanging on with a doomed franchise ought to be, but I can see where someone might find him to be a self-obsessed wiseass. But as to the other point, I think he's a better writer than most writers. (How much credit belongs with Leonard Shecter, his editor, I don't know.)

Clemenza and I totally agree! Bouton is immensely likeable and a great writer. A lousy actor though. Laughable in the Long Goodbye.

No Eight Men Out? That's a very good book imo.

I couldn't make the adjustment to us agreeing, Alex...I think Bouton's fine in The Long Goodbye. Not an actor, agreed, but the guy he's playing is a superficial operator whose slickness is supposed to contrast with Gould's dogged, somewhat clumsy virtuousness, and by that yardstick I think he does okay. When he tells Marlowe at the end that that's the way it is, guys like him are chumps who are there to be taken advantage of, I find Bouton credibly slimy.

I can't stand the movie so I don't really like anything about it.

Surprising...Just the movie itself, or '70s Altman in general? Mark Rydell delivers a line that's on my short-list of funniest ever.

The movie. Although there are other 70s Altman flicks I can't stand there is plenty I love.

1921: The Yankees, the Giants, and the Battle for Baseball Supremacy in New York, written by SABR members Lyle Spatz and Steve Steinberg, is the winner of the 2011 Seymour Medal, which honors the best book of baseball history or biography published during the preceding calendar year.

http://sabr.org/latest/spatz-and-steinbergs-1921-awarded-2011-seymour-medal

Wow, impressed with the consensus on Ball Four. I should pick it back up then, huh!

I'd also recommend the follow-up, I'm Glad You Didn't Take It Personally, which covers Bouton's half-season with the Astros in '70, his release, and the fallout from Ball Four (some priceless stuff on Bowie Kuhn). Not as good, but good nonetheless. He also wrote a book on managers that I read years ago and liked. There were chapters on Harry Walker, Joe Schultz (shitfuck, a must), Houk, etc. Pretty sure it was called I Managed Good, but Boy Did They Play Bad.

Bouton has a website where you can arrange to get books autographed: http://www.jimbouton.com/. I continue to think about doing this...it's a little pricey, but I think the money goes to charity.

for Ball Four fans:

http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/ball-four-tracers/

So thank you all for getting me to stick with Ball Four. It's an awesome piece of work, insightful and fascinating, and Bouton comes across clever, compassionate and decades ahead of his time. His team-mates, for the most part, not so much! I definitely want to pick up the sequel now.

Shawn Green has a Zen-inflected memoir out:

http://mlb.sbnation.com/2011/8/2/2306220/shawn-green-interview

An interesting postscript to The Echoing Green -- Ralph Branca just found out, through Joshua Prager, that his mother was Jewish and that several of his relatives died at Auschwitz:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/15/sports/baseball/for-branca-an-asterisk-of-a-different-kind.html?pagewanted=all

Stumbled over this searching for a Merritt Ranew quote:

http://www.funtrivia.com/playquiz/quiz1704811385e00.html

20/25.

I'm reading "Ball Four" again and was looking up some of the players on B-R. Cheers on sponsoring the Joe Schultz page, clemenza!

(although there are MUCH better Joe Schultz quotes, IMO) :)

Thanks. There are so many to choose from. Knowing I couldn't get "shitfuck" or "fuckshit" in there, that eliminated about half off the top. There's just something about the absurdity of the roast beef quote I love. (I used to sponsor Fred Talbot's page, too, until a relative of his contacted me about giving it up.)

When you finish, NoTime, try the quiz I linked to in the post previous to yours--it's still up.

I got 21/25. I probably should have done better considering I just read the book.

Schultz never managed again, with the exception of a cup of coffee with the Tigers a few years later. I guess his year with the Pilots gave him a reputation as a loser that he couldn't shake?

http://img.getglue.com/books/big_hair_plastic_grass_funky_ride_through_baseball_america_in_swinging_70s/dan_epstein/normal.jpg

I must have been asleep when this came out--it even gets mentioned upthread. Bought a copy today, looking forward to it so much. (I loved Phil Pepe's oral history of '70s baseball a few years ago.)

Learned about this thanks to the above book. I have no recollection of it whatsoever:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7s4T_gypZDY

Two-thirds of the way through this--love it. Reminding me of so many things I'd forgotten: e.g., the '76 NL batting race, where Griffey to sat to protect his lead and had Madlock go 4-4 to pass him. And so much else that I wasn't aware of. Three examples: 1) That if you write Dock Ellis's name like it would be formally alphabetized, you get Ellis, D.; 2) Danny Ozark, as the '76 Phillies started to squander a huge lead to the Pirates: "Every Napoleon had his Watergate"; 3) Game 5 of the '74 Series, with Charlie Finley sharing the owner's box with Rock Hudson and Anita Bryant.

Yeah, this book sounds awesome.

I was looking up a Yogi Berra quote online today, and found the Napoleon/Watergate quote attributed to him. My guess: Ozark actually said it, but eventually every great malapropism gets credited to Berra.

http://hardballtalk.nbcsports.com/2012/09/17/tony-la-russa-holds-a-grudge-against-keith-law/

Enjoying most of this:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51364op%2BHbL._BO2,204,203,200_PIsitb-sticker-arrow-click,TopRight,35,-76_AA300_SH20_OU01_.jpg

The chapter on the draft and risk/reward is great; it loses me when they get into PITCHf/x, though, where it's like reading a dry textbook.

Good stuff:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_fXNLNzNuk

on Jim Brosnan and The Long Season:

http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2012/10/25/quit-thinking-you%E2%80%99re-hurting-the-club/

Neyer read the Piazza book so you don't have to

http://mlb.sbnation.com/2013/2/15/3991264/mike-piazzas-new-book-has-something-for-everyone

Found some good ones at a thrift-store sale today, all brand new:

MVP -- Robert W. Cohen (evaluates all the awards--looks to have a sabermetric bent)
Ty and the Babe -- Tom Stanton
High Heat: The Secret History of the Fastball and the Improbable Search for Fastest Pitcher of All Time -- Tim Wendel
The Stark Truth: The Most Overrated & Underrated Players in Baseball History -- Jayson Stark (going to start on this right away)
2012 Prospect Handbook -- Baseball America (I used to buy every Baseball America/Sporting News/Elias/STATS/etc. annual on the market when they were everywhere as remainders...the glut slowed down a few years ago)

I've never read Jayson Stark, but my impression was that he was someone worth reading. 40 pages into The Stark Truth, I don't think I've recoiled from a book this much since a Cintra Wilson collection I read a few years ago. I mean just him as a writer, never mind some of his over/underrated valuations. His jokes are so clunky and obvious, and he never lets up--he's got three terrible eating jokes in his Babe Ruth entry. And from what I've read and skimming ahead, he's got Kevin Brown, Tommy John, David Wells, Graig Nettles, Andruw Jones, and Bobby Abreu as overrated, and Roger Bresnahan, Todd Helton, Derek Jeter, and Pete Rose as underrated; putting my own feelings aside, wouldn't the general perception of those players be reversed? Lots of strawmen, too. Ron Blomberg is his #1 most overrated DH of all time...I remember Ron Blomberg--has anybody under 35 even heard of him?

Stuart Tanner on his new labor-centered book The Baseball Trust:

http://newsandinsight.thomsonreuters.com/Legal/News/2013/04_-_April/Q_A__Stuart_Banner_on_baseball_s_antitrust_carve-out/

http://i43.tower.com/images/mm101710363/pure-baseball-keith-hernandez-paperback-cover-art.jpg

This is terrific and can be had on the cheap. Watch two ball games with Keith. Great riff on the hit-and-run and inside pitching strategy.

Mathewson back on the shelves

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/10/christy-mathewson-and-the-thinking-mans-game.html

Re-reading Ball Four. Not for the first time, but the first in at least 20 years. Just got sent back to Vancouver--great as ever.

The one thing you can do now is check out some of Bouton's stories. There's one about both Tommy Davis (in the majors) and Phil Linz (in the minors) getting co-operation from the opposing catcher so they could preserve .300 averages for the season--in both instances, they get a hit.

I'll give Bouton a passing grade on that one, but just barely. He identifies the Davis season as when he was with the Mets, and sure enough, Davis did hit .302 that year, and went 1-3 for the final game. But it didn't come down to the last AB; he doubled in his second AB, then grounded out in the 4th, then got pulled. Technically, he could have gone 0-3 and still would have rounded to .300. More important: the story is told as Davis's old friend John Roseboro doing him a favor, but Jeff Torborg caught that game--Roseboro only pinch-hit after Davis was gone. As far as Linz goes, the only minor-league season he had that was close to .300 was .298 in 1959. I can see where minor-league stats might have been very unreliable then, and something got revised later on. Otherwise, the story is based on something that never happened.

print the legend

I was at the documentary festival this afternoon, waiting for a film to start, when the guy beside me noticed my copy of Ball Four. "Good book"--said he'd read it long ago.

Earlier, as I stood in line outside, I started giggling out loud at this part:

The kids beat the fathers 40-0, and Sibby Sisti said, "Forty runs, for crissakes, and nobody gets knocked down." And McNertney said he was standing next to Sal Maglie during the game and swore he heard Sal saying, "He's a first-ball hitter"--"a high-ball hitter"--"a fastball hitter"--and none of the kids was over four feet tall.

If you post on ILB and have never read it, order a copy tonight from AbeBooks or somewhere.

I can't believe you hadn't read it in over 20 years. I think I last read it about 3-4 years ago, but it's the kind of book I feel like I should be reading every year when spring training starts.

I saw Sibby Sisti at a SABR convention (before he died, as Yogi wd say)

That's great. Bouton goes fairly easy on Sisti, who's just there to qualify for a pension.

One thing I'm really noticing this time is how the book is like a blueprint for sabermetrics to a degree. First of all in a general sense--questioning conventional wisdom at every turn (I think Ball Four helped me get ready for the Abstracts--but also in some specifics. Bouton talks about how wedded writers are to a pitcher's W-L record, and how it doesn't matter how you're actually pitching--pitch well for a month and win nothing, then win a game giving up six runs, and the writers will be there to ask when you started to turn things around. Also, at one point, he talks about the mindset of a professional player, and how in a key situation he'll say, "I've been here before; I've succeeded and I've failed, and none of that has any bearing on this particular at-bat." You could easily translate that as skepticism about the idea of clutch hitters.

He ridicules a lot of dumb sports cliches but I wouldn't go that far. There are many 2 IP, 2 H, 2BB, 0 ER appearances that he calls "good" or "excellent". He pitches into trouble, escapes without giving up a run, and sees it as a job well done, which isn't really true, especially for relievers.

I was curious about that, so I added up the most basic totals for his excellent and good outings. (If you haven't read the book, Bouton has a detailed personal game log at the back, with a rating for each appearance as excellent/good/fair/poor.) The numbers are microscopic in my old paperback, so hopefully this is accurate.

In the aggregate, at least, his designation of excellents is spot-on, I think:

IP - 72.1
H - 33
BB - 19
K - 59
ER - 4
ERA - 0.50
H/9 - 4.11
KK/BB - 3.11

He's looser with his definition of good, agreed, but I don't think it's that unreasonable a description:

IP - 24.2
H - 22
BB - 8
K - 19
ER - 7
ERA - 2.55
H/9 - 8.03
K/BB - 2.38

Also, when Bouton talks about giving up hits throughout the book, he's often very specific about which ones were cheap hits and which ones were clean. Is that partly where all the work being done on defense right now resides? (An actual question--I don't know.)

Anyway, I think it depends on what sabermetrics means to you. If it means WAR and BABIP and UZR, then no, Bouton has nothing to do with sabermetrics. How could he? A player, much less a player in 1969, doesn't think that way.

But to me there's a direct line from Bouton to James in the more general sense I described above: "Everyone says this is true--it is actually true?" That's everywhere in Ball Four, just like in the Abstracts.

"is it" in the last line...if I manage to get through a post without a typo, other gremlins take over.

Holy crap, nice work. I checked my copy of the book, and you're right, there are some questionable decisions over whether to call an appearance "excellent" or "good" or whatever, but in the aggregate, his designations are justified.

I didn't mean that Bouton anticipated the use of complicated statistics but it's true that he tended to analyze his performances on a batter by batter basis, rather than just looking at the linescore for the day. An outing where you retire five straight batters but make a mistake to the sixth and he hits it out could still qualify as a very good outing, even though 1 ER in 2 IP might not look impressive. He certainly knows it's different than 4 H, 1 ER, 2 IP and getting out of a jam when the defense turns a double play. He also tracks inherited runners scored (and understands why it's important for relievers), which was likely somewhat revolutionary for the time.

I should have tracked inherited runners, too--that would have figured into his rating for each outing. The other big factor is the knuckleball. He tends not to penalize himself too much for walks, as one of the ongoing stories in the book is how he's trying to discipline himself not to give in and throw a fastball (which he doesn't have anymore) when he's behind in the count, unless it's a Dal Maxvill or a pitcher at the plate. He almost considers it a moral victory when he walks a good hitter on a 3-1 knuckleball.

Just loved the book this time around. Beyond the baseball, it's such a document of the culture. On the war and on race, Bouton's great. I'd give him a pass on the book's treatment of women--there's the crude sex stuff (usually really funny), yes, and I could see where that would bother people, but in the way he talks about his own wife and daughter, very thoughtful. The one area where it's typical of it's day is in its treatment of homosexuality. Not hateful or anything, just a very dated kind of humour. That only comes up two or three times.

jason grilli 'wrote' a book

guess i won't be too sad when his regression to suckitude soon gets him dfa'd

http://www.bucsdugout.com/2014/5/12/5706120/book-review-jason-grillis-hilariously-narcissistic-just-my-game

http://www.timwendel.com/images/SummerCover-210.jpg

Excellent. Wendel spends more than a third of the book on the world out there--I wouldn't want a baseball book on 1968 to do anything but. But he makes the connections back to baseball well. Example: I never knew that RFK's assassination was so divisive within MLB as to how it should be handled. Some players sat out the next day, most played; of those who sat out, sometimes management looked the other way, sometimes not. Milt Pappas was very militant, and after an on-field confrontation with his GM, he stepped down as player rep. A week or two later he was traded. No connection, promised the GM. Another: the Astros in to play the Cubs in August during the Democratic convention, Larry Dierker watching the chaos below from his hotel window.

Everyone knows Drysdale's scoreless streak in '68, but both Gibson and Tiant made at run at the record themselves. Gibson got to 47 innings, Tiant (whose streak preceded Drysdale's) to 41. A couple of big fights are documented, including one involving Tommy John and Dick McAuliffe: "...order was soon restored. That's when everybody noticed John holding his left arm. Afterward, it would be determined that he had suffered torn ligaments in his pitching shoulder." Good writer that he is, Wendel leaves it at that.

Great World Series at the end, and a couple of famous plays: Brock getting thrown out at home in Game 5 (Cardinals were 3-1 at that point), and Jim Northrup's triple in Game 7 to put the Tigers ahead.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DU6jXgINHZA

Flood said he misplayed the ball and should have had it, Gibson and all the other players (both sides) stuck up for him. I don't know...I'd have to say I agree with Flood.

Okay, back to the present.

i read 'the art of fielding' chad harbach book, it is v good; is more a novel w/ baseball in it than a 'baseball novel' or w/e but its well done, maybe justifying its bidding war