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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).

Fun With Stats: Bill James Edition

The Bill James Handbook 2008 has been out for a couple months now, but after receiving my copy earlier this week, I whipped through it in two days. Here are some interesting tidbits contained therein:

• Perhaps unsurprisingly, considering the state of the Yankee starters, and given that Joe Torre was the manager, the Yanks had a league-leading 522 relief appearances. No other team even topped 490.
• In Fielding Bible voting, Kevin Youkilis was ranked third at his position, Robinson Cano sixth, Dustin Pedroia eighth, Mike Lowell 10th, Coco Crisp fourth, Jason Varitek fifth and Chien-Ming Wang third. Derek Jeter, Alex Rodriguez, Bobby Abreu and Hideki Matsui also received votes. No respect, then, for Julio Lugo, Manny Ramirez (what?!) and Jorge Posada.

Haven't We Read that Already.....Twice?

In case you missed Mind Game: How the Boston Red Sox Got Smart, Won a World Series, and Created a New Blueprint for Winning by the folks at BP, and Feeding the Monster: How Money, Smarts, and Nerve Took a Team to the Top by Seth Mnookin, Publishers Weekly has some good news. Herald hack Tony Massarotti is at present working on "Dynasty: The Inside Story of How the Red Sox Became a Baseball Powerhouse," for St Martin's Press, and it's being pitched as "an in-depth, behind the scenes look at how the Red Sox became successful." Seriously? Tony? A new idea? Anyone? Please???

Doing the Right Thing

Let me toot my own horn and encourage readers to check out my Los Angeles Times review of a new collection of Jackie Robinson's political correspondence, "First Class Citizenship." I think it's safe to say that most fans—most Americans—don't realize what an important role Robinson played in the struggle for civil rights after his playing days had come to an end. Robinson made his misjudgments (on Nixon: "There is something about him that leaves me with the feeling of sincerity"), but his overall contribution to the American march for racial justice is hard to overestimate. He certainly wasn't pleased with the direction of things when he died, in 1972. A few months before he passed away, he wrote his erstwhile friend Nixon, telling him "You are polarizing this country to such an extent there can be no turning back. I hope you will take another look at where we are going and be the president who leads the nation to accept difficult but necessary action, rather than one who fosters division." Kind of hits home, doesn't it?

Spalding on BP Radio

To coincide with the paperback publication of Spalding's World Tour, I had a chat with BP's Will Carroll about the book, Albert Spalding, and his great trip around the globe. Makes for some easy listening, if you have a few spare moments.

Spalding's World Tour: Now in Paperback!

Behold the hot-off-the-presses paperback edition of Spalding's World Tour. Pretty, right? I think so. But you should find out for yourself, because there's nothing quite like the feel of a book in your hand. And for the low, low price of $11.66—your cost on Amazon.com—how can you resist? Provides hours of fun. Makes a great gift (Father's Day is fast approaching). Looks good on the shelf or the coffee table. What else?

-New York Times Book Review, Editors Choice
-Rave reviews in the Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, Washington Post, Business Week, Newsweek
-Sports Illustrated Top 10 Baseball Book of 2006
-Dan Shanoff Top 10 Sports Book of 2006
-Finalist for the Seymour, Casey, and Moore awards for best baseball book of 2006

If you're a Yankee fan, face it, you need a distraction.

Spalding's World Tour: Moore Praise

We're pleased to report that Spalding's World Tour has been nominated for yet another prize: The Dave Moore Award, bestowed annually by the editors of Elysian Fields Quarterly on the best baseball book of the previous year. The book was also a finalist for SABR's Seymour Medal and the Casey Award. Together they are the triple crown of baseball book prizes. If you haven't done so, you can pre-order your copy of the new paperback edition from Amazon.

David Halberstam: 1934–2007

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.—Joseph Campbell

This quotation is the epigraph to David Halberstam's magisterial "Summer of '49," surely one of the most influential books in the baseball literary canon. The passage evokes the stature and power of Joe Dimaggio and Ted Williams—the book's chief protagonists—but it just as well describes Halberstam, who was killed today in an automobile accident in California. Few writers can be credited with shaping political events. Halberstam did that; first as a Pulitzer-winning journalist, and then with his two books on the Vietnam War, "The Making of a Quagmire" and "The Best and the Brightest." Those books made plain to the American public the fiasco of a failed war. A spate of books in the same vein have followed recently, on a different war and a different set of misguided intellectuals. If his Vietnam work secured Halberstam his place in history, for baseball fans he will always be best remembered for "Summer of '49," which tracks a nail-biting, wire-to-wire pennant race between baseball's two great rivals. It is a beautiful book, an elegaic and sympathetic portrait of the Yankees and the Red Sox and one extraordinary summer. Any number of books have since followed its format—Halberstam himself copied it with "October '64"—but it remains the gold standard. If this site had a patron saint, it would be Halberstam. He will be missed.