| 2010-08-04 13:00:00 (link to chat) | Steven, as I sit here grinding through my last Friday of studying before the bar exam, I am looking forward to reading something non-law related for the first time in a long time. What baseball biographies would you say are the all time best? And has BP ever considered starting a "Books Blog" with staff reviews of new baseball books, and maybe a list of favorites others may have missed?
(achaik from Maine) | Congratulations on making it through law school. One hopes the job market will treat you well. If you don't mind me shifting the question slightly to autobiographies, I love and frequently return to Veeck as in Wreck (Bill Veeck), Nice Guys Finish Last (Leo Durocher, and just reissued), and Maybe I'll Pitch Forever (Satchel Paige). In common with all autobios, the authors skip or gloss the bad stuff and exaggerate the good, but the stories are so great and so well-told that you can live with that. If you want a straight biography, Robert Creamer's "Babe" on Ruth is very good, and so is Charles Alexander on John McGraw. Haven't read the new Mays or Aaron books yet. Finally, I will be crass enough to recommend my own "Forging Genius," on Casey Stengel. ...Christina and I discussed adding a books feature recently, but I imagine a lack of bandwidth for both of us renders that kind of a daunting task. (Steven Goldman) |
| 2009-03-13 13:00:00 (link to chat) | The Decline and Fall of the New York Yankees (1967)by Jack Mann - well written, entertaining.
(rich from nj) | A good book, out of print insofar as I know, but worth tracking down. At last night's signing I mentioned that two of my favorite baseball books are Veeck as In Wreck and Nice Guys Finished Last, by Bill Veeck and Leo Durocher, respectively, both collaborated on by Ed Linn. (Steven Goldman) |
| 2008-10-20 13:00:00 (link to chat) | If you had a gun to your head, would you say that Torre 1. got the Yankees and extra WS or two through cool-headedness; 2. Cost them one or two through his bullpen usage; 3. Probably had no effect. Substitute other reasons for 1 & 2 if I'm off. Thanks!
(Tony from Brooklyn, NY) | Do I have to have a gun to my head? Can I say that it was sometimes 1 and sometimes 2, depending on the year? Let us also say that in both 2001 and 2003 his decision-making was influenced by pathetic roster construction--if you look back at our last playoff roundtable, you can find Joe and I talking about this. In 2001, the bench was Enrique Wilson, Clay Bellinger, Randy Velarde. In 2003, as Joe memorably said, they had more lefties in the pen than the Marlins had lefty hitters. I don't know who gets responsibility for those calls. But in 2007, his "coolness" led him to sit on his ass while Joba was eaten by bugs, and I know very well that Casey or Billy Martin or Leo Durocher or John McGraw or Dick Williams would have been out there pulling his team off the field. I don't know if they would have gotten to the World Series, but his coolness became passivity there and justifiably cost him his job. (Steven Goldman) |
| 2008-09-10 13:00:00 (link to chat) | I've got a bone to pick with Prospectus over the last few days. It seems like every day someone writes an article about how "this may seem like momentum, but it's not" or "this is just a player getting lucky, it's not a hot streak."
While I realize that most people underestimate the amount of luck that goes into baseball, certainly the game is played by people, and people do get into grooves, start feeling good/bad about themselves, etc., etc.. Y'all wrote It Ain't Over 'Til It's Over and now you're going out of your way to remove narratives from baseball. What is the deal?
(James from Boston) | So you're saying that maybe we at BP are on a cold streak, one that's gonna cost us the analytical pennant? There's no panic in this locker room, and my numbers say we'll pull out of it.
Baseball is a game of streaks and slumps, and fans and media tend to attach narratives to them with particular sensitivity to the time of year in which they occur. A slump that wouldn't be thought of as more than a hiccup if it happened in early June is suddenly read as evidence of imminent collapse with an accompanying lack of moral fibre: a choke. The Cubs losing eight of nine in late August/early September prompts everyone to conjure up stories of the black cat in 1969, despite the fact that Leo Durocher is in his grave and the likes of Ron Santo and Fergie Jenkins have nothing to do with this team. The Rays losing six out of seven while the Red Sox win six out of seven is proof that the former is too young to win this thing while the latter just knows how to git-er-done... Yeesh. Might as well turn on the content hose and mail in the next half-dozen columns.
The streaks and slumps that make up a baseball season tend to cloud judgements, as though the most recent week is exponentially more important than the 20 or so which preceeded it. That's just not true unless you're talking about the final days of the season, and for the most part, teams' performances tend to even out. The narratives I tend to enjoy and employ in discussing pennant races do fascinate me, but they're narratives of a whole season or a much longer period than just a lost weekend at this point in time. (Jay Jaffe) |
| 2008-06-17 15:00:00 (link to chat) | We know the way it was handled was wrong but were the Mets right in firing Willie Randolph?
(David from NJ) | Well, as botched a job as it was, I don't entirely disagree with the decision to dismiss Randolph. As Rob Neyer pointed out at ESPN, there's a good argument to make that he's not the right manager at the right time for this club, even given its flimsy construction.
Managers aren't solely tacticians. They're leaders of men (some very boyish men at times). Different managers have different styles, but some seem to be better at protecting their teams by placing themselves in the line of fire and drawing the attention away from the struggles of their clubs. Ozzie Guillen is a good example of this now, as batsh*t crazy as he may seem, there's a method to his madness. Joe Torre does the same thing while exuding an aura of pure calm. Bobby Valentine, Casey Stengel, Leo Durocher, Tommy Lasorda - the styles can vary but that function is an important one.
Randolph didn't handle that aspect of the job very well. The Mets have carried a very negative aura around them since last year's collapse, and not even the acquisition of Johan Santana could erase that. At some point Randolph should have just said strong words to the effect of "Don't connect this club to last year's mess, it's a new day and we've moved on so you should too." Instead he played the race card and in doing so started the countdown on his own sell-by date. (Jay Jaffe) |
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