YFSF

Bottom of the Ninth

My review of Michael Shapiro's new book on the aborted life of the Continental League, a would be addition to the majors, appears in today's Los Angeles Times. (I sure picked the right day to run a baseball story in the paper.) "Bottom of the Ninth" is a book that's absolutely worth your time, though not an easy one, and not without its flaws. Though we all have a tendency to stick our heads in the sand when it comes to the ugly shenanigans that are the business of baseball—we watch baseball because it's supposed to be entertainment—unless we keep an eye on history's fine print it's impossible to hold accountable those who control the game. Those who are ignorant of the past, are condemned to repeat it. Or perhaps we'd be condemned anyway, but a little bit of knowledge doesn't hurt, especially if it comes in an enjoyable package.

The Adults

In this week's New Yorker, Roger Angell, the dean of the press box, looks at the career of Joe Torre, dean of the dugout set, and his new book with Tom Verducci. Some of the choice bits:

For me, a longtime New York baseball fan, the shock of no Yankees in the playoffs was less than the shock of not having Joe Torre in town for the summer, and I feel the same way now, at the beginning of his second year in exile. What’s lost is not the winning so much as the elegant daily and weekly, home and away managing seminar on giving your team a chance to win, or get readyto win—or perhaps lose, if that’s the way things turn out. This tone or strategy may be only another way of enunciating Yogi Berra’s “In baseball you don’t know nothin’,” but it’s a lesson I did not fully grasp until I had watched Torre sitting immobile in the Yankee dugout through many hundreds of innings, with his lidded dark gaze raised to the level of the field; one hand occasionally reaching back for another swig of green tea; his head now and then tilting toward the words of his bench coach; and, late in the evening, his shoulders lifting as he prepared to get up and climb the steps and trudge to the mound to change a pitcher and exchange a word or two with his catcher about the situation at hand.

and the conclusion:

He’s a cinch for the Hall of Fame—as a manager, not a player—whenever he’s ready to retire, and he’s already in the Grownups Hall of Fame, which has a few more members than the one in Cooperstown but tougher admission standards.

Lit Fans Bid Scribe Adieu: John Updike, 1932–2009

A sad day for American letters, and America generally, with the passing of author John Updike. The hero of his great Rabbit series was a basketball player, but Updike knew his baseball as well, and gave us one of our most memorable—and best titled—pieces on the national pastime: Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu. Our cap is doffed. 

A Race Like No Other

 

It's a great week for democracy here in NY. Friday was Halloween, and one of the highlights of that night is always the parade down in the Village. Anyone can participate; all you need is a little creativity and a sense of humor. Or you can just be a spectator. Next Tuesday, of course, we all get to exercise our right to vote, and we certainly hope you'll do that. But as far as I'm concerned, today is always the best day of the New York year: Marathon Day. It's a truly egalitarian world-class sporting event, and a day on which the city invariably puts it's best besneakered foot forward. If you can run 26.2 miles, you can enter. And New Yorkers will cheer you on in all five boroughs. As Liz Robbins notes in her fine new book about the event, A Race Like No Other, 749,741 runners have crossed the finish line since its inception in 1970. The book is an ode to the race, to the racers, and to the city in which it takes place. It tells the tale of last year's event by tracking a series of runners of different skill and background as they make their from Bay Ridge to Billsburg, Long Island City to the Upper East Side, Harlem to the South Bronx, all the way to Central Park. "Fans four deep line both sides of Fourth Avenue as they stand clapping and shouting, some banging on pots and pans for extra emphasis," she writes of the crowd in Park Slope, where we watched. We'll be there again this year, and suggest you join us, if not there than somewhere along the route. Or maybe you're running yourself. In which case, GO GO GO.

Studs Terkel: 1912–2008

The great Studs Terkel—prolific historian, essayist, broadcaster, and champion of the little guy—died yesterday, a hard blow to American letters, and to the many Americans who'd been touched by his sweet but rumbly voice, both on paper and through the airwaves. Studs was a great baseball fan; he even appeared as a reporter in Eight Men Out. Fitting that his last World Series featured the Phillies, a team even older than Studs himself, and one with a similar working-class pedigree. He'll be missed.

Jules Tygiel, 1949–2008

We're a bit remiss in posting a note on the passing of the historian Jules Tygiel, who died earlier this month in California, where he was a professor at San Francisco State. Tygiel was born in Brooklyn, and will always be best remembered for his wonderful biography of Jackie Robinson, Baseball's Great Experiment. He was the author of several books on baseball and Robinson (among other subjects), all required of any sports library. Beyond his work on Robinson, we can be grateful to Tygiel for demonstrating that baseball, and sports generally, are subjects worthy of academic study that tell us a great deal about our culture and ourselves. He will be missed.

Eliot Asinof, 1919–2008

Eliot Asinof, in the starting lineup on any team of baseball literary titans, died yesterday in upstate New York. The nice obits on the author of Eight Men Out from our pals Alex Belth and Jay Jaffe are worth the time.

The Good Book

A few weeks ago, the editors of the Los Angeles Times Book Review asked me to write a short piece on the Baseball Encyclopedia, mythology, and the fragility of the historical record. It's in today's paper. You Could Look It Up. It was a special pleasure to interview David Neft, the Encyclopedia's original editor, whose thoughts about records and typographic qualifications echo my own:

"I don't believe in asterisks. Period. The record is the record. The record is the achievement. You may not like the person who holds the record. You may think he cheated. It doesn't matter. He's got the record."

A Splendid Find

On Saturday we were upstate for the weekend with my diehard Soxfan parents, who made the trip out to Columbia County to visit the SF clan. Our son Isaac of course made his weekendly demand for a visit to our wonderful local used bookshop, Rodgers Book Barn. It must have been something about the high percentage of Royal Rooters in the house (literally, it's a house), because as we were walking away we noticed a hardcover copy of the book that the above image is taken from, Ted Williams' classic "The Science of Hitting". It was four bucks, so an automatic purchase since our only copy of the book is a reprinted paperback. The bonus was that, upon further inspection, we discovered it to be a first printing, and in darn good shape at that. It's worth well more than the four bucks we shelled out.

The 1971 book is a classic of baseball instruction full of helpful illustrations and handy tips for the devoted ballplayer, even if impossible to emulate as an amateur. Williams' first person narration is rich and anecdotal; it reveals the great depth of Williams' historical knowledge of the game. It is up there with Ben Hogan's Five Lessons: The Modern Fundamentals of Golf, one of the greatest pro-to-amateur sports instruction manuals ever published. And, to this design nut, there is an amazingly modern graphic sense to some of the diagrams, particularly for a sports instruction book. The image at the top of the thread is from the cover, a hit chart representing Wiliams' hot and cold zones, done decades in advance of the visual information we are given on a nightly basis via ESPN, NESN, YES, etc. There is also some beautiful photography, in particular a sequence showing Williams' swing as it passes through the plate, shot dramatically from above the dish. We were lucky to find this.

A couple of pictures follow after the jump.

Fun With Stats: Hardball Times/Julio Lugo Edition

A bit of talk in recent days and weeks around here has been centering around the defense of our respective teams. A happy coincidence, then, that The Hardball Times Baseball Annual 2008 focuses several analysis chapters to the subject of defense.

Perhaps the most interesting is Tom Tango's look at shortstop defense over the past 15 years.

The article focuses on every Red Sox fan's favorite whipping boy -- Derek Jeter. I won't go too much into the Jeter analysis, which I admit I did enjoy. It pretty clearly shows that Jeter isn't just overrated on defense -- he's criminally overrated. Even arguments that he's good at coming in on balls or leaping for line drives fall flat as Tango shows that Jeter makes fewer plays than almost every shortstop in the game when compared by the pitcher on the mound, batter at the plate, baserunner on first, or ballpark.

We'll look a little at that, but what he doesn't mention -- and I was surprised to see -- was how well this look at defense flatters Julio Lugo (Red Sox fans' second-favorite whipping boy).