Wise Guides

Some very interesting little books arrived today, full of nice surprises: Three pocket-sized “Wise Guides” to Wrigley Field, Yankee Stadium, and Fenway Park. Each slim volume concentrates on each franchise’s unique ballpark experience in a manner that’s sure to please the novice game-goer, as well as amuse the season ticket holder.

The books (booklets?) contain a treasure of tips, from acquiring tickets under the most difficult of circumstances (hint: when buying from scalpers, be patient. Wait an inning or two and the price will come down.) to eating strategies (each ballpark has its own hometown cuisine) to timing bathroom breaks (Wrigley has a “culture” all its own).

Some of the information appears in each volume because it’s applicable to any ballpark (how to keep a scorecard, computing key statistics), but the books are also obviously customized, with kudos to each team’s key players and events, as well as how to get your name up in lights on the scoreboard, bone up with books about the specific ballclub, and how to indulge in the “Seat Improvement Program,” more commonly referred to as “sneaking down.”

Among a few individual highlights:

Wise Guide to Fenway Park

• Stroll Yawkey Way
• Celebrate Patriots Day

Wise Guide to Wrigley Field

• Kill the (Goat) Curse
• Become a Bleacher Bum
• Meet Eamus Catuli (what those strange codes on the scoreboard mean)
• End Up on a Roof

Wise Guide to Yankee Stadium

• Drink Like a Yank
• Salute the Captains
• Watch Your Wallet (high prices, not pickpockets)

The books also offer sound advice on how to get to the ballpark (most agree that public transportation is the most effective way to go), and appendices of hot wining and dining spots in each city. For the $9.99 cover price, each Wise Guide is a much better deal than any info an out-of-towner would get from a more general guidebook.

More tributes to David Halberstam

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The Project for Excellence in Journalism (Journalism.org) offers a collection of tributes from numerous sources.

Terry Gross, host of NPR’s Fresh Air, replayed a few interviews she did with Halbertsam over the years. Topics include his award-winning work covering Viet Nam for The New York Times, writing about the 1950s, and Michael Jordan’s place in society.

 

Katie Couric on how Halbertsam might have reacted to the Pat Tillman situation.

 

Whatever happened to…STATS’ Baseball Scoreboard?

I was listening to the Mets-Rockies game as I was driving home from work last night. Orlando Hernandez was pitching for New York and Howie Rose commented on how economically he was working, getting the ball where he wanted it. A few days before Oliver Perez threw more than 25 strikes in a row. I got to thinking: what was the record for consecutive strikes?

During the Tuesday game — which the Mets eventually won in 11 innings on a drag bunt by Endy Chavez — David Wright had a lengthy, multi-pitch at bat that again made me wonder: in a situation like that — that is a full count that includes multiple foul balls — who has the advantage, the pitcher or the batter?

That made me think back to the Baseball Scoreboard, a wonderful book that STATS Inc. used to publish about a decade in the 1990s. Anyone who reads USA Today or Sports Illustrated would recognize the “factoid graphics” that highlighted such items as the longest home runs, fielding accomplishments, etc. These little icons grew into bigger essays in the Scoreboard series.

The format was usually the same from year to year. One section would answer a question about each team. For example, in the 1999 edition, the Mets section asked “Where does Mike Piazza Rank Among the Best-Hitting Catchers in History?”

Another section would consider more general questions, such as “How important is it to grow your own players?” or “Who profits most from experience — pitchers or catchers?” In the ‘99 edition, Bill James wondered which records were in jeopardy. In hindsight, it’s interesting to read that he gave Mark McGwire — hot off his own record-breaking season — a 23 percent chance of reaching 800 home runs. The only others considered for such a lofty total were Ken Griffey, Jr. (35 percent), Sammy Sosa (15 percent), and Juan Gonzalez (12 percent). Barry Bonds was given a 1 percent chance of reaching 756.

On the pitchers’ side, Roger Clemens and Greg Maddux had a 60 and 37 percent chance, respectively, of reaching 300 wins. Tom Glavine, Pedro Martinez (who had a record of 84-46 at age 27, when the book came out), and John Smoltz were also given a decent chance (31, 21, 19 percent). While Glavine seems destined, Martinez has been injured of late and Smoltz has spent many years in the bullpen, making them questionable.

The Scoreboard also asked (and answered) question on offense (”"Who are the human air conditioners?”), pitching (”Was Kerry Wood’s Game the Most Dominant Ever?” following his 20 K performance against the Astros in 1998), and defense (”Where do extra-base hits come from?”).

The Scoreboard offered the virtual “something for everybody.” The queries changed from year to year, but they were always entertaining, thought-provoking, but not obnoxiously heavy on the calculus-like statistics that have wormed their way into the numerical lexicon of the game.

There might be a lot of blogs that deal with these things nowadays, but I guess I’m just old-fashioned; I enjoyed leafing through the pages, making my notes, and sharing it with my friends at the ballgame or the office.

More…

David Halbertsam

The literary world lost one of its greats with the untimely death of David Halberstam. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author is one of those writers whom I always admired for his ability to transcend subjects, whether writing about politics (The Best and The Brightest), American history/pop culture (The Fifties, my favorite of all his books), or myriad other topics. His next project, The Coldest Winter, about the Korean War, is due out in the fall.

That Halberstam also wrote about baseball (and other sports) placed him in the company of George F. Will and Stephen Jay Gould, authors who didn’t consider themselves as above writing about a game despite their reputations as experts in non-sports fields. As a result, they were able to give fans — and non-fans — some though-provoking works on the national pastime.

Halberstam wrote about events that seemed ordinary at first glance, but upon deeper examination were exciting, unnerving, and just a little bit sad. Summer of ‘49 (Morrow, 1989) followed the Yankees-Red Sox battle for the American League. And while October 1964 (Villard, 1994) may have been ostensibly about the World Series between the Yankees and St. Louis Cardinals, the deeper story was about the decline of the Bronx Bombers, who would not win another pennant for more than a decade, and the national league champs, who, with such stars as Lou Brock, Curt Flood, and Bob Gibson on their roster, were still fighting battle against bigotry and ignorance.

He also edited The Best American Sportswriting of the Century as well as contributed to countless other sports anthologies.

Then there’s The Teammates: A Portrait of Friendship (Hyperion, 2003), which followed the heartbreaking saga of former Red Sox legends Johnny Pesky, Dom DiMaggio, Bobby Doerr, and Ted Williams during the end of the Splendid Splinter’s life. My review of Teammates is on Bookreporter.com. You can read a sample chapter here.

Some obituaries on Halberstam:

• The New York Times
• The Times slideshow presentation
• ESPN provides this one, along with audio comments from sportswriters John Feinstein and Bob Ryan, as well as selections from Halberstam’s work for ESPN. Sports Illustrated ran the AP obit. I’m sure they will offer something a little more heartfelt over the next few days.
• An appreciation from Newsweek’s Jon Meacham
• New York Observer
• From Poynter.org, a web site for journalists

More…

Bits and pieces

Ted Cox, the TV/Radio sports columnist for the Arlington Heights Daily Herald, evidently has as little patient as I do when it comes to errors in baseball books. For an industry whose main product is numbers (overwhelmingly maintained via computer technology), it’s inexcusable that so many factual errors pop up. As Cox writes in his April 20 entry on the new edition of Baseball Prospectus:

… [T]he emphasis on writing makes it all the more irksome that I detected a record number of errors in the text this season. In the first sentence of the first team entry, for the Arizona Diamondbacks, it says the Snakes “aren’t afraid to show expensive veterans the to the door.” And as I pored through the book, preparing for my fantasy draft, time and again I was caught up by some typo or editing snafu.

While giving credit to the BP editors for their excellent Web site, Cox is less enthusiastic with the book.

I’m tempted to start keeping track of the mistakes in the book and compare the count from year to year — present a writing “range factor” on the order of a Bill James. But in this case I think the writing alone will have to carry it. No baseball fan has a tolerance for errors, and that goes for reading about the sport as much as for the action on the field of play.

While serving on a committee judging baseball books, I read A Great Day in Cooperstown: The Improbable Birth of Baseball’s Hall of Fame by Jim Reisler. Like Cox, I was amazed at the number of errors that made it into print. One of the more egregious mistakes was the attribution of a testimonial for one of the first batch of inductees. The author has the laudable remarks, supposedly uttered at the Hall’s opening ceremony, coming from an ex-player who had been dead more more than a decade.

Certain errors are understandable: the rush to get the book out puts a lot of pressure on all parties involved in the process, especially for annuals such as Baseball Prospectus, which can hit the bookstores shortly after the final out of the World Series (one title hailed the Mets championship season before the season was even over!). But that doesn’t make them excusable, espcially in the case of a project such as Reisler’s, which presents itself as a work of historical importance, rather than transitory eyewash. Publishers must be aware of the importance of fact-checking and find someone who can catch the mistakes at the early stages.

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The Washington Post ran a review on The Gashouse Gang: How Dizzy Dean, Leo Durocher, Branch Rickey, Pepper Martin and Their Colorful, Come-From-Behind Ball Club Won the World Series — and America’s Heart — During the Great Depression, by John Heidenry (Public Affairs). Allan Barra offers his review of the book in the Houston Chronicle.

Read a excerpt from the publisher’s Web site.

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From Editor and Publisher, this article about Ross and David Newhan, an unusual father and son baseball combination. Other families have had both dads and kids in the major leage ranks — the Griffeys, the Bonds — but as far as I know, only one has had the pater as a Hall of Fame sportswriter and the progency as a ballplayer.

Bits and pieces

Baseball America’s annual book feature includes reviews on several books, CDs, DVDs, and video games. Books include The Soul of Baseball; How Bill James Changed Our View of Baseball; Opening Day; Once Upon a Game; Hideki Matsui, Sportsmanship, Modesty and The Art of the Home Run; Sports Illustrated: The Baseball Books; Brushing Back Jim Crow; Inside Baseball: The Best of Tom Verducci; A Well-Paid Slave; and Branch Rickey, Baseball’s Ferocious Gentleman.

They also link to a list of 2007 book titles.

<i>Percentage Baseball</i>: <br>An Appreciation

“Before Bill James, before Moneyball, all the way back in 1964, we published one of the touchstones of mathematical analysis of the sport: Percentage Baseball by Earnshaw Cook. As a result of a conversation about the productive value of the sacrifice bunt, Cook … began putting probabilistic values on every aspect of the game in an effort to make every decision a matter of applying cut-and-dried rules.”

From the MIT Press blog, April 4, 2007

Percentage Baseball was one of the first baseball books I remember buying as a kid. Found it at a used book store for a couple of bucks. Even though I didn’t undestand the material at the time (and still, don’t in some examples), its charts and graphs made me seem precocious just by lugging it around. I still have it in my library, it’s original bright green cover making it easily recognizeable among all the other volumes. (The book art here is the latest rendition.)

That it’s still available today is quite remarkable. It is the granddaddy of the SABR movement.