Baseball Books

Halfway through Keith Law's The Inside Game. Pretty good, but I just finished the chapter where he writes about the status-quo trap, the tendency to think doing nothing is safer than change, which he illustrates with Grady Little leaving Pedro in too long in 2003, and with the Giants keeping three prospects who never panned out rather than trading for Roy Halladay (coming off a mediocre season, headed for a string of great ones) around the same time. Fine--except earlier in the book, he writes about availability bias, where a team might mistakenly jump at a known quantity primarily because he's known, and you could just as easily make the argument that the Giants avoided that. It's sometimes a here's-the-answer, what's-the-question kind of book.

The book sounds interesting, but when did Law become an armchair psychologist? I get that he wants to take a break from analytics and write about the human element of the game, but has he actually researched that? Or is he just trying to pad his memoirs by giving it a more "academic" spin?

When the Halladay trade happened, it was widely thought that many teams were overvaluing their prospects and were reluctant to make trades for established stars. I don't think it had much to do with availability bias, but perhaps my timeline is a bit off? He was working for the Jays at the time, right? He'd be the right guy to comment on what front offices were generally thinking.

The book's in the car right now, too lazy to walk out and get it, but I think he says he had a background in all this stuff at university.

The availability bias (and it might have a different name...many biases covered in this book) would have been in play in the negative: San Francisco didn't, in that particular instance, fall prey to it. My basic point is that there are all sorts of biases--the very biases he writes about--that come into play simultaneously, and when you chastise one team for falling prey to one of them, the opposite may be true for the other team; they may have wisely avoided it. In the Halladay non-trade, there was the Giants avoiding the availability bias, falling prey to the status quo bias, and--true of the Jays also--being led astray by recency bias, not making the trade because Halladay was coming off a poor season. The Jays, who made Halladay available, got away with it: the Giants passed, and the Jays got four or five more great seasons out of Halladay.

All these biases are at cross-purposes, and I think Law sometimes cherry-picks them to suit his purposes. Which is one of the biases he writes about.

So that Halladay non-trade was in 2004, not around the time he was actually traded years later.

Cherry picking biases sounds about right based on your description. That would annoy me as a reader but I should read the book before assuming too much.

also keith law is a prick

(xpost) I should have made that clear, 2004. I'm on the chapter about good decisions right now, and that deals with Halladay in 2009.

One instance where Law looks like a genius is an early chapter where he writes about vaccine hysteria (connecting it to one of his biases), and chastises people who won't get a measles vaccine, and how misinformation is feeding them, and what would happen if there were a serious epidemic, etc...and he's writing in the middle of 2019.

Reading Kevin Cook's Ten Innings at Wrigley: The Wildest Baseball Game Ever, With Baseball on the Brink. Before starting, I thought it'd be Ryne Sandberg's famous game against the Cardinals (must have been a Saturday--I was watching) -

https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/CHN/CHN198406230.shtml

or Mike Schmidt's four-HR game -

https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/CHN/CHN197604170.shtml

but it's neither; it's this one:

https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/CHN/CHN197905170.shtml

I think I will be receiving the Howard Bryant Rickey book for Xmas.

the only player I ever had a poster of.

Love the kind of useless trivia you pick up from a book like Ten Innings at Wrigley.

1) Bob Boone and Randy Lerch of the Phillies remain the only pitcher-catcher combination to both homer in a game before taking the field.

2) I guess I should have known this--I didn't--but the Dodgers, in their "legendary draft of 1968," landed Garvey, Cey, Lopes, and Buckner. That's incredible...that's 8,800 hits in the same draft, many of them (probably most) for the Dodgers.

3) There was an umpire's strike in '79 (the first?). It had just been resolved before the 23-22 game in question, but the replacement umpires were still working games before they returned. The home plate umpire that day was nursing a hangover.

It's still the '70s, far and away baseball's greatest decade for me.

Don't remember Danny Ozark all that well (Phillies manager in '79), but evidently he was a Yogi Berra in training. When the Phillies were mathematically eliminated in '75, he was quoted as saying "We're not out of it yet." On team morale: "Morality isn't a factor." When he was kidding around one time, he said "I'm being fascist."

Nice image after Schmidt wins the game in the 10th with a HR: two of the old-school reporters start writing their game reports on typewriters, while one of the younger reporters starts writing his on a Teleram P-1800 computer, and another writes his on a Radio Shack TRS-80.

Finished the Kevin Cook book. (Not a cookbook.) I just grabbed it off the shelf looking for something quick to read over Christmas, but it was excellent. You start with this one game that then branches off in so many different directions (beginning with histories of the Cub and Phillie franchises, all their woes and mismanagement). The cast of characters in the 23-22 game takes in HOF'ers (Schmidt and Sutter), weirdos like Tug McGraw and Dave Kingman, all those relievers I mentioned, Rose and Buckner, pure '70s guys like Bake McBride and Rawley Eastwick and Garry Maddox, Bob Boone and Tim McCarver, etc. The story of Donnie Moore is central; as I remembered, there was a whole confluence of factors that led to his suicide (which was actually a suicide/attempted murder of his wife).

Then and now. In '79, Kingman was a veritable freak, a guy who hit home runs or struck out. He led the NL that year with 131 strikeouts--which would have have placed him 56th on the MLB list in 2017. (Gorman Thomas did strike out 175 times in the AL that year.)

I am reading Ball Four and I love it, and though I’m only 30% in, I can otm this:

and basically, christ what an asshole

I’m 80% of the way through this, and into the Ball Five (post playing career?) bit so I feel qualified to comment now.

Firstly, Bouton tells the story really well. The book is full of both the broad sweep - the grinding slog of a season, from the minors to the majors and traded onwards - and the tiny details - the stuff they talk about in the bullpen, like the All-Uglies Team and the punctuation of family visits and pranks. So there’s a very frank portrayal of the professional player’s life back then, which has probably changed quite significantly since then, though the long hours of travel and boredom no doubt stay the same.

There’s some real laughs in it, he has very dry humour. But all the same, it’s clear as day that this guy is not liked, and it’s not because of his politics*, it’s because of his personality! Seriously. Steve Hovley managed to stay in the team, as did the guy who forever had a sore arm and went from starting to relief without Bouton thinking about this much besides “whyyyyyy can’t I start?”

Seriously. I won’t say that this works against the book, that it is a worse book for it, but Bouton is a prick. I got the strong sense that this would be the case even if he’d never published this. He’s always making digs and jokes at people despite clearly being disliked at best, and he absolutely loves to trot out the true catchphrase of the prick, “I couldn’t resist!” It’s a sad day when you’re sympathising with some dead-eyed big boi Bouton is dunking on just because Bouton has no clue how to read a room. If this guy was a football manager, we’d say he lost the dressing room, and in his case it would be almost as soon as he walked into it.

*Re his politics - yeah great you’re anti war, but the book is still filled with mentions of “beaver shooting”, some of which is basically upskirting aiui. That’s a criminal offence today, I found that far worse than any of the stuff about greenies or cheating on the wives or whatever.

Anyway I am finishing the last part of this but not looking forward to it. The atmosphere in the clubhouse and the tales of how the games went and how he felt pitching his knuckleball and all that - wonderful, I would read 20,000 pages of this. Him in television? I really don’t care, you know?

Classic read basically.

I don't think I'd change anything I wrote above--and I doubt either one of us would move the other an inch as to what we think of Bouton or the book--but I'm glad you mostly liked it. Haven't read the follow-up, Glad You Didn't Take It Personally, in ages (and only once)--I should read that again. It's about his '70 season with the Astros, and also about the fall-out from Ball Four.

i haven't read dirk hayhurst's book(s) so maybe he talks about this? (although tbf he was always marginal)

players in the minor leagues are trying desperately to *not* be in the minor leagues. they're in direct competition with their own teammates in a zero-sum game. but at the same time they're expected to publicly support each other in search of a Texas League title lol

there's a book to be written about that (even apart from the at-large racism of organized baseball)

(also 'sugar' was a good movie)

By the way, I should mention that the impetus for me to read this book was seeing this comic about it.

Finished Ball Four properly - all the post-career updates.

I went from finding Bouton irritating to more sympathetic. He wrote about his daughter Laurie‘s death with such tenderness and in such pain, and how it affected him. As he aged, he gained more perspective on his life. I loved his later life meeting with Steve Hovley, and that conversation he had with Gary Bell where they talk about modern players and all the money they make. He even has perspective on how pitchers are better cared for now - this is even truer now than it was in the later texts.

But yeah, as above: the perspective shift only reminds me of the original things I didn’t like much about his narration. An absolutely essential book.

One of the most moving things--not sure if it's in there--is when, after decades of Mantle not talking to him, Bouton took the initiative and contacted him when Mantle's son died of cancer: (Wikipedia) "Bouton tried several times to make peace with Mantle, but not until Bouton sent a condolence note after Mantle's son Billy died of cancer in 1994 did Mantle contact Bouton. The two former teammates reconciled not long before Mantle's death in 1995."

Yeah it is in there. It was very touching.

By the way, even though Baseball Reference discontinued their page sponsorships, they grandfathered a few around that, and I'm proud to say I'm still the sponsor of Joe Schultz's page:

https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/s/schuljo05.shtml

His player page--I tried to get his manager page first but I think someone else had it, or maybe it cost a lot more--but it's still Joe.

Got a few at the town sale yesterday, including the International League yearbook for the 1987 season. I got excited thinking it would be filled with future HOF'ers, but no: scanning league leaders for both hitters and pitchers, the only one I can spot is Glavine, 18th in ERA. I do see the names of numerous future Jays: Mike Sharperson, Rob Ducey, Manny Lee, Lou Thorton, Sil Campusano, David ("Dave") Wells, Duane Ward, etc. The Jays had a strong farm system then. Two other names: John Gibbons, Bill Beane.

Going to start on Pat Jordan's The Suitors of Spring. Jordan was one of SI's key baseball writers in the '70s; I remember an excerpt in the magazine from A False Spring, his memoir of his own minor-league pitching career. Never read the book, but the piece ended memorably, with him completing something like a two-hit shutout and thinking he'd finally arrived. The Suitors of Spring, from '74, has essays on eight pitchers, including Seaver, McDowell, Johnny Sain, and Steve Dalkowski (9 minor league seasons, 956 IP, 1324 K, 1236 BB).

I’m reading Jason Turbow’s The Baseball Codes, which is about the unwritten rules of the game. Ty to Mookieproof for this! So far my favourite chapter is about retaliation:

That the Royals were willing to wait a full season for revenge hardly set precedent. Take the time in 1973 when A’s outfielder Billy North let go of his bat as he swung at an offering from Kansas City rookie Doug Bird, sending it sailing toward shortstop Freddie Patek. North jogged out to retrieve his lumber, but stopped at the mound on the way to ask the startled pitcher, “Do you remember me?” Bird replied that he did not. “I remember you,” said North. “From Quincy.” Then, to the surprise of everybody, he started swinging. “We were all stunned,” said A’s second baseman Phil Garner, watching from the dugout. “Everybody was stunned.” “We were on the bench saying, ‘What the hell’s going on?’” said A’s catcher Ray Fosse. “They started fighting, so we as teammates ran out, and so did the Royals. When it was all over, we all asked, ‘What the hell just happened?’”

What the hell happened was that in 1970, when North was a twenty-two-year-old playing for Quincy, Illinois, of the Single-A Midwest League, he had the misfortune of coming to the plate against Bird, then twenty years old and playing for Waterloo. The two batters ahead of North had connected for home runs, and Bird responded by brushing North back. After the hitter had words with Waterloo’s catcher, Bird’s next pitch drilled him in the helmet. North missed three days. That was the last time the two shared a baseball diamond as minor-leaguers. North got called up to Oakland the following season, and two years later, when he saw the transaction wire indicating that Bird had joined the Royals, he began counting down the days until Kansas City came to town.

About halfway through the Pat Jordan book I mentioned above, The Suitors of Spring. There's a long chapter, "The Old Hand with a Prospect," about Woody Huyke--career minor-league catcher, "organization man" who obligingly goes wherever he's sent, hoping to maybe get a coaching job in the majors one day--and his relationship with Bruce Kison, 20 at the time and a year away from his famous middle-relief game in the '71 Series. It reminded me so much of Bull Durham, which I know is based on Ron Shelton's own minor-league experiences, but I bet he'd at least read Jordan's book when he sat down to write it.

Huyke never got his major-league coaching job, but:

He managed in the Pirates' organization from 1974 through 1989, and 1990 through 2004. He voluntarily stepped down as manager after the 2004 season, remaining with the Gulf Coast League Pirates as a coach. One of Woody's early successes, in 1989, was identifying Tim Wakefield's potential as a knuckleball pitcher (at the time, Wakefield was a light-hitting first baseman) and convincing the Pittsburgh Pirates organization not to release him.

Still alive; Kison died five years ago.

Anybody read Evan Drellich's Winning Changes Everything? A friend writes that it's

a look at the Luhnow-era Astros that offers: a) a case-study reckoning with two decades of league-wide Moneyball cloning; and b) a sobering portrait of Alex Cora in his Houston days (a drunkard and a lout, according to Drellich).

The Sam McDowell chapter in the Pat Jordan book is a time-capsule snapshot of the baseball mindset just a few years before James published his first Abstract. Jordan dwells on how immensely talented McDowell is, and how that doesn't translate into gaudy W-L records. He never outright says it, but the unspoken message of the chapter is that McDowell just doesn't know how to win. He's too preoccupied with his hobbies (he paints, he's a gunsmith), he's got "too much stuff" (and therefore never had to learn how to pitch), etc., etc. Mostly, it's an obscure character flaw that holds him back: "He seems to be afraid that if he let his talent grow to its fulfillment he might cease to possess it, and it, in turn, would possess him. So he treats his talent like some unruly growth he must periodically prune before it becomes unmanageable." Huh?

What isn't mentioned: his alcoholism (understandable--probably not public knowledge when Jordan profiled him) or (barely; there's one brief acknowledgement) the mediocre teams he played for. Cleveland wasn't as bad as I thought--they had 86- and 87-win seasons during McDowell's tenure there--but they were usually under .500, and bottomed out at 60 and 62 wins.

From everything I've ever read about McDowell, it does sound like he was his own worst enemy, so I'm not saying Jordan doesn't get at something. But psychoanalyzing his W-L record is such a time capsule.

(Personal corroboration: on that 1972 trip to spring training my family took--I've posted photos here--I have a distinct memory of my dad talking to one of the players, maybe even Harry Walker, about the recent McDowell/Gaylord Perry trade. Whoever it was said that Cleveland got the better of the deal because Perry was a "winner" and McDowell wasn't. Subsequent events proved him right, but I don't think for the reason he thought.)

I don't think a team-wide cheating scandal is going to hurt Altuve one bit. It'll be ancient history. If he makes it to 3000 hits, most people aren't going to be talking about 2017, they're gonna be talking about his 3000 hits. They'll talk about his Astros winning 4 pennants in 6 years (or whatever it ends up being). And they'll talk about how short he is and how unlikely his story was. Jaffe himself says that Altuve will probably go in with 3000 hits.

― ✖, Sunday, June 4, 2023 8:21 PM

Finished Andy Martino's Cheated, which is mostly about the Astros but also covers all the other rumoured and actual sign-stealing going on the past few years (plus a pre-history: Bobby Thomson, etc.). I mostly agree with ✖'s post, but not entirely. The book makes clear that Altuve was much less eager to take part than other Astros, and, numerically, received the assistance of far fewer garbage-can signals than others. But a) he did receive some--maybe 20 to their 200, although that may have been more, because sometimes the signal was no-bang, and b) his series-winning HR off Chapman in the 2019 ALCS is very murky: Altuve clearly signals as he approaches home plate that no one is to remove his jersey in all the celebrations, possibly because he was hiding some kind of signal-giving apparatus, or maybe for a more benign reason. Martino presents a couple of other possible explanations, but he doesn't commit one way or the other. History tends to simplify, so Altuve's role is ambiguous enough, I think, that all that will be remembered is that he was on that team and part of all that.

Two things I didn't know: 1) Verlander and Cole may have benefitted from doctored baseballs. I always assumed that Astros pitchers were exempt outside of additional run support, and that since no one cares about pitcher wins anymore anyway, that wouldn't matter to something like HOF viability. It seems obvious Verlander won't be affected, but it does look like he's not blameless. 2) The worst offender in terms of numerically documented trash-can signals was Springer. Which would explain the non-stop booing he got in L.A. a few days ago.

Beltran, hard to say. He was heavily involved, but at the same time, he did seem to be scapegoated--only player specifically named in the report--possibly because of earlier issues he'd won when he'd taken on MLB.

By the doctored baseballs do you mean the spider tack stuff? Cos that was known regarding those two, but a lot more guys than them benefited from it. Manoah famously called Cole the biggest cheater in the modern game (!) because of it.

No index, so I can't look it up specifically...It had to do with clubhouse people rubbing up the baseballs pre-game; the Astros pitchers would use the ones that had more or less of whatever they used. Maybe that's the same thing you're talking about. I knew Cole had issues, but I thought that had to do with stuff he was allegedly doing during the game.

I do recommend the book. Like a lot of people, I was half-paying attention when the story broke wide open in 2020, but then COVID happened and my attention turned elsewhere.

Oh that’s interesting, no it’s not the same thing, will check it out for sure 👍🏻

Here's Altuve's HR:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XC34yua88z0

At 6:25, Ken Rosenthal actually asks him why he was signaling not to tear his shirt.

Gausman had some choice words about it, don’t know if you ever saw it. Kind of shocking they never punished any players.

This Astros thing is bad!!! Guys lost jobs, got sent down, missed service time bc of how they were hit in HOU. Does anyone really think they only did this in 17? #getreal

— Kevin Gausman (@KevinGausman) November 14, 2019

That's stressed in the book; nine pitchers lost their jobs right after a loss to the Astros in 2017 (one of them sued). Honestly, I think the timing of COVID and the lost season had a lot to do with it--within weeks of blowing up, the story was dwarfed by events. Also, to get people to talk, MLB had to (or at least decided they had to) offer players immunity

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F6UuxPabMAAT-wA?format=jpg&name=large

Thought it made sense to move this here. Relevant lead-in, the first six posts here:

2023 NLDS: Atlanta Braves vs. Philadelphia Phillies

I think there's legitimate room for disagreement here. As I've said many times, I'm always amused when the defender of a controversial book or movie or whatever--in this case, me and Ball Four--is surprised or annoyed that not everyone agrees with him. Ball Four divides people, even today--I get that, and if we disagree, we disagree.

With that in mind--and I've probably posted some variation on most of these thoughts already in this thread--if you're going to write Ball Four, I believe you need to write Ball Four. If you want to move the sports book forward, you can't walk up to a line of privacy, back off, and end up writing the same old sports book. If Bouton hadn't done it, someone else would have. And if no one ended up ever crossing that line, maybe we'd still think of Mickey Mantle as this 100% heroic figure who used to hang around the park for hours after the game signing autographs for kids.

It's like a friend of mine who once told me he loves the first Schoolly-D album, he just wishes it weren't so profane and so out of step with acceptable discourse today. Okay...but without that, it's not the first Schoolly-D album it's something else. If you were to take Taxi Driver and make Jodie Foster 19 instead of 12, make Travis a flawed but well-meaning vigilante instead of a racist psychopath, that might make it more acceptable to some people, but it wouldn't be Taxi Driver anymore. If you want to write Ball Four, you have to write Ball Four.

And, again, I don't think there's an ounce of malice in anything Bouton wrote, or any attempt to shame anyone. All the stupid stuff he writes about--behaviours both silly and much, much worse--he knows it's all part of the game he loves. People he has zero in common with--Gene Brabender, Fred Norman--he enjoys their company. Sibby Sisti, who's nothing but a full-time annoyance hanging around for a pension, Bouton gives him what I count as the funniest line in the book. I think even Sal Maglie, the one guy he clearly doesn't like, makes him laugh once or twice. And he of course adores Joe Schultz, and that comes through.

(I also believe Bouton when he says that, at a certain point in the season, everyone knew he was writing something. Players would come up to him and say "Here's a good story for your book." He'd drop his pen on the mound and some coach would casually pick it up without saying anything, clearly knowing something was up.)

As far as the ethics of journalism, I don't know the geography of a clubhouse, but is it taken for granted that anything overheard is printable? I'm used to the classic Hollywood treatment--All the President's Men, etc.--where the question of "Is this on the record?" was a given. Maybe that's a quaint notion that no longer applies. I will say, if the Braves know who leaked the Arcia comment, that reporter may have won the battle and lost the war. Good luck getting anybody to open up to you in the future.

I think Arcia has a legitimate complaint.

I will say, if the Braves know who leaked the Arcia comment, that reporter may have won the battle and lost the war. Good luck getting anybody to open up to you in the future.

That sounds like an important distinction I didn't acknowledge.

Alex Cora was asked about this

Alex Cora was on Baseball Tonight with @Buster_ESPN and while he didn’t touch on too much with the Red Sox, he did talk about giving teams bulletin board material.

He alluded to the whole Eduardo Rodriguez situation in 2021, but the best part was his story from 2007.

After Ryan… pic.twitter.com/GVskWI32nq

— Tyler Milliken ⚾️ (@tylermilliken_) October 12, 2023

This continues to roll on. The reporter was named as Cespedes BBQ’s Jake Mintz. First this happened:

"And then some jackoff comes in at the end of the season that gets a credential, God only knows why. And the clubhouse is a sacred space." Alanna Rizzo went off on Jake Mintz's clubhouse reporting on MLBN's "High Heat" Thursday. pic.twitter.com/6dooqeLPnh

— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) October 12, 2023

1) He yelled the phrase when cameras and recorders were rolling. I have audio. Had he done it at a slightly different moment, a camera sending an interview live to the truck might have caught it. Would you be eviscerating that network? Or would you say,

— Chelsea Janes (@chelsea_janes) October 12, 2023

Shouldn’t say that with cameras around?

2) Suggesting you shouldn’t report something said in the presence of MORE THAN A DOZEN reporters because it “wasn’t meant to get out?” is suggesting reporters should be protecting players from themselves. That’s not our job. It’s theirs.

— Chelsea Janes (@chelsea_janes) October 12, 2023

Statement from the BBWAA pic.twitter.com/X6ThJPk6CK

— BBWAA (@officialBBWAA) October 13, 2023

In that post above, I still never really explain why I give a pass to Bouton but not to the reporter. I realize that it comes down to personal bias, that--fairly or unfairly--I value what Bouton does (writing a book) more than what the reporter does (writing an article, game report, whatever). Ball Four changed sports books, and I think it was extremely important in the evolution of how we view athletes; quoting Arcia in the clubhouse led to a memorable postseason moment (not the HR itself but the staredown) but has no intrinsic value otherwise. So it's basically a biased value judgement in the end.

I was also thinking that Ball Four is so great, it divides people in unexpected ways. In one respect, Bouton and Bill James were trying to do exactly the same thing: demystify a lot of silly things people believed about baseball and baseball players. Yet the most memorable comment I've ever encountered from James on Ball Four is "Jim Bouton is a loudmouth." I'm surprised he either can't see or won't acknowledge his affinities with Bouton.

I've never seen the TV series, but I'm guessing that it's something close to what the book would have been if Bouton had held back and not crossed that line of privacy: Wacky Expansion Team. Still entertaining, but changing nothing. Similar to how I avoided The Bad News Bears for 20 years because I assumed it would amount to Wacky Little League Team and little more. Instead, it's a surprisingly harrowing argument that adults should never be allowed to coach kids baseball.

Posnanski is 1000% on the reporter's side.

https://open.substack.com/pub/joeposnanski/p/friday-rewind-the-hunger-games?r=1jtu0&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

Spent the morning in the library basement helping move boxes for the upcoming town book sale. The guy who organizes the moving always lets me take a few baseball books. Found a hardcover of Bouton's I'm Glad You Didn't Take It Personally--library stamp but in excellent shape, what I assume is a first edition. Also Harold Rosenthal's The 10 Best Years of Baseball: An Informal History of the Fifties. He's got the wrong decade, but looks interesting.

Unlikely I'll ever read it, but found a copy of this at the town book sale (hard to find a good image online):

https://i.postimg.cc/VkxpDQVN/leflore.jpg

Published in '78, right after his .325/212-hit season with the Tigers. He followed that with two more good ones, then stole 97 bases for the Expos in 1980--three more and he would have been only the third guy to steal 100 after 1900. (Henderson stole 100 the same year, Vince Coleman a few years later.) LeFlore was out of the game after the '82 season; his Wikipedia entry says it was soon revealed that he was five years older than he claimed. Received MVP votes in four of his nine seasons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_LeFlore

I would love to read a book about the most successful ex-con in baseball history! I didn't know that they made a movie based on his life too.

He's still alive. Not being too far from Detroit, I thought to check today to see if it was autographed. No luck. (He and Fidrych both played in the '76 All-Star Game.)

Read Bouton's I'm Glad You Didn't Take It Personally for the first time in years. Very worthy follow-up. Still a few things that are dated, of course--two songs they sing on the bus, in particular--but a great chronicle of all the fallout from Ball Four and the end of Bouton's career (and beginning of his TV career). One chapter is letters received about Ball Four, including one from Ruth Ryan: "...both Nolan and I enjoyed it very much." Another chapter, "Sanctity of the Clubhouse," addresses issue raised above. There's a part involving Doug Radar that I want to quote but can't find at the moment.

Bouton's working for ABC at this point:

I had a great time with the Astros. They made me feel most welcome, and there was a marvelously nutty interview with Doug Rader, the third baseman, who suggested Little Leaguers should actually live one a diet of bases, pitchers mounds and bubble-gm cards.

Bubble-gum cards?

"Oh, yes. They have lots of information on them about hitting and pitching."

Anybody read Evan Drellich's Winning Changes Everything? A friend writes that it's

_a look at the Luhnow-era Astros that offers: a) a case-study reckoning with two decades of league-wide Moneyball cloning; and b) a sobering portrait of Alex Cora in his Houston days (a drunkard and a lout, according to Drellich)._

Pitcher usage was a common fight between them in 2012, Luhnow’s first season of play with the team. Late in games, managers have to deploy their relievers in a way that positions the team to win while also protecting those pitchers’ health. Sometimes relievers throw on multiple days in a row, increasing fatigue and the chance of injury. Even if a reliever does not enter a game, just warming up in the bullpen can be taxing. Luhnow wanted Mills to use his better relievers more frequently.

“What if his arm isn’t feeling well?” Mills said. “We can’t do that, because we’re going to kill this guy.” “What do you mean we’re going to kill this guy?” Luhnow said. “He can’t throw four or five days in a row,” Mills said. “Well, he can, if he only throws an inning here, two-thirds of an inning here, or whatever,” Luhnow said. “No, he can’t. Because he has to warm up,” Mills shot back. “We just can’t walk up there and get this guy to come in the game. He has to warm up; his arm has to get hot.”

never heard of this!

The Celebrant, by Eric Rolfe Greenberg

I have two copies of Thomas Klise’s wild and wildly out-of-print 1974 novel, The Last Western, and my friend Maria gave me both of them. It’s a strange, shaggy, ambitious book—one of those classic Catholic Social Apocalypse/Baseball novels, whose protagonist both pitches in the Major Leagues and becomes the pope, among other things; we talked about it at The Awl back in 2012. As it is not the social baseball novel that I’m writing about here, I will move on from it beyond encouraging you to seek it out. The reason I bring it up has more to do with Maria’s practice of buying a copy of the book whenever and wherever she finds it, and then giving that to someone she thinks would get something out of it. This seemed strange to me at the time, and I told her as much, but it makes more sense to me now. If you are going to love a book that’s hard to find, and want other people to love it, too, that is what you will have to do. And so, at least until Defector Classic Editions comes into existence and publishes a deluxe new edition of the book, I am committing to doing it when and wherever I find a copy of Eric Rolfe Greenberg’s 1983 novel The Celebrant, the book I most enjoyed in 2023.

The Celebrant is easier to find than The Last Western, if nothing else; first editions are expensive and seem decently rare, but you can get copies of the most-recent printing, from 1993, from the University of Nebraska press and on Amazon. And I imagine it would still work if you got it that way, but there was something about how I found it that felt auspicious. Some friends had recommended it years earlier, and critics had praised the book widely when it came out decades before that, but the fact that it had fallen so far out of the conversation—it’s the only book that Greenberg ever published; he doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page—made it seem all the more significant when it finally turned up on a shelf at The Strand. If you can get a Lost Classic on Amazon, it feels less lost, somehow, and maybe even like less of a classic for being on there alongside all the self-published anti-vaccine claptrap and knockoff HDMI cables. The thrill of discovering it, right in its place and where it had never been in any of my previous visits, felt more like what I’d imagined.

However lost it was, The Celebrant is indeed a damn classic. The Last Western concerns the end of everything—a whole world collapsing under the weight of human cynicism, malaise, jealousy, greed, unbelief, and all the other 1970s American Classics. The Celebrant, which is set around the turn of the 20th century and tells the story of a Jewish immigrant family and their complicated personal and professional relationships with baseball in general, the New York Giants more specifically, and the iconic Giants ace Christy Mathewson in particular, is more a novel of beginnings than endings. It is a story about how baseball has made people into Americans, which it always has, and how fraught and complicated and implicating a thing that is. There is a lot of baseball in it, and Greenberg writes it elegantly and expertly; the turn-of-the-century details are carefully wrought; there’s nothing showy about the language, but the steakhouses and train carriages and ballparks are described in evocative and graceful ways. It feels real enough—crowded and smoky and half-drunk, or starched and fancified and lonely—that Greenberg’s detours into more debauched and dreamlike corners are made all the more disorienting.

It is a commanding performance, all told, and Greenberg’s stuff is all the more effective for how well he controls it, and how meticulous he is about setting up what needs to be set up, and how comfortably he changes speeds. As good as the baseball writing is, and as colorful as the color is, what has stayed with me about The Celebrant is how deftly Greenberg navigates the concentric and contradictory layers of reverence and awe and unreality and devotion that make fandom so simultaneously deranging and enriching a lived experience. The Kapinski family comes closer to these icons—to Mathewson, especially, and to the Giants’ irascible manager John McGraw—than they are strictly comfortable with, and ultimately perhaps closer than they can strictly handle. You’re not supposed to do business with your gods.

If what follows is tragic, it is mostly so in the same accumulative way that stories told over sufficiently long periods of time tend to be. Everyone is pushed and pulled by the forces that always push and pull people, and also by the abiding and All-American subsuming of the small by the large, and the past by the future. It’s a smaller book than The Last Western in a bunch of ways, if just as worthy of rediscovery. Both have to do with belief, but if The Last Western is about the crisis of a world without it, The Celebrant is about the strange and shifting shapes that belief can take, and the lonesome places our devotions can take us. - David Roth