Baseball players

The Natural

5 stars (The Game Beyond the Game) - I just re-read Malmud's truly great first novel, The Natural . I had first read it over 20 years ago. It was more moving to me now -- having experienced both success and failure in my life. It is a book about baseball and it captures the best elements of the game (I grew up loving and playing baseball both in NY and Denver) and Mickey Mantle was my boyhood hero, much like Superman -- the comic book hero. Compulsive baseball statiticians with no real appreciation of genuinely fine literature may grow impatient with some seeming discrepencies. However, the larger picture is that through poetic metaphor and very real tough dialogue Malamud captures the glory and the anguish of the elusive American dream. 2 stars (The Movie may be corny, but it's better than this) - I knew before beginning that Malamud's book was substantially different from the great film made from it. Specifically, I was aware that at the end Roy Hobbs would strike out instead of hitting that mammouth home run to win the pennant. I was, however, prepared to read the book, which I fully expected to enjoy. I was wrong. For one thing, and this I think should be obvious to any baseball fan of merit, it seems as though Mr.Malamud has decided to use flowery prose about mountains, women, and railroads to cover up a distinct lack of knowledge regarding the sport of baseball. At one point he refers to Pop Fisher having played for the Sox in the World Series "about forty years ago. It was the first series they'd been in in twenty years. Even if the book took place in 1952, the year it was published, that series sixty years ago would have been in 1892, eleven years before the first World Series. Another World Series is described as having pitted the Sox against the A's, when both of those teams were in the American League! There is much more to find disagreeable in this book, such as the illogicality of the plot. We go right from Hobbs being shot to 15 years la...
Farrar- Straus and Giroux :: Fiction & Literary :: Literature- Classics :: Literary :: Fiction - General :: Fiction :: Baseball stories :: Baseball players :: Baseball - General :: Kevin Baker :: B :: The Natural

Moneyball- The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

5 stars (About so much more than baseball!) - Don't judge a book by its cover. Ostensibly the title and cover of this book would lead you to conclude that this book is all about baseball. It isn't. When I was handed this book I was expecting a dreary George Will book about the symmetry of motion in baseball or how baseball is the smart man's sport. My expectations were very low. The first few pages quickly put that concern to rest. This is a page-turner that you will not put down. Have you ever wondered how the Oakland A's with a team that looks so unlike other major league teams can be a consistent winner? The A's General Manager Billy Beane found market inefficiencies and effectively exploited them. He recognized that other teams religiously used subjective measures and the wrong statistical measures in evaluating a player's worth to the team. Billy Beane found the right measures. And, he recognized that the measures being used by every other team inflated player's salaries not because they contributed to the team's bottom line but because they looked the part or their stats looked good on paper. He looked for talent where others were simply not looking and he found it. This allowed him to field a winning team for far less than others. He developed a strategy to exploit the system by seeking out players not deemed worthy by conventional measures. For instance, short stocky players did not fit the image of a baseball player. Because of their smaller strike zone they walk more frequently, meaning they get on base more often. While other teams were looking at batting average or RBIs, Billy Beane was using statistical measure such as on-base percentage to measure a player's contribution to a winning. He focused on what's important. Billy Beane recognized that using the traditional measures of a play's worth and the scout's reliance upon subject measures didn't match up with what really matter to winning. He leveraged this market inefficiency to bui...
W W Norton - Company :: United States :: Sports Economics :: Sports & Recreation :: Sports :: Scouting :: Salaries :: etc :: Management - General :: Economic aspects :: Baseball players :: Base :: Moneyball- The Art of Winning an Unfair Game