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 While the hot stove is cooling off as we near the start of spring training, there’s still the occasional murmur of a trade here and there that might swap present, future and/or former stars for one another. The merits of trades are instantly put through the ringer by bloggers, pundits and the casual fan, and many times live on in infamy as steals or robbery – depending on which side of the trade your team was on.
In Traded, Doug Decatur takes a sample of trades throughout history – those he describes as the most lopsided in baseball history, and promises to take you ‘inside’ them – a term that unfortunately never quite gets explained.
Decatur starts by explaining a bit about trades and that they are just one of several options a general manager has at his disposal to improve his team. This, of course, should be no surprise to the reader, but it made me wonder if Decatur was somehow weakening the quality of his topic by diminishing a bit. Trades certainly do not make or break teams on their own – they can have profound impacts of course, or they can be fairly innocent, and even if you make a trade there are many more variables that go into weighing it’s eventual merit.
Decatur asks a critical question early on – do lopsided trades matter or not? – which he answered with the words that were swirling around in my head at the time: in some cases. That cast an unfavorable light on the rest of the book for me — if the author is stating that the main topic of his book doesn’t always matter, then what is the purpose, other than to compose more lists and put more words on paper? Between this admission and his readiness to admit that trades are just part of the big equation, I was beginning to doubt that I’d really enjoy the book.
Decatur uses Bill James’ Win Shares totals to assign value to trades – a methodology that he explains nicely in the early pages of the book. Win shares is not a perfect method of course, and many trades have to be looked at in larger contexts to fully appreciate their value to a team.
After his introductory chapters, Decatur moves quickly into the list of the 306 most lopsided trades of the 20th century. Note that I said 20th century, as opposed to baseball history as the subtitle would indicate. Decatur explains in his introductory chapters that the book will only cover 1900-1999. Which leads me to my first eyebrow-raiser from the list: if this is the case, then why are the Washington Nationals mentioned in the book? Shouldn’t the Montreal Expos be noted instead?
My guess is that Decatur had to make a decision somewhere along the way as to how to refer to teams, and elected to refer to them by their current names. But the Texas Rangers didn’t make all the trades they’re given credit or fault for — some were made when they were the Washington Senators, and the list goes on. It’s certainly convenient to group things by franchise and lump everything under one team logo, but the real juicy meat of trade discussions comes from going into the why of a trade – what did the team need, what did they have to offer, and who was calling the shots at a particular point. To really go inside a trade, Decatur needed to go back to newspaper clippings, interviews and team makeups and figure out why a trade happened and what made each GM pull the trigger on a particular deal. This is where the promise of being taken inside the most lopsided trades in baseball history began to fall apart, and where I would venture to say quantity outweighed quality.
Following the list – which is headlined by the 1991 trade that sent Steve Finley, Curt Schilling and Pete Harnisch from the Orioles to the Astros in exchange for Glenn Davis, a net win of 609 future win shares – Decatur ventures into a very brief team-by-team history that spotlights the positive lopsided trades a team has made, the players acquired via a lopsided trade who appeared in postseason play, as well as the best trades in franchise history, the negative lopsided trades, and a quick paragraph about the GM who made the best trade in franchise history.
The final chapters contain some of the true highlights of the book – in particular, a pair of chapters about the 13 red flags of lopsided trades and how to apply those red flags to midseason trading deadline deals. While there is no magical formula provided to figure out whether or not a trade is lopsided, there are at least some things to keep an eye out for.
A final chapter touches on lopsided trades of the 21st century, a nice touch even though it only checks in at a page and a half and features just four deals and a “hopeful” that Decatur thinks might turn out to be a lopsided trade that could be included in a future edition.
Unfortunately though, this brief section also contained a very noticeable error – the misspelling of Richie Sexson’s last name, which ended up as Sexton. Having spent time with the Mariners and failing to live up his free agent signing, “Big Richie” has a spot in my memory that is less than favorable. Seeing an error like this – the misspelling of a player’s last name – is simply unacceptable.
Likewise, I noticed an error in the chapter on the Arizona Diamondbacks – when Decatur is talking about Luis Gonzalez, and mentions that a piece of gum supposedly chewed by him sold at auction for $10,000 in 1982. While the auction part is true, the event happened in 2002 – some 20 years later. Unfortunately these two errors casts doubt on the rest of the book, especially some of the lesser-known bits of trivia and information. It’s unfortunate, because that became the final strike in this book’s at-bat.
The topic is certainly interesting and valid and one that will continue to generate lots of discussion among fans, but Decatur’s book leaves a bit lacking for my preference. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Rob Neyer to cover for one his “Big Book of Baseball (fill in the blank)” works, something Decatur might want to peak at should he attempt a rewrite or a future edition. Decatur’s treatment of the topic leaves quite a bit to be desired, from his own positioning of the validity of the topic, to his treatment of the team sections, to the spell and fact checking that was missing at several points in the book.
Traded simply isn’t worth trading your money for.
 To provide a new outlook on an event over 50 years since it happened is no small task — and when it’s finished, it had better be pretty darn good. Almost perfect, some might say.
Lew Paper takes on the task of Don Larsen’s perfect game in the 1956 World Series, what many consider to be one of the greatest performances ever to grace a baseball field, and approaches it by profiling the 19 men who took the field that day.
Using a chapter format that reminded me of Charles Euchner’s The Last Nine Innings, Paper profiles a player in each chapter (with one exception, where he profiles two players), followed by a brief recap of what happened that inning.
The book is tremendous, as it gives a remarkable picture of the players involved in that October 8, 1956 game that would forever imprint itself on the minds of baseball fans not just of the day, but for years to come. The game featured seven players that would be inducted into the Hall of Fame -Mickey Mantle, Enos Slaughter, Pee Wee Reese, Jackie Robinson, Yogi Berra, Duke Snider and Roy Campanella – and one, Gil Hodges, whom many believe should be there as well. Fifteen of the nineteen players made the All-Star Game at some point in their career. It was played in one of the games grandest cathedrals, Yankee Stadium, in front of 64,519 people – a crowd that no Major League ballpark could hold today.
Paper’s approach of looking at each of the players on the field that day works very well, and serves as a ready reminder of the numerous personalities and backgrounds that shape the game of baseball. The game had just marked its first decade of being integrated, as Jackie Robinson, who debuted 10 years prior in 1947, would end up retiring at the end of the season rather than report to the New York Giants after the Dodgers sold it to them. Many of the players in that game were nearing the end of their playing careers, and Paper provides a concise look into their lives before, during, and after Don Larsen struck out Dale Mitchell for the final out.
You may be wondering – how does Paper do this, given that many of the players are long dead, yet there are so many quotes? I wondered this too – so I decided to flip through the book a bit.
It turns out that Paper’s approach is similar to the one Mark Stewart and Mike Kennedy used in their 2006 work Hammering Hank: How the Media Made Henry Aaron. Paper compiled his quotes from dozens, possibly into the hundreds of sources over the past 50 years. He readily admits this, on page 365 though, which initially left a bad impression with me. Rather than burden the pages by dozens of footnotes, the references that Paper used are consolidated into a 35-page chapter of endnotes.
 Lew Paper Now it would seem that Paper isn’t trying to pull a fast one on the reader, nor is he someone who just combed the records for quotes and pieced them together. Perfect is his fifth work, following up on four previous books – John F. Kennedy: The Promise and the Performance, Brandeis: An Intimate Biography, Empire: William S. Paley and the Making of CBS, and a novel, Deadly Risks. He certainly has an academic background, as he is a graduate of the University of Michigan and Harvard Law School, as well as Georgetown University, where he obtained a masters in law degree. He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, and The American Scholar. He is also a practicing lawyer in Washington, DC.
The idea for the book, Paper writes, came largely from two visits to a baseball camp in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, called the Mickey Mantle Memorial Week of Dreams, which later evolved into Heroes in Pinstripes, a camp offering the chance to play with and learn from Yankee legends. It was there that he got to speak with with several of the players from the game, including Larsen, Hank Bauer and Enos Slaughter. But needing much more to make a book of this scope work, he turned to the Hall of Fame and their records, as well as to Peter Golenbock, who has written a number of baseball books, including many on the Dodgers and Yankees.
Which is what brings me to how I find myself challenged to look at this book. On one hand, I am thoroughly impressed by the product that resulted after Paper’s years of research and compiling of quotes and information. It is a resource that breaks down a momentous event in baseball history incredibly well and will likely be turned to by many interested in the subject for years to come. As I ask myself after I read every book – am I a better and more knowledgeable fan after reading this book? Undoubtedly.
On the other hand, I feel like there should be so many other people’s names on the cover of the book – or at least given more credit at its start and throughout the pages. To paraphrase Sir Isaac Newton, Paper is able to see so far with this work because he stands on the shoulders of giants. While Paper provides them credit in the endnotes, the sheer quantity of resources relied on seems to warrant a different, and better, kind of treatment.
Loving, and therefore recommending Perfect requires a bit of trust on both my part and your part. As Paper readily admits in the endnotes, he relied on the work and writings of numerous other people. As time goes on, memories change, stories become embellished, and things don’t get documented as accurately as they should. Depending on your existing knowledge of the game and the players, some things might conflict with what you already have learned. Paper acknowledges this and provides his thought process for resolving conflicts in stories, and while some might nitpick, many will find this an apt and capable recap and breakdown of the game and those involved in it. However, given how long ago Larsen authored his masterpiece, there is certainly plenty of time for discrepancies to creep into the story.
I feel compelled to mention that the editor’s eye in me did catch a couple of editorial bobbles – a misspelling of home plate umpire Babe Pinelli’s name, what looked like an errant footnote towards the end – but things that are ultimately forgivable and nothing worth quibbling over.
Overall though, a worthwhile read on a topic that will live on in baseball lore for many years to come.
 While scouts have not been part of all of baseball’s long history, they have been part of it for well over 100 years. They travel the country and the world, looking for young players who show the promise of turning into a big leaguer. They rack up tens of thousands of miles, watch more games in a year than some people will watch in their lifetimes, and have to make informed decisions on the prospects of a young man often with only a few exposures to him on the field.
And while the idea of being a scout probably sounds idyllic to many fans, each of the 19 men profiled in Eye for Talent are quick to testify that the reality isn’t as great as the romance.
P.J. Dragseth, who produced Go Pro Baseball Wise in 1999, edits together interviews with 19 scouts who together have amassed centuries of professional experience both playing and scouting baseball at the amateur and professional levels.
When this title first crossed my radar, my interest was instantly peaked, thinking that Dragseth might have compiled a fresh look at baseball through the eyes of scouts, those individuals charged with finding the players that will amaze, entertain and inspire future generations with their talents and hopefully bring a World Series championship to our favorite team.
Having been around baseball for a few years myself, I was hoping that this book would be one I could recommend to fans looking to become smarter about how they watch baseball: what to look for, what traits young players exhibit that indicate potential for greatness down the road and so forth. I wanted gold, because scouts have so much information between their ears that having someone tackle the task of compiling it and writing it down excited me tremendously.
However, none of that emerged and after 234 pages, I was left incredibly disappointed.
What Dragseth does is give these scouts an open platform on which to ramble about their backgrounds, accomplishments and funny stories while not holding them accountible for sharing things with the reader that turns them into a better and smarter fan. There is no argument presented in the book by Dragseth, although there are a few things all these veteran scouts repeated throughout the book that they agreed on:
- They are horribly underappreciated and generally horribly underpaid.
- Things (meaning baseball business, free agency, statistics, computers and so on) aren’t like they used to be.
- The institution of the draft in 1965 forever changed the game of baseball and the way that they did their job.
- Almost every fan doesn’t know what a scout really does and thinks that scouting must be the greatest job in the world, when in fact it’s nothing close to that.
- A lot of folks currently working in baseball don’t know as much about baseball as they do.
Eye for Talent shares a commonality with the men profiled in the book: just like scouts often have to sort through hundreds of players to find one who will make the Major Leagues, you will have to sort through hundreds of words, stories and ramblings in order to find useful information. Even then, I can’t recall anything I read that I will take with me to the ballpark next time I go and feel smarter for knowing it.
If anything, Eye for Talent just adds a bunch of names, places and stories to baseball history, which may come in handy for some researcher down the line, but not for the average baseball fan.
I suspect many readers would go into this book looking for insights from scouts who have spend decades honing their craft, unfortunatley that expectation never manifests in any form.
While I have no doubt that Mr. Dragseth did a good amount of work putting this book together, to say that it was edited would be a generous term. Editing, at least as it was taught to me, involves cutting and cropping to put together a finely tuned finished product. If the term editing is truly appropriate for this work, something that only Mr. Dragseth and his publisher likely know, than I can’t imagine what these “interviews” must have come out looking like in their original form. Rather, what you are given is a stream-of-consciousness that could be interesting while sharing a beer at a ballgame or over dinner, it falls flat in the context of this book. As opposed to interviews, it seems Dragseth just started the recorder and let it run as opposed to asking questions and guiding his subjects to provide answers to topics. One scout profiled simply wrote a letter back to Dragseth, which he published seemingly whole in the book. To think that he had the opportunity to question these men and get them to open up is an enviable thought, as few people would ever get that level of access to these kinds of figures within baseball. There seems to be a gap far and wide between what I consider and hope to generate from an interview and what Mr. Dragseth does, as evidenced by his seemingly hands-off approach to the topic.
Like a scout who believes in a player only to see him stumble after signing him and never make anything out of himself in the game, I felt let down by what could have been a remarkable book based on the individuals whom Dragseth solicited for their thoughts. Yet because Eye for Talent is focused on individuals instead of themes and key points, the knowledge and insight never shines through.
Unfortunately, other than the above points that get rehashed by almost every one of the 19 scouts, there is neither an argument laid out nor any kind of compelling information that warrants a recommendation to read this title. With a $39.95 list price, it makes it a borrow recommendation if you absolutely have to read it, because there is no way I could justify that price for what I got out of it.
If you don’t mind sifting through a lot of stories to find the occasional nugget, or you like to sit around and listen to old men tell stories, you’ll likely enjoy Eye for Talent. If not, I suggest you wait for a title to come out that tackles this subject in a more compelling way, as Bruce Weber did in As They See ‘Em, his seminal work about the life of umpires and their role in America’s pastime. Hopefully the publishers of the world will be able to keep their eyes open for an individual to providen this much needed look at the world of scouting and deliver it in a more usable format.
 The easiest way to spark a debate amongst sports fans? Come up with a list about something – Top 10 athletes, moments, boneheads, whatever – and then tell everybody about it while declaring your list the definitive, infallible authority on the subject.
A simple premise, and one that gets repeated time and time again, including in The Great Book of Seattle Sports Lists, part of a series from Running Press that look at the greatest sports moments in cities across the country.
Assembled by Seattle P-I columnist Art Thiel, KJR-AM’s Mike Gastineau and former Seattle P-I editor and columnist Steve Rudman, the book is an insightful, educational and entertaining look back at Seattle sports history by way of lists. From the best of the best or the worst of the worst, odds are pretty good it’s been covered – especially when it comes to the oddest of the odd.
What makes this book shine is its combination of humor, history and insight from not only the three co-authors but several guest contributors: Sue Bird of the Storm shares the worst pick-up lines she’s ever heard, while Kevin Calabro pens a piece entitled “Five Barrys, Three Coaches, One Great Party” that recalls some of his memories with the Sonics. Both will make you laugh, and should likely give you an appreciation for not just the great stories that come from between the lines on the fields of play, but those stories that come once the final buzzer has sounded.
Former Husky football coach Don James lists the toughest coaches he’s faced, while Jamie Moyer pens a chapter on what made the 2001 Mariners such a great team. The roster of guest contributors is impressive – Ichiro, Lofa Tatupu, Drew Carey, Sonny Sixkiller, Mike Holmgren and even Sir Mix-A-Lot share their lists of different parts of the Seattle sports scene.
Of course, there is the requisite Husky and Cougar banter, with KJR’s Dave “Softy” Mahler and sportswriter Jim Moore writing on behalf of their respective universities. There is also a rather thorough chapter on the definition of ‘Couging It,’ authored by the man who coined the phrase, John Blanchette of the Spokane Spokesman-Review. A phrase that has become commonplace in the vocabulary of northwest sports fans, the term gains a new level of definition and appreciation through Blanchette’s recaps of some of the low lights of Cougar athletics.
While reading The Great Book of Seattle Sports Lists, I found myself taking the bait and doing exactly what a book like this is designed to do – start a discussion. Having gone to a high school known for its success on the athletic fields, I couldn’t believe that some of the coaches or teams who achieved so much didn’t get a mention in the book.
Regardless of what I think were some glaring omissions, the book ends up painting a much more colorful picture of the Seattle sports scene than I think many fans often appreciate. Given the departure of the Sonics, the struggles of the Mariners and Seahawks in recent years, and prior to the arrival of the Sounders, it was easy to see Seattle as a rather bleak sports town. However, professional sports have been a part of the northwest since before the start of the 20th century, and while Seattle’s trophy case might not be as well stocked as other cities’, there are still plenty of teams, moments and personalities to discuss and argue about.
Thiel, Gastineau and Rudman do a commendable job with this book, and manage to keep a balance between the good and the bad, as well as what could have been and what actually was. The Great Book of Seattle Sports Lists is worth taking a look at, if for no other reason than to get a fun lesson in Seattle sports history.
 The story is a sad one – Mike Coolbaugh, 35 years old, was killed by a errant line drive during a minor league baseball game on July 22, 2007 in Little Rock, Arkansas. He was likely a man you had never heard of – his 91 plate appearances scattered amongst 44 Major League Baseball games produced a .256 batting average, with two home runs and seven RBI to his credit. He spent the majority of his professional career toiling in the minor leagues, often passed over in favor of players drafter higher or signed for more money than he was.
While his death was one that didn’t exactly rock the baseball world, it certainly had its effects – base coaches must wear batting helmets because of him. But even that is something that could be overlooked, a notation in the baseball timeline that doesn’t necessarily have his name attached to it. A notation that even if you scour the play-by-play notes, aren’t likely to find – the game was stopped after Coolbaugh was hit in the 9th inning – meaning the game ended after eight innings. In a twist that only baseball could provide, the at-bat that killed a man never even happened, at least not in the baseball record books.
But to dig into the life of Mike Coolbaugh as S.L. Price has done, one finds the story of a man who loved baseball and understood that when the game kicks you in the teeth, you have to stand back up and smile.
Price, a senior writer for Sports Illustrated, employs a successful blend of journalistic reporting and creative prose to shape not just the profiles of Coolbaugh, his family, and Tino Sanchez, the player who hit the fateful shot that found a spot on the back of Coolbaugh’s head so small, that had it hit an inch away in any direction, he would still be alive. He does not canonize Coolbaugh – but Price is fair to his accomplishments and to the quality of man that those who knew him found him to be.
Coolbaugh played many positions in the game of life – a son, a brother, a ball player and teammate; he was a husband, a father, a coach and a mentor.
Of course though, the story of Coolbaugh’s death is more than just about him – it is about the scout that discovered him, a man named Al LaMacchia, a lifer of the game who spent 52 years of scouting after playing 2 1/2 seasons in the Major Leagues in the mid-1940s. It’s also about Jon Asahina – a pitcher for the Tulsa Drillers, the team that Coolbaugh was a hitting coach for, who had been been hit in the head by a line drive during a game while his pitching coach, Bo McLaughlin, watched from the dugout and immediately flashed back to his own run-in with a baseball some 26 years earlier.
The book is also about baseball – parts of it, one of which is the historical side that touches on Ray Chapman, the only Major League player to be killed on the playing field, to many lesser known players and coaches who have been injured not just playing the game, but by batted balls to which they were defenseless. Heart of the Game is also about the “love of the game,” the respect that players and fans need to have for a game that rarely does anything but take from the individual – it can leave you frustrated, disappointed and embarrassed, but it’s when you have that true love of baseball that you’re willing to get back up and get right back into it.
Price takes both the story of Mike Coolbaugh and the moments leading up to that fateful play and delivers them to the reader remarkably well. Most notably, the pages that tell how Coolbaugh’s friends, family, and teammates learned of the news and processed it was striking. To think about watching a coach sustain a life-taking blow, or having to make the phone call to his wife, or to be a teammate walking into the hospital – all are remarkably complex topics that Price handles with both sensitivity and sympathy, as well as a deft use of words that both inform and impact the reader.
This book is about much more than just Mike Coolbaugh and a line drive that took his life – it is about how baseball gets into so many people, bringing them from all over the world with their struggles, their challenges, their hopes and their dreams. It is about hope, loss, and the challenge of moving on after an event absolutely turns your world upside down. Heart of the Game is an absolute gem of a book that should be read by any fan who loves the game of baseball.
 As a fan of seeing new baseball stadiums, and as a frequent visitor to baseball parks big and small, I was naturally interested and excited when I received Patrick L. Shabram’s new book, Professional Ballparks of the West Coast.
Shabram, who also penned a Guide to California’s Professional Ballparks, expands his scope to include revisions to his original work and coverage of stadiums in Washington and Oregon, along with a “bonus” guide to Nat Bailey Stadium in Vancouver, B.C., home to the Vancouver Canadians.
The book features a total of 35 stadiums, ranging from Vancouver, B.C., to San Diego, CA, home of Petco Park and the San Diego Padres, and covering independent league teams, minor leagues and the Major Leagues.
Shabram takes a similar approach in providing his “fan’s eye” review of each stadium – chronicling the quality of the food, fans and in-game entertainment while providing each stadium’s address, directions, ticket and parking prices. He provides a quick pluses and minuses synopsis of each stadium, as well as some helpful tips to help the reader get the most out of their visit to each ballpark.
Living on the West Coast myself, I’ve had the experience of going to several of the stadiums that Shabram covers in his book – 15 of the 34 as of my latest travels, so I was interested to see how my thoughts compared with his. There were many common thoughts, but also several that I didn’t necessarily agree with — such as the score of the game at Safeco Field in Seattle being hard to locate. As someone who has attended hundreds of games at Safeco Field, it’s hard for me to see it through the eyes of a first-timer, although the idea of not looking at the main centerfield scoreboard, or either of the two auxiliary scoreboards near home plate as a natural thing to do did seem a bit strange to me.
But this is exactly what makes this book both very interesting and somewhat irrelevant at the same time. Individual experiences can vary tremendously at the same ballpark, even at the same game. Sometimes you go on an off-night, and sometimes you go on the best night of the year. Sometimes you get told about some great secret that lies within the ballpark and feel like you’re a local, and sometimes you see it on a very surface level as someone stopping by for a quick visit. And as I have found when I’m a visitor, you often don’t have the connection with a ballpark that the locals do, which Shabram reminds the reader of throughout the game. The feeling of ‘it may be a dump, but it’s our dump’ is one that many of the fans Shabram talked to echo throughout the book.
The issue of practicality for a book like this was one that stuck with me as I read through its 144 pages. The book has some historical notes to it – such as that the original scoreboard and lights from Seattle’s Sicks Stadium, home to the Seattle Pilots for just one season, ended up in Vancouver’s Nat Bailey Stadium – but not enough to really be called a history book. While the reviews and notes from Shabram’s visits to each of the stadiums are completely valid and useful, they certainly shouldn’t be taken as the only source of information for your visit to a stadium, especially when you can get online and see dozens of reviews from many different types of fans. If anything, the notes on each stadium seemed to be a bit thin for me to really fall in love with the book as a true guide.
When I think of a guidebook, I want as much useful, relevant information as possible, so that I will enjoy my visit as thoroughly as I can. Whether the stadium is rich in history because it held great games there, or whether it offers truly unique food or experiences, that is what I crave from a guidebook. That may be asking a lot for one person to provide – but it is what I need to see before laying down my money for a guidebook.
Unfortunately, there were some factual and grammatical errors that stood out to me – the most memorable of which being directions to Yakima’s County Stadium, which directed visitors to take Interstate 5 either east or west, depending on their starting point. Unfortunately, I-5 runs north and south, and is on the western side of the Cascade Mountains, some 140 or so miles from Yakima. Needless to say, I would recommend both an editor and fact-checker for future versions of this book, as well as for you to verify the directions yourself prior to heading out on your journey. Likewise, things change with stadiums, such as teams, affiliations, ticket prices and parking options, so a visit to the team’s website would likely be needed for the most up-to-date and accurate information.
Shabram also runs a website – California Professional Ballparks – which has some of the same information you’ll find in the book, but could evolve into a much more dynamic and up-to-date resource for fans visiting the stadiums with more user-generated feedback and updates on recent visits to each of the stadiums. Sadly, I have yet to come across a site that provides an all-encompassing guide to ballparks, leaving fans to piecemeal details and tips from travel sites and smaller sites that only provide reviews of a limited number of stadiums. Maybe an idea for an entrepreneurial individual with some website development knowledge…
A good effort by Shabram, unfortunately marred by some editing errors, and in this digital age of wikis and forums, one that in printed form might be slightly outdated despite its useful information.
 One hasn’t been thrown in decades, the other is so rare in the modern game that I’d challenge you to name more than two current pitchers that throw it. But both have a cult following — and both are an integral part of baseball’s history. And both have been captured in a new book – The Spitball Knuckleball Book by Tom E. Mahl.
Mahl dives into baseball’s history, going back to the late 1800s to trace the roots of these two “freak pitches” and their cousins – the shadow ball, the emery ball, the Vaseline ball, and so on. He profiles those that through it, those that passed it on, and those that made – or at least extended – a career because of it.
One of the first things that I look for in a book such as this is how good of a job it does tying baseball’s history into baseball’s present – and Mahl succeeds at this objective. Mahl makes it glaringly obvious what drove the spitball out of existence – money. More specifically, the money that was being brought in by fans to see players like Babe Ruth and others hit home runs. Quite simply, when the balls were flying out of the yard, people showed up, and far be it from the owners to stand in the way of that by giving pitchers the ability to make the ball that much harder to hit. Certainly an interesting connection to the way we’ve seen the game embraced in recent years.
The layout of the book’s six chapters turned out to be a bit of a spitball from my perspective – in the first chapter, Mahl starts out coming right at the reader with a great bit of topography as to the baseball landscape and the forces that affected the use and legality of the spitball, butthen took a nose dive into the dirt in chapter two by veering into biographies of players that threw the spitter – particularly, the 23 pitchers who were allowed to continue throwing the spitball after it had been deemed illegal prior to the 1920 season.
 Tom E. Mahl (photo courtesy Tom E. Mahl) While this will definitely be a highlight to those readers with an interest in player biographies, it was the part that generally left me uninterested. This isn’t to diminish the contributions or careers of individual players, but I prefer books like these to fly at a bit higher of an altitude and provide a bit more of an overview of the topic while tying together changes from one era to the next, which Mahl does quite well.
Chapters three, four and five continue the player biographies, looking at groups of pitchers that through the spitter even though it was illegal, those who picked up the knucklecurve, otherwise known as the ‘dry spitter,’ and the knuckleballers, those pitchers who adopted what is referred to in French as le papillon – the butterfly.
Chapter six brings the book to a close with an explanation as to how these pitches work and how they are thrown, a chapter that I found quite interesting and wished would have had twice the information that it does. For someone interested in the mechanics of the game and understanding how things work, Mahl could have written a whole book on this topic and I’ve likely have still wanted more. A chapter such as this is like being able to sit in the dugout or stand on the mound with some of the game’s great pitchers and being able to pick their brain and watch them and dissect their deliveries over and over again.
Mahl brings in an impressive collection of pictures of not just the players, but some up-close pictures of the grips they used on numerous versions of these pitches and blends them in throughout the book, with the strongest showing coming in the final chapter. For anyone with an interest in pitching, these pictures are darn near worth the price of admission.
No stranger to the author’s chair, this is Mahl’s first book on baseball after contributing to the Most Wanted series with Espionage’s Most Wanted, as well as his first book, Desperate Deception: British Covert Operations in the United States. With a doctorate in diplomatic history from Kent State, Mahl is also no stranger to academic pursuits – and his book is incredibly well researched without straying into the territory of being an overly academic read.
The book is quite sizable – just under two feet across when opened up, and as a hardcover, it packs a considerable amount of weight. While the content certainly merits such a format, it does become a bit heavy after extended periods of reading, and you’d likely benefit from recruiting a table to put the book on as opposed to trying to hold it in your lap.
Overall, The Spitball Knuckleball Book by Tom E. Mahl is a welcomed addition into the library of baseball books that exist, and will certainly make both a wonderful read for fans with an interest in the game’s history, as well a wonderful resource for those who want to dig deeper into the subject of spitballs and knuckleballs.
 Almost every baseball fan should be familiar with Cooperstown, NY and the Baseball Hall of Fame, at a surface level if nothing less – that it’s the home of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, and for many years was hailed as the birthplace of baseball, a story that has proven to be fictional in recent years.
Longtime sportswriter Bert Sugar, known for his contributions to the worlds of baseball and boxing, has penned Bert Sugar’s Baseball Hall of Fame, a beautiful new book that takes the reader inside the Baseball Hall of Fame and provides a top-level view of the history of the game as seen through the collections of the Hall.
The result is 272 pages of photos, player biographies, and overviews of major developments in the game of baseball on a decade-by-decade basis, which serves as a virtual stroll through the numerous rooms and exhibits in the Hall, and provides an introduction to the history of the game for fans.
While there is no substitution for an in-person visit to Cooperstown and the Baseball Hall of Fame, Sugar does a fairly good job of walking you through the facility and should ultimately leave you with a pretty strong desire to either make your first visit or a return visit. It may also be the impetus to inspire you to read more about a certain player or subject — Sugar touches on women’s professional baseball, the Negro Leagues, rules changes throughout the history of the game, and several other subjects which contain a wealth of information spanning farther and wider that Sugar is able to touch on.
The book is easy to read, although I do have to take issue with some of the page layouts. The first half of the book is a decade-by-decade look at major figures and events during that ten year period, although there are interruptions and sidebars that are often put right into the middle of a sentence and forces you to entertain two different thoughts and directions. While not a critical issue, it does add an unnecessary pothole on the path that Sugar tries to take the reader down.
Otherwise, a misspelling of Seattle Mariners’ play-by-play broadcaster (and Hall of Famer) Dave Niehaus‘ name – it was spelled Neihaus – was glaring to this Seattle native. Also, an interesting error in the final pages stood out — each Hall of Famer’s plaque is featured so that the reader can get an up-close look at each one, with the exception of Babe Ruth’s, whose is zoomed in so much to the point that you can only see the upper quarter of it. Lastly, a few Hall of Famers – Alejandro Pompez and Cum Posey, who are next to each other in alphabetical order – were listed as being inducted in 1906 – a full 33 years before the Hall even opened. Both were inducted in 2006.
With the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum celebrating it’s 70th birthday on July 12, 2009, this is a timely book that should be a welcome to addition to almost any bookshelf. It’s a great book to thumb through and look at great pictures of the game’s artifacts, and should easily make you want to make your initial – or repeat – pilgrimage to Cooperstown sooner than later.
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