Review by New York Times Review
THE CURRENT EDITION of David Halberstam's classic "The Breaks of the Game" features a glaring error, right on the back cover. It promises an account of "the tumultuous 1979-80 season for the Bill Walton-led Portland Trail Blazers." There's no denying the season was tumultuous. The team was not, however, Bill Walton-led. Frustrated with the Blazers' handling of his ailing feet, the star center had defected to the San Diego Clippers before the season began. But let's not be too hard on Halberstam's paperback publisher. Bill Walton is the kind of outsize character whose absence is felt as keenly as his presence: He is the hero of Halberstam's book in the same way Achilles is the hero of the "Iliad" even when he's sulking in his tent. The tumult of that '79-80 season stemmed from Portland's trying, and failing, to replace an irreplaceable talent. Now Walton is the hero of his own book, an elegiac yet exuberant new memoir, BACK FROM THE DEAD (Simon & Schuster, $27). Walton has always been a study in contradictions: An unreconstructed hippie who thrilled to the martial dictums of U.C.L.A.'s John Wooden, a champion at every level who is also one of the N.B.A.'s great what-if stories, a lifelong stutterer who found a second career in broadcasting. This is a book only Walton could have written, and not just because he liberally seeds the prose with lyrics from his beloved Grateful Dead. It's a celebration of a life in sports that is also a frank assessment of the toll basketball took on his body. "Back From the Dead" opens with a powerful scene from 2009, in which the pain from a lifetime of injuries has left Walton supine on the floor of his home, unable to move and unsure if he wants to go on. "If I had a gun," he writes, "I would use it." Skeptics who still believe that Walton's frailty was the result of an acute lack of heart, not congenital defects in his feet, may find such scenes self-serving. But 37 orthopedic surgeries are hard to argue with. You can't help feeling for Walton, even if you don't buy his claim that he is "the most injured athlete in the history of sports." If you've ever heard Walton call a game, the hyperbole will have a familiar ring: The man has made an art of unapologetic exaggeration. Of Maurice Lucas, Walton writes that he didn't commit mere fouls; when the Portland power forward put a body on you, it was a "crime against human decency." Rarely is Walton content to choose a single adjective when two might do twice as well. Of the Blazers' guard Johnny Davis, he writes: "His joining our active squad was very much like the night Mickey Hart joined the Grateful Dead. History was made, and the future had a new script. We became incomparable, unstoppable and beyond description." Whether you find this style entertaining or irritating will correlate with your tolerance for fish stories and the drumming of Mickey Hart. The substance of the man, however, is undeniably compelling: a generational talent and a true product of his generation. Among Walton's boasts are that he has attended "more than 859" Grateful Dead shows and read every book by David Halberstam. All, that is, save "The Breaks of the Game." The redheaded center writes with admirable candor about his failings as a player and the betrayals of his body. But when it comes to the Portland years, he prefers to remember the 1976-77 season, when the Bill Walton-led Trail Blazers won it all. The cost of injury, not just to athletes but to an entire sport, is the subject of THE ARM: Inside the Billion-Dollar Mystery of the Most Valuable Commodity in Sports (Harper, $26.99), by Jeff Passan. Despite its title, the book is really about the elbow, and more specifically still, the ulnar collateral ligament, which Passan, a columnist at Yahoo Sports, describes as "a finicky little bastard, ill-equipped to stand up long-term to the single fastest movement the body can generate: the throwing motion." When your favorite pitcher goes down for the season, it's likely because he's shredded his U.C.L. Thanks to Tommy John surgery - named for the Dodgers southpaw who was the first to undergo it, in 1974 - a U.C.L. tear is no longer a career-ending injury. But Passan is troubled by the sport's growing reliance on the procedure. The recovery process is grueling, and not everyone returns to form. To Passan, the Tommy John option has allowed organized baseball to paper over a scandalous failure: It has no idea how to take care of pitchers' arms. Even as advanced analytics have come to inform nearly every facet of the game, teams remain content to rely on guesswork - arbitrary pitch counts and innings limits - when it comes to pitchers' arms. Passan varies his approach to his subject like an ace mixing his speeds, leaving the reader happily guessing at what's coming next. He embeds with the veteran reliever Todd Coffey as he undergoes Tommy John in the hopes of making a late-career comeback, providing a vivid play-by-play of the tendon-harvesting and bone-drilling that go on in the O.R. He paints an affecting portrait of Daniel Hudson, an Arizona Diamondbacks right-hander who is one of the unlucky ones: His surgery fails, threatening to end his career before it's begun. He indicts the cutthroat world of youth baseball for its role in the epidemic of U.C.L. tears among young pitchers, describing a system that takes "underdeveloped arms and pressures them to show off for the radar guns they're taught will determine their future." From no less an authority than Sandy Koufax, Passan receives an oral history of the rigors of the pre-Tommy John era, when pitchers took anti-inflammatory drugs intended for horses and doctors pulled teeth to relieve shoulder pain. Clearly, Tommy John represents an improvement over those benighted times. But Passan makes a convincing case that the success of the surgery has prevented teams from seeking out the combination of mechanics, training and rest that might spare players the surgeon's knife. You know the problem is real when even the surgeons say it is. "If they don't get involved in it from a prevention standpoint at the youth level, they're not going to have anybody to draft out of high school or college who hasn't had their elbow operated on," says the famed orthopedist James Andrews. In 1997, Andrews performed Tommy John on one or two high school kids a year. Today, the number is 80 to 90. "Hell," he tells Passan during one interview. "I've got four to do tomorrow." For a lighter look at the national pastime, turn to the ONLY RULE IS IT HAS TO WORK: Our Wild Experiment Building a New Kind of Baseball Team (Holt, $30), by Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller. The book's irresistible premise: What would happen if you handed two shut-in stat geeks their very own baseball franchise? Not a fantasy team. A team of living, breathing, tobacco-chewing players. In 2015, Lindbergh and Miller, the former and current editors of the stats bible Baseball Prospectus, persuaded the Sonoma Stompers of California's fledgling Pacific Association to hand them control over the team's front office. The result is a kind of gonzo "Moneyball," with Lindbergh and Miller sharing the role of the Oakland Athletics' Billy Beane. Except this is independent league ball, pro baseball's lowest rung. Any player the Stompers can get their hands on is by definition tainted. "If the A's were 'a collection of misfit toys,' as Michael Lewis wrote, then we'll be building a team out of toys that got recalled because they were choke hazards," Lindbergh writes. (Lindbergh and Miller alternate chapters, allowing them to describe their not always congruent views on how to run the team.) The authors search for inefficiencies in the Pacific Association's peculiar little market. They hunt for talent the big-league clubs overlooked. They prepare sophisticated scouting reports. They employ on-field strategies based on statistical probabilities, not old baseball habit. Or, at least, they try to. Persuading the team to adopt their theories proves a challenge. They present their old-school skipper with an unassailable rationale for using the team's closer not just in save situations but at any juncture when retiring batters might make the difference in the game. The manager responds with bulletproof logic: "No dude. The closer's the closer because he's the closer." The teachings of Baseball Prospectus are a touchstone throughout the season-long experiment. But in a way, the pleasures of this wildly entertaining book have more in common with another sacred baseball reference: "Major League." For all the talk of WAR and wRC+, this is at heart a comic story about a team of lovable losers making one last run at pro ball. The Stompers even play an exhibition game against San Quentin, perhaps of the California penal league. Ultimately, whatever the authors manage to teach the Pacific Association about analytics is easily matched by what the league teaches them about the mysteries of clubhouse chemistry and the delicious unpredictability of the game. As Miller puts it, "No matter the scouting report, in every game some baseball happens." Among other things, Lindbergh and Miller's book is a reminder that money has hardly corrupted all of professional sports: The typical Stompers paycheck tops out at significantly less than $1,000 a month. PLAYERS: The Story of Sports and Money, and the Visionaries Who Fought to Create a Revolution (Simon & Schuster, $26.95), by Matthew Futterman, offers another corrective to the idea that sports were purer in the era before they were also big businesses. "There isn't much purity in a system as exploitative toward its labor force as professional sports was," writes Futterman, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal. In 1959, Wilson, the sporting goods company, made nearly $560,000 in sales of equipment with Arnold Palmer's name on it. Palmer got $11,000. In 1974, the year before he won his landmark free agency, Catfish Hunter was making $100,000 a year with the A's. In 1975, the Yankees gave him a five-year deal worth $3.5 million. Futterman's book chronicles the work of the men who freed athletes from these unfair arrangements, paving the way for them to earn incomes commensurate with their rare skills. One is Mark McCormack, a Cleveland lawyer who persuaded Palmer to let him renegotiate the bum contract he'd signed with Wilson. In the process, McCormack, a man with Benjamin Franklin's work ethic and P.T. Barnum's eye for spectacle, invented the figure we now know as the sports agent. The little firm he founded to do this newfangled work was called IMG. Refreshingly, Futterman sees the achievements of McCormack and others like him as largely to the good - not just for the athletes' net worth, but for fans and owners, too. Bigger paychecks allowed athletes to become true professionals and to devote themselves full time to refining their abilities. As play improved, fans came out in droves, and owners invested in increasingly valuable teams. The cycle was virtuous. Until it wasn't, or so Futterman writes. He tends to view money favorably in individual sports like golf and tennis but sees it as a corrosive force in team sports like basketball, where he links ballooning sneaker deals with a plague of ball-hogging, as players came to value endorsement contracts more than championship rings. But why is what's good for Arnold Palmer not good for Stephen Curry? A recent Morgan Stanley memo put Curry's potential value to his sponsor Under Armour at $14 billion. Why shouldn't the spectacularly unselfish M.V.P. get his cut? Futterman largely ignores our current golden age of ball movement and dwells instead on the decade following Michael Jordan's retirement, when a host of players came to the N.B.A. directly from high school. Those players, he writes, "all arrived raw but with guaranteed shoe contracts that may or may not have disincentivized them from working as hard as they could to maximize their talents." Futterman argues that, lured and lulled by sneaker money, these young players fell prey to the "joy of shooting," and team play suffered. BOYS AMONG MEN: How the Prep-to-Pro Generation Redefined the NBA and Sparked a Basketball Revolution (Crown Archetype, $28), a gripping, deeply reported book by Jonathan Abrams, late of Grantland, offers a far more nuanced study of this cohort, which includes some of the greatest players in recent history, from Kevin Garnett to Kobe Bryant to LeBron James - none of whom you can accuse of lacking competitive drive. The prep-to-pro generation invites easy moralizing and, too often, an uneasy streak of paternalism from those who believe they understand the best interests of these young players better than they do themselves. The old saw is that for every success story, you can name a he'sthe-next-Michael-Jordan type like Eddy Curry (drafted by the post-Jordan Bulls) or Kwame Brown (drafted by Jordan's Washington Wizards) who washed out. It's true that some highly touted high school players failed to live up to their potential - often because the demands of the professional game outstripped the players' physical and mental preparedness - and Abrams doesn't flinch from these stories. But nor does he fall into the trap of judging prep-to-pro players on whether they became superstars. It's true that neither Curry nor Brown became the players they were projected to be, but both eventually found a niche in a fiercely competitive league. "Kwame Brown and Eddy Curry lasted longer in the N.B.A. than most players," Abrams writes. "They drew lucrative salaries, even if their predicted stardom did not pan out. Brown was paid more than $60 million through 13 seasons. Curry made more than $70 million in 12 years." Abrams gives prep-to-pro players the credit that might have made them heroes, not villains, of Futterman's book: These are young men who saw an opportunity to maximize their earning potential, and seized it. An absurdist bit of baseball trivia Abbott and Costello might have appreciated: Where did Catfish Hunter win his first home game as a Yankee? In New York, naturally - but not in the Bronx. It was at Shea. In 1975, Yankee Stadium was in the midst of a major renovation, forcing the team to bunk with the Mets in Flushing. Meanwhile, the football Giants, who were building a new home in the Meadowlands, had grown tired of their temporary digs at the Yale Bowl in New Haven, where they had gone a dismal 1-11. So they asked the Jets, who also called Shea home at the time, if they could spend a season there, too. This footnote in stadium history-the only year in which four professional teams shared the same trampled turf - is the subject of when shea was HOME: The Story of the 1975 Mets, Yankees, Giants, and Jets (Sports Publishing, $24.99), by Brett Topel. This was of course the infamous year of "Ford to City: Drop Dead," when New York's future seemed to hang in the balance. It was a dismal year for New York baseball and football, too. A different writer might have found poetry in the idea of the teams' faüures standing in for the city's. Topel doesn't have an ear for such echoes, preferring to lavish attention on the recollections of Shea's put-upon head groundskeeper. But he does manage to capture the tragicomedy of four struggling clubs living cheek by jowl. Over the course of the season, two managers and a coach would lose their jobs. "It comes with the game," one of the dismissed said. "You're hired to be fired." That line could have been uttered only by Yogi Berra, the Yankee great - who in 1975 was managing the Mets. The same month, Bill Virdon, his Bomber counterpart, got pink-slipped. Billy Martin replaced him in the Yankee clubhouse. Which was actually the Jets locker room. There were a few highlights in the lost season. The Japanese emperor Hirohito attended a Jets game, a rare home win. Asked what he made of the gridiron action, he replied that he would have liked to have gotten Catfish Hunter's autograph. As for Hunter, he put up a Cy Young-caliber season at Shea, posting a now inconceivable 30 complete games. It was his last truly dominant year. He would become the first in a long line of cautionary tales, as yet unheeded, about the dangers of placing so rich a bet on something as finicky as a pitcher's arm. JOHN SWANSBURG is the deputy editor of Slate.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 5, 2016]
Review by Booklist Review
Lindbergh and Miller former editor and current editor in chief, respectively, of the Baseball Prospectus podcast gave new meaning to the notion of fantasy baseball when they took over baseball operations of an independent minor-league franchise, the Sonoma (CA) Stompers, last summer. Our ideas about baseball are academic, theoretical, never exposed to tobacco spit and stray infield pebbles, writes Miller, who, along with fellow stathead Lindbergh, lived out every sabermetrician's dream: to apply theory to the realities of a pro-baseball team, from drafting players to applying complicated defensive shifts to seeking that ever-elusive clubhouse chemistry, all to varying degrees of success. The authors' drily comical narrative is a winner, though, in portraying one patchwork collection of men who are each uniquely endearing, yet who also embody the very human dynamics certainly at work in any baseball clubhouse.--Moores, Alan Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
What happens when two numbers crunchers take command of an independent minor league team? Through some fancy wheeling and dealing, Lindbergh, a staff writer for FiveThirtyEight, and Miller, the editor-in-chief of Baseball Prospectus, are put in charge of the operations for the Sonoma Stompers, an independent professional squad in California. Their task is to scout and sign prospects for a winning season. Using data-driven sabermetics and spreadsheets, the two set a goal of "making the right decision every time, giving players every resource and advantage available." Lindbergh and Miller are real storytellers, explaining their strengths and defects as they attempt to field a capable team, using the best stats money can buy. They pay tribute to the collection of older, dedicated players who are pleased to play in the minors and have no illusions of making the majors. Armed with data, they gleefully describe their team's roaring start in the first half of the season, gaining first place, then slipping to a respectable second-place finish. For fantasy baseball junkies and baseball purists alike, this is a vivid, joyful exploration of recruiting and running a team by numbers-and instinct. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Baseball encompasses a multitude of statistics; every aspect of the game is analyzed and put under a microscope by experts and dedicated fans every year. In this debut, former Baseball Prospectus editor in chief Lindbergh teams with Miller, current Baseball Prospectus editor in chief and coauthor of Baseball Prospectus 2016, to share their experience establishing a winning minor league team. Utilizing their vast knowledge of the game, the authors convinced the owners of the independent Sonoma Stompers to allow them to handle daily operations. Their experiment-whether the statistical analysis system sabermetrics could create a championship team-turned out to be like none other. While critics thought the hypothesis crazy, the results are truly riveting. This absorbing read takes readers through some very unorthodox methods of management. With honest and captivating prose, the authors compel readers to care about players that don't make a lot of money yet still have big league dreams and aspirations. -VERDICT Die-hard fantasy baseball players, statistic geeks, and anyone interested in the sport's legacy will -appreciate this work.-Gus Palas, Ela Area P.L., Lake Zurich, IL © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
