Book Review/Interview: The Wax Pack: On The Open Road In Search Of Baseball's Afterlife, By Brad Balukjian

The Wax Pack: On The Open Road In Search Of Baseball's Afterlife
By Brad Balukjian (University of Nebraska Press, 2020)

In September 2014, sitting alone in the sparsely-populated upper deck of the Oakland Coliseum, Brad Balukjian's mind wandered in the time between pitches.

Thinking about the game and his childhood and collecting baseball cards eventually gave him an interesting idea. What if he bought an unopened pack of Topps cards from 1986 (the year he began collecting) and tracked down every player in the pack?

He began scribbling notes on his scorecard and well before the game was over, he had (via his phone) won an eBay auction for a 28-year-old, still-sealed pack of cards. After the pack arrived and was opened, and he had chomped the brittle slab of gum, Balukjian began researching and mapping out a seven-week, 11,341-mile drive through 30 states (in a 13-year-old Honda Accord).

That journey is the subject of The Wax Pack: On The Open Road In Search Of Baseball's Afterlife, an enjoyable and thought-provoking look at life after baseball. I should warn you: do not come to this book expecting tales of game-winning hits or complete-game shutouts. The publisher describes the book as "a meditation on the loss of innocence and the gift of impermanence" and that "Balukjian [had] retraced his own past, reconnecting with lost loves and coming to terms with his lifelong battle with obsessive-compulsive disorder".

Balukjian describes himself as a natural introvert who has "always gravitated toward the obscure, the unknown, the unsung". His writing is direct and enjoyable, conveying serious thoughts with a light touch, along with turns of phrase that made me smile: "I bolt up like a piece of toast." He notes that his teaching schedule gave him the luxury of time off in the summer, but not a lot of money. "The only advance I have is the warning that Vince Coleman might be a dick".

He describes an OCD flare-up as "refereeing a civil war" inside his head. Talking more generally, he writes:

There's an important distinction between resignation and acceptance. Not fighting back doesn't mean letting fear roll over you, it just means not resisting. ... [Y]our brain can be full of shit. ... The only way to beat the unwanted thoughts is to accept them, to invite the fear over to dinner, rather than shutting it out.

All but one of the 14 players in the pack had a career of at least 10 seasons. ... I learned Garry Templeton never said, about the 1979 All-Star Game, "If I ain't startin', I ain't departin'". (The line belonged to announcer Jack Buck.) Templeton still burns about a 1981 confrontation with manager Whitey Herzog that was grossly misinterpreted in the press. Herzog never bothered to correct the record. ... Lee Mazzilli, growing up in a family of five in a three-room apartment, seems to ask as many questions as he answers. ... Richie Hebner mentions getting hit by a pitch in four straight games. Naturally, I have to check his recall. Hebner's memory is correct: May 18-21, 1975.

Balukjian is the director of the Natural History & Sustainability Program. and teaches biology at Merritt College in Oakland, California. His bio states that he graduated "from the 23rd grade", he chose his career path because he "apparently has a strong aversion to money", and he possesses strong opinions about "utility infielders from the 1980s."

Sitting by Al Cowens's grave in the Inglewood Park Cemetery, Balukjian thinks back on his many conversations, not only with the players, but his father and former girlfriend:

The lesson I learned in dealing with OCD has been reaffirmed throughout this journey, that we overvalue our thoughts and feelings, which are out of our control and ephemeral and often illogical, and undervalue the importance of our behavior, which we can control. And if we change our behavior in a positive way, our thoughts and feelings will follow.

I spoke to Balukjian on the morning of June 24.

Joy of Sox: Just before I called, I noticed MLB and the players finally agreed to a short season.

Balukjian: I saw that last night. We'll see. (laughs) Who knows if they will even finish, with the way Covid is acting. It's going to be weird not having any fans, too. I was of the opinion that if they didn't play this year, I wouldn't really have minded. I certainly miss baseball, but it's not like we need to do it at all costs, you know?

Right. I haven't missed it, honestly. I'd been assuming all along there wouldn't be a season, so I'm a little surprised. ... Congratulations on the book. I mentioned in an earlier email that you getting the idea for The Wax Pack was exactly how I got it into my head to research the 1918 Red Sox. An idea pops into your head at a baseball game.

I thought using a pack of baseball cards as a device to write a book was a neat idea. I liked the idea of the randomness of the cards. I've always been curious about the players that I grew up watching. My favorite players were always the bench guys – and I knew in a pack, you're going to get more of those guys than stars, so it was also a nice way to indulge my fetish for underdogs.

The Wax Pack is not a typical baseball book in which you write about each player's career and their personal highlights or important events. An excellent example of that is when you tell Steve Yeager that you'd rather go with him to run errands and wash his car than see him work with the Dodgers' young catchers. When you were gathering information on each player, were you concentrating on the more mundane aspects of their lives?

Yeah, I definitely went in knowing I wanted to write a book that wasn't so much about baseball. You could go in a lot of different directions with this conceit, but what was most interesting artistically to me was writing a book that would (hopefully) transcend baseball because of the themes that would emerge from their personal lives and who they are as people. I had done a ton of research on each guy and when I would meet each player, I would put my big folder full of material in front of them and say, "I've read all this and I feel like I know nothing about you." And that would set the tone, I think, that I was not going to do a typical sports interview. I also envisioned the book as something in the literary/new journalism tradition, where I'm an active participant in the story. My own narrative is the connective thread between these players. Without that, it's just 14 stand-alone profiles. And I didn't want to write a book like that. I wanted a cohesive narrative.

A few times in the book, I was genuinely surprised at what you were revealing about yourself. I clearly see myself as much more of a straight reporter, because I think I'd rather cut off my arm than share such personal (and unflattering) details with the reader. I like reading people who can mix reporting with personal information – when it works, it's amazing – but I can't see myself doing it, or doing it well.

I knew it was risky. It's why the book was rejected 38 times. It was perhaps more ambitious – or more unusual – than most sports books, which are usually about a season or a player, where the author is not in the story or it's a straight-up memoir. I wanted to write a book that's a travel book, a sports book, a memoir – it's telling the story of these players, but it's also about my life – and some publishers, they may have thought, "Well, this seems too hard to pull off." If I could describe one of the main themes of the book, it's vulnerability. I'm asking these players to be extremely vulnerable with me, so I felt like I owed it to them – and the reader – to be just as vulnerable. It's not easy to share that stuff, but that authenticity and honesty is something I wanted in the book. And frankly, there have been readers who haven't liked that. It's "oversharing", "too much information", "why are you telling me that?" Or people have not liked me personally. I always knew that would be a risk. But I wrote the kind of book I wanted to write.

When you put down the file of clippings and say these articles don't tell me about you, that implies these players, during their careers, were rarely forthcoming. And I understand why players speak in cliches. It's so much easier to answer the same questions every day with generic answers that you don't have to think about. Yet in your encounters with these guys, they are all extremely open and honest, without exception. How hard was it to get them to speak about such personal issues?

It helped that I was not a traditional sportswriter. I was extremely honest about that and when I met these guys, I would also talk about myself. If I was asking a player about his divorce, I'd talk about my own failings in relationships. Also, going to their houses, or the zoo, or a bowling alley, people are generally more comfortable in those environments. It's not like sitting across a table with a tape recorder in front of you. So all that made them more comfortable. Some readers have wanted more straight-up baseball talk. An editor at the Los Angeles Times gave me the best piece of advice about writing. What matters most is the meaning of whatever you're writing. Not the words or the style or any of that, it's the meaning. So I felt like once I identified what the meaning was, if the material didn't fit that, if it was a story just for the sake of having a story, I took it out. Steve Yeager told me about the different brawls he was in and it was interesting, but it didn't serve both the chapter and the book, so it didn't have a place.

Looking through my notes at what each player said about his childhood and his father, it's a litany of neglect and emotional abuse and abandonment (either through divorce or death), which ended up causing damage in different ways. It's brutal when it's all piled up.

Yeah. So much so that when I got to the last chapter, I had become almost numb to the storyline of bad fathers. It kept coming up over and over again. I didn't know that was going to be the case going in.

You write about several players visibly debating with themselves whether to keep talking. Your favorite player as a kid, Phillies pitcher Don Carman, was 15 when his father had a heart attack and died in their front yard. And he admits "I was hoping he would die". Carman was told all the time he was slow and ugly and stupid, picked on by everyone, even teachers at school. His intensity on the mound came from a fear of failing and going back home to Oklahoma. (He's now a sports psychologist.) Rick Sutcliffe is extremely blunt about his father, who he last saw when he was 11. "I know what a piece of shit is. I know what not to be." ... Whose father built a pitching mound in the back yard, watched his son throw one pitch and then walked away and never had anything more to do with it?

That was Randy Ready. Yeah, one pitch when he was 10 and that was it. And six years later he died of a heart attack. It's very sad. Randy talked about the last time he saw him, he didn't give him a hug, and all that stuff. [One of Balukjian's more surreal moments of the trip is, after Ready mentions he's currently in the middle of a divorce, introducing Ready to the world of Tinder and enduring some light ribbing.]

The bigger theme is the players' adjustment to life after baseball. Some stay connected to the game as coaches, but most of the guys are simply trying to become a regular person.

There are very few professions where when you're 35, you have to consider: What do I do now? You've stopped doing the one thing you always thought about doing. They were about my age when they were retiring and moving on to the rest of their lives. There was a parallel with my life and finding out what can I learn from them.

Baseball was the one thing they all had been doing obsessively since they were kids, or teenagers at the very latest. So that's most of their life – and then it's suddenly gone. Carlton Fisk did not talk with you (despite your persistent efforts), but you include a quote from him. Near the end of his career, he said, "I'm afraid to leave the game because I'm afraid there's nothing out there for me." He's defined himself as a baseball player for decades and now he is not that. Who are you?

The book begins and ends with the people who worked at the Topps factory back in 1985 making the pack that I eventually opened almost 30 years later. That was a conscious choice, to make the point that baseball is beyond the players. One of the things that I conclude with is that a lot of fans wonder what it would feel like to be a major league player, but I think they already know. If they have been part of any kind of team at any level, in any way, that is somewhat what it feels like. I mean, sure, you have the novelty of your first at-bat or whatever, but after a while, it becomes another day at the office. It's really about the relationships with the other people in the game that's so special. Baseball players have these two lives: their baseball life, which is something we don't normally relate to, and then there is their second life, which is – okay, now they are just like the rest of us, how are they going to adapt.

You meet up with your own father during the trip and he spends a couple of days with you. So that becomes part of the thread, too. And while you say you have always had a good relationship with him, you are still extremely nervous about telling him about yourself, your outlook on life, your beliefs, etc. ("a thirty-four-year-old liberal with Buddhist leanings"), which are very different than his.

I am close to my dad and I had a nice childhood – it's not like we had the kind of broken relationship that a lot of these players had – but whenever we talk, it's always, hey, what's the weather, what's the stock market, what's happening in baseball? It never was about what's really beneath all that, how are you emotionally, how's your personal life, what are you feeling? Talking about your feelings is not something my dad and I would do very much. And what I wanted to get out was This is who I am and I wanted to say that directly to him and not have him try to infer it.

You also mention an alternate life for yourself as you go to meet an old girlfriend who you once thought you would marry. In thinking of these what ifs, the choices you make (or your family makes for you when you're a child) inevitably mean other choices are no longer available. The players mention being driven by fear or anxiety or a burning desire to prove someone wrong. I wondered how much they consider how things might have been different if they had better relationships early in their lives?

I got the sense from most of them that they don't dwell on that, and that attitude is part of what helped a lot of them be successful. They recognize things could have ended up differently or maybe they whimsically wonder about that, but in general they accept what is in front of them and what happened. I didn't sense that many of them were particularly trapped in wondering about those things. They didn't even seem particularly nostalgic about their baseball careers. What they missed was the camaraderie. Rance Mulliniks said if he had to choose between going 4-for-4 or just hanging out with the guys he played with, he'd choose the latter.

The attitude of accepting what is in front of you is essential to being a successful player. I can't imagine a player getting as far as they did without the ability to forget you made the error last inning or that you've already struck out three times today. Or even that you looked silly missing a curveball and now the count is 2-2.

Which is basically what sets Jaime Cocanower apart from everyone else in the book. By his own admission, he wasn't good at that. ("Baseball was very frustrating. I don't look back on it as my fondest memories of life.") So it's no coincidence he was the least successful baseball player.

As a writer I couldn't help thinking the spring of 2020 turned out to be the absolute shittiest time to release a baseball book.

I had a 35-stop book tour planned and all kinds of stuff. But one thing that has been nice is that a bunch of people who had baseball books come out this year have come together to form the Pandemic Baseball Book Club. Writers can sometimes be territorial and competitive and it's been really cool to see how we've not done that. We have a podcast and a video series and we've got swag. We're up to about 25 writers now.

I wanted to ask you about the Iron Sheik.

(laughs)

Now, obviously, he didn't kill you. [Early in the book, Balukjian says he hoped to write a biography of the wrestler, but that idea ended "with a drug-addled Sheik threatening to kill me in his living room". An endnote explains a little more: "Technically, the Sheik gave me three options: shoot me with his .38 Magnum, stab me with his butcher knife, or simply break my leg."]

It's an interesting story, but I didn't think it really belonged in the book, in any detail. But if Don Carman was my favorite baseball player, the Iron Sheik was my favorite wrestler. Fifteen years ago, I had left my job at Islands magazine to write his biography with him. I had gotten to know him and done a lot of research, but he was so strung out on drugs and so volatile that things fell apart. I realized, okay, this is not going to happen, so I cut my losses and came back to California. But I'm still in touch with him. I talked to him a few weeks ago. It wasn't like it was a bad ending in the long run. He's a little old, but he's doing a lot better.

***

Since Balukjian does not reveal (either in the book or our conversation) which of the Iron Sheik's three less-than-ideal options he chose, I'm guessing he talked his way out of any physical harm. I'd enjoy reading a magazine article about his whole Sheik project/adventure.

Review: Conspiracy Of Silence: Sportswriters And The Long Campaign To Desegregate Baseball, by Chris Lamb

[Draft Post: November 1, 2014
An Unfinished Book Review]

Every April 15, Major League Baseball celebrates Jackie Robinson's 1947 debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers. Players on all thirty teams wear Robinson's #42 (players once chose to wear it, now it's compulsory) and there are tributes at every ballpark to the man who broke – at long last – baseball's 20th Century colour line.

MLB manages (with the complicity of the mainstream sports media) to both pat itself on the back for its inclusiveness while simultaneously ignoring how it worked overtime for decades and decades to keep blacks out of organized ball.

Dodgers president Branch Rickey and Robinson are presented as the stars of desegregation, but, as Chris Lamb points out in Conspiracy of Silence: Sportswriters and the Long Campaign to Desegregate Baseball (University of Nebraska, 2012), that's because the popular story was told by Rickey himself and repeated by unquestioning sportswriters. (The movie 42 (released in 2013) dealt mostly in myth, ignoring the reality of, as The Atlantic's Peter Dreier writes, "how baseball's apartheid system was dismantled".)

What has been lost is context – and that is what Lamb provides. By looking closely at the decade before Robinson (1933 to 1945, specifically), Lamb charts the unceasing efforts of sportswriters at numerous black newspapers and the Communist Daily Worker (along with countless activists) to push the issue relentlessly, forcing organized baseball to finally confront its institutional racism.

Conspiracy of Silence has a slight academic tone, but that should in no way dissuade anyone from picking it up. It's both highly entertaining and deeply educational, and essential to understanding this important chapter of baseball (and American) history.

Lamb begins his story in 1933, when Heywood Broun speaks to the New York Writers' annual gathering and makes the case for desegregating professional baseball.

***

Regarding the Communist newspaper, Daily Worker, Lamb writes: "No newspaper was more insistent in demanding that baseball live up to its democratic ideals. No newspaper called more often for baseball to admit blacks. And no newspaper recruited more people to protest against the colour line."

Lamb's history gives us new heroes: Lester Rodney

August 1936
Writing for the Daily Worker, Lester Rodney "pounded away at the injustice, denial, and apathy that surrounded baseball" and "shamed the sport into defending itself against racism".

Lamb notes: "One cannot tell the story of the desegregation of baseball without including the Communists."
(Well, apparently, you can. MLB has been doing it for more than half a century.)
petition drives, prodded Landis to break his silence on the issue
"picketing, petitions, and unrelenting pressure"

Daily Worker founded in 1924
"superimposed the Capitalist hierarchy upon the U.S. professional sports establishment"
saw/presented athletes as workers who did not receive a fair share from their bosses
neither athletes nor factory workers had unions protecting their interests
Over the years, the newspaper became a "persistent and unwanted intruder" to major league baseball.

Rodney and other writers used Marxist ideology to show the players were nothing but property to the owners, and easily discarded if necessary.

The Daily Worker began its decade-long campaign on August 16, 1936 with a page 1 editorial: "Jim Crow Baseball Must End".
The campaign was equal parts education and confrontation.
Why was this allowed to occur in a supposedly free and equal country?
One week after the editorial, National League president (and future commissioner) Ford Frick said there was no ban on signing black players and that the responsibility was with team owners, not league executives such as himself.

***

Time and time again, management and baseball executives deny the existence of a law forbidding blacks from playing professional baseball. And that is true: there was no actual law.

But Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who ruled baseball with a dictatorial iron hand, passed the buck when it came to integration, saying it was up to the various teams. Management of the 16 major league teams passed the buck onto fans, saying that fans and players would have to be better educated and prepared for the sight of black and white men playing together and against each other. Lamb shows that in petition after petition, huge numbers of baseball fans had no problem with the idea of integration.

In 1939, National League president Ford Frick claimed that big leagues teams wanted black players but could not sign them until society became more tolerant. The general public allegedly needed more education. Until then, segregation was in the sport's best interest. Frick and others claimed that because there was no formal policy barring blacks, the responsibility for ending any color line belonged to the fans and society, in general. There was simply nothing organized baseball could do until then!

Frick claimed that segregation reflected the believes of fans and players, not the owners or club executives. Wendell Smith, a sportswriter for the Pittsburgh Courier went to the players and asked them (a) if they knew of any black players who could play in the major leagues and (b) would they play with and against them?
He interviewed players on every National League team when they came to Pittsburgh. Every player knew at least one black player who could likely succeed in the big leagues and most said they would have no issues with playing with black teammates and opponents.
Brooklyn manager Leo Durocher: "I've played against some coloured boys out on the coast who could play in any big league that ever existed."
Dizzy Dean on Satchel Paige: "Only his colour holds him back."
Smith's series on interviews ran all summer - and showed an unprecedented level of support - contrary to what Commissioner Landis and league executives claimed.

Other reasons given were that blacks did not want to play in the major leagues, preferring their own leagues. Owners appeared altruistic by claiming they did not want the Negro Leagues to go out of business if blacks were eligible for MLB.

Mainstream sportswriters contributed to the problem by simply ignoring the issue. Many baseball fans had no idea there was a growing movement to desegregate professional baseball. Some knew next-to-nothing about black baseball – and so, when executives claimed that they would sign a black player if one was good enough, fans assumed that baseball was lilly-white simply because no black players were good enough.

Bill Mardo, Daily Worker: "As long as mainstream sportswriters maintained their silence, the color line remained firm. Most newspaper readers didn't know there was a massive campaign to end Jim Crow in baseball."

The issue grew during and after World War II, as blacks fought and died alongside whites on the battlefield, but were second-class citizens at home.

The baseball establishment ignored black baseball, and ignored the long fight to crack the colour line. Most of the time, white sportswriters even ignored the fact that there was a colour line. Baseball continues to ignore this part of the story.

One example of how the mainstream deprived its readers of knowledge of black players came in 1937. Joe DiMaggio, in his second season with the Yankees, was asked about the best pitcher he ever faced. He answered: "Satchel Paige." While this promptly became a headline in the Daily Worker the next day, no white writer quoted DiMaggio anywhere.

Yet white writers would occasionally comment on the issue.
In 1938, Westbrook Pegler wrote a scathing column, saying that baseball "has always treated the Negroes as Adolf Hitler treats the Jews".

Landis had always claimed to be the final and ultimate authority, so if he opposed discrimination, as he claimed, why not simply end it in baseball?

On June 22, 1942, Daily Worker writer Conrad Komorowski interviewed Landis for 90 minutes in his Chicago office. While he initially refused to comment on various matters, such as a resolution passed by 80,000 Ford workers condemning Jim Crow in MLB, he eventually began to talk:
"There is no man living who wants the friendship of the Negro people more than I"
"So why not end the colour line?"
"No comment."
("And that is the answer - thus far - from the head of organized baseball in a nation at war for freedom, equality, and democracy.")

After the story appeared, Landis, for some reason, decided he needed to defend himself. He was apparently provoked by a comment made by Leo Durocher three years earlier.

Negroes are not barred from organized baseball by the commissioner and never have been ... There is no rule in organized baseball prohibiting their participation and never has been ... [If Durocher wanted to sign 1 black player or 25 black players] it was all right with me.

The next day, Landis denied the existence of any "rule, formal or informal, or any understanding, written, subterranean or sub-anything" against the hiring of black players.

Writer Fay Young asked the logical question: "Since no Negroes are barred, what keeps them out?"

Pittsburgh Courier, ever optimistic: "The Great White Father of Baseball has finally spoken ... Landis has left the issue to the owners and the fans. The end is in sight."

While Landis's comments were reported in a few mainstream newspapers, some, such as the New York Times, ignored them completely. One white writer, Joe Williams, criticized Landis for bringing the issue into the open, implying that it belonged safely behind closed doors.

One white writer who fired back at Landis was Dave Egan of the Boston Daily Record. His column was later re-published in the Defender and Daily Worker.

[I] waited for the fearless journalists to haul off and ask the Judge who in the hell he thought he was kidding, waited for somebody to say that his statement was a cruel contradiction of fate. ... But everybody, everywhere, keeps an uncomfortable silence and allows the statement of the judge to pass unchallenged, like a saboteur in the night. ...

We are fighting, as I understand it, for the rights of under-privileged peoples everywhere. We weep for the teeming masses of India. Down the years, we must have contributed millions to the suffering Armenians. We have room in our souls to pity the Chinese, the Arabs, and the brave Greeks. Could we, by any chance, spare a thought for the Negro in the United States? Do we, by any chance, feel disgust at the thought that Negro athletes, solely because of their color, are barred from playing baseball? ... I suggest that our national sport should be the very first to discourage discrimination and start practicing democracy.

***

Lamb's story ends with Robinson's first season with the Dodgers, a year in which Robinson would win the Rookie of the Year award and Brooklyn grabbed the National League pennant.

Even after Robinson was a member of the Dodgers' lineup, the process of truly integrating the major leagues was an extremely slow process, with teams moving at a glacial pace to place even one black player on their rosters. The following list shows when each of the sixteen teams debuted their first black player:

1947: Dodgers, Indians, Browns
1948: —
1949: Giants
1950: Braves
1951: White Sox
1952: —
1953: Athletics, Cubs
1954: Pirates, Cardinals, Reds, Senators
1955: Yankees
1956: —
1957: Phillies
1958: Tigers
1959: Red Sox

[Note: Hank Thompson was the first black player for two teams: St. Louis Browns (1947) and New York Giants (1949).]

***

In Color Blind: The Forgotten Team That Broke Baseball's Color Line, Tom Dunkel presents the hidden history of a semi-professional team from Bismarck, North Dakota, that featured both black and white players in the mid-1930s.

Neil Churchill, who owned a Bismark car dealership, sought the best available players during the Depression, regardless of race. The famous battery of Satchel Paige and Ted "Double Duty" Radcliffe spent several seasons in Bismark, and the fully-integrated squad was enormously successful.

Dunkel has done remarkable research, combing through countless small town newspapers, looking for any scrap of information, while also interviewing long-time residents of the town.

Book Review: Power Ball: Anatomy Of A Modern Baseball Game, By Rob Neyer

I've enjoyed and been impressed by Rob Neyer's writing for over 20 years. I was extremely jealous of him back in 1999 when he spent the summer in Boston attending every Red Sox home game and writing Feeding The Monster. His three Big Book(s) Of Baseball (Lineups, followed by Blunders and Legends (tracers!)) are insightful and entertaining, even educational.

I recently finished reading his latest book, Power Ball: Anatomy of a Modern Baseball Game, which won SABR's 2018 CASEY Award for the Best Baseball Book of the Year.

Using the framework of a late-season game in 2017 between the Astros and the Athletics (September 8, to be precise), Neyer explores and explains how major league baseball has changed over the last few decades. Along the way, he addresses the supposed ills of the game, such as extreme shifts. Neyer notes that the leagues' batting average on balls in play has barely budged in the new age of shifting - and, in fact, the entire idea of standard player positioning is a shift.

As HarperCollins, Neyer's publisher, states:

Over the past twenty years, power and analytics have taken over the game ... Seemingly every pitcher now throws mid-90s heat ... Every batter in the lineup can crack homers and knows their launch angles. Teams are relying on unorthodox strategies, including ... purposely tanking a few seasons to get the best players in the draft. As he chronicles each inning and the unfolding drama [of the game] ... Neyer considers the players and managers, the front office machinations, the role of sabermetrics, and the current thinking about what it takes to build a great team, to answer the most pressing questions fans have about the sport today.

I assumed I'd post a traditional review of Power Ball, but I found I was putting a post-it note on every third page (on average), noting a certain passage or observation. For the record, there were post-its on 80 different pages - and realized I'd be fussing with a lengthy (and positive) review for far too long. So I'm going to post a few snippets that I hope will give you a good feel for Neyer's writing style and the tone of the book. (And I love the cover, with its great use of the now-traditional online or on-screen strike zone box. It even includes a ball that may well be a low strike.)

The Human Element

The demise of the human element in umpiring seems terrifying too. Specifically, the prospect of "robot umpires" – which is a stupid term, but what are you gonna do? – who will call the balls and strikes. To an outside observer, it might seem odd: the idea that we actually want our game officials to make the wrong call roughly 10 percent of the time, as even the best human umpires do, when calling balls and strikes. ...

But the game was not designed, any more than any other game is designed, for the human element to include errors by the officials. If the men who invented Baseball could have eliminated umpires from their new sport, they would have. If they could have eliminated umpires' errors from their sport, they would have.

Today the people who run Baseball can eliminate those errors. Of at least a huge percentage of them. If the technology isn't ready yet, it could be soon.

When the human element can be removed, it will be removed ...

Robot umpires are coming, friends. Just as sure as tomorrow's sun. For the simple reason that today's technology, available to anyone with a cell phone or wi-fi, often makes it obvious when the umpire misses one, and nobody pays good money to see umpires be wrong. ...

Once that particular human element is gone, though, we'll still be blessed with the human element of players' training habits; the human element of pitch selection; the human element of guessing pitches; the human element of managers' cognitive biases; the human element of executives' and owners' emotions; and, oh, a few million other human elements that won't just disappear because a bunch of smart kids are writing code. Promise. [pp. 105-106]

I love using the term "robots", so naturally I was amused by Rob describing the term as "stupid" on one page and then using it himself (sans quotation marks) on the next!

On Statcast Data and Broadcasters

With Lowrie's long, loud third out [which ends the fifth inning with the Astros leading 7-3], the A's "win expectancy" stands at just 7.2 percent, according to the FanGraphs website, which generates a running graph for every major-league game. Because people like numbers—people with internet connections and favorite sports teams especially like numbers—the Win Expectancy charts have become popular, at least among the cognoscenti. It's potentially a pretty good "storytelling stat," if you're desperate for something like that. In fact, top-notch analyst (and now Major League Baseball Advanced Media staffer) Tom Tango has called Win Expectancy the ultimate story statistic.*

[* Win Expectancy, along with its cousin, Win Probability Added, has probably helped kill the sacrifice bunt for non-pitchers, since the actual numbers suggest that bunting doesn't improve your chances of winning, but actually lowers them a smidgen.]

Well, except usually it's not really much fun to drop a percentage into the middle of a story. Win Expectancy works well visually, when the line on the graph reverses itself a few times, or makes a huge jump (or fall) right at the end.

But if you're not FanGraphs or FiveThirtyEight, how often do you drop a graph into the middle of a story?

What's more, Win Expectancy leaves out much. As FanGraphs' glossary notes, "WE is the long-run average, however, so you need to remember that a 40% chance of winning is based on average players. If Miguel Cabrera is at the plate against Aaron Crow, the true odds favor the Tigers more than WE graph indicates."

Aaron Crow hasn't pitched in the majors since 2014. If you don't remember him, feel free to substitute Seth Maness or Nate Jones or Al Alburquerque. You can also swap in Jose Altuve for Cabrera if you want.

In the context of this game—the Astros have the better lineup, and the better bullpen—one might reasonably knock a percentage point or two off the A's true chance of winning this game. Either way, based purely on what we know, the home team now has roughly a 1 in 20 chance of winning this game.

Is this a thing worth knowing, if you're just a fan watching the game? I think for most fans, it probably is not. You might rather not know. Especially if you're a fan of the team that's losing. We know that fans tend to change the channel or go home if their team's almost certainly going to lose. I can understand how Win Expectancy would serve as a fine story stat. But only after the fact, and only in games with a big change, or changes. It's a tremendous comeback stat. Again: after the fact.

So? We're perfectly free to ignore Win Expectancy when it's not interesting, right? We are. I have greatly enjoyed entire seasons of baseball without seeing or hearing or reading about a single WE graph. At least until October, when curiosity does sometimes push me toward the (alas, context-free) percentages. And broadcasters, hardly interested in losing viewers and listeners, have no (good) reason to mention Win Expectancy during a game. They're far more likely to say something like, "Gee, if we can just get a few guys on base and somebody hits one out, things could get real interesting." Which of course happens less often, even in today's game, than they want us to think.

Win Expectancy, then, is the perfect Postmodern Baseball statistic: it's there when you want it—when it's interesting or useful, however rarely that might be—but the rest of the time it's not there. [JoS: In Power Ball, it's there. Each half-inning in the book ends with both the score and the Win Probability of the team leading or, if the score is tied, the team about to bat.]

I wish we could say the same about the new Statcast numbers that have so quickly weaseled their way into the broadcasts. Especially the national broadcasts; so far, only a few local broadcasts have incorporated the Statcast data (although the Astros' TV crew seems to be among the enthusiasts).

As Keith Hernandez writes, "I wonder what [Yogi Berra] and some of the other old-timers would say if they heard some of the broadcasters in the game today. Too many of them emphasize all these crazy stats, like 'exit velocity,' trajectory angles,' or, and this is my favorite, 'percentage rate of someone making a catch.' His probable rate of making that play was seventy-six percent!' Give me a break. Who cares how many miles per hour the ball traveled once it left the bat, or how high the ball traveled in degrees, or how many seconds it took to leave the ballpark?"

Hernandez does possess some self-awareness, also writing, "Am I dating myself? Am I a dinosaur? I guess to a degree I am. . . ."

He does have a point, though. What too many broadcasters don't seem to understand is that the new, user-friendly Statcast-driven numbers are interesting only at the extremes (and of course there's also the little issue of suggesting to listeners, however implicitly, that catch probability is anything close to precise).

When Altuve homered back in the first inning, Geoff Blum intoned, "Altuve pummels it, to the tune of 106 off the barrel, estimated 415 feet." When Chapman homered in the second, Blum said, "One hundred and three miles an hour off the bat," with an onscreen graphic listing that number, along with "26 DEGREE LAUNCH ANGLE."

Okay: 415 feet. We know something about 415. We know something about 415 because for as long as they've been painting numbers on outfield walls, we've had some context for outfield distances. It was obvious to me, as a kid, that 400 feet was a long ways from the plate. Because if you hit the ball 400 feet, usually it would be a home run. Hell, you could hit the ball only 330 feet and get a home run. Even fewer feet in Boston! But you kinda knew. Because the numbers were right there on the wall.

Launch angle, though? Exit velocity? We have no context, and only a Very Chosen Few of us will ever have any meaningful context. For two reasons. One theoretically solvable, one probably not.

The first reason is that the broadcasters are making absolutely no effort to provide any context, and are unlikely to. Exit velocity 103: Is that a lot? No idea! We're simply given the information, and information should not be given unless it's somehow useful and it's not useful without context and we're practically never given any context. Too much trouble, probably.

But broadcasters can learn.

The second, bigger reason is the numbers themselves. Baseball statistics work when they describe something we care about and when we can, given a reasonable chance, tell the difference between something that's impressive or interesting, and something that is not. ...

It's not Statcast's fault, or MLBAM's fault, that we're seemingly on the verge of being inundated by meaningless, context-free information. Quite frankly, it's 100 percent the broadcasters' fault. The broadcasters who still seem obsessed with small sample sizes and RBIs and fielding percentages have now skipped an entire generation of good, hard-won, contextualized knowledge, and for some reason seized upon exit velocity as a key objective in Statistics Scavenger Hunt. ...

Essentially, the new Statcast data is wildly important for the evaluators and decision-makers in the front offices, and modestly useful for that subset of journalists and essayists who rely on, and have the head for, in-depth statistical analysis. But otherwise, the data are often just more meaningless dribs of information, good for filling airtime in the absence of genuinely insightful analysis, but not much else. And in some cases the numbers are crowding out evocative, lyrical prose and verbiage. Which were already in alarmingly short supply. [pp. 144-148]

Hmmmm ... "inundated by meaningless, context-free information. Quite frankly, it's 100 percent the broadcasters' fault. The broadcasters who still seem obsessed with small sample sizes and RBIs and fielding percentages have now skipped an entire generation of good, hard-won, contextualized knowledge, and for some reason seized upon exit velocity ..."

Boy oh boy, am I ever looking at you, Dave O'Brien (who seemingly has never met a "meaningless drib of information" that he didn't rush to breathlessly communicate (free from all context) on the air, filling airtime and avoiding insightful analysis). He's not alone, not by any stretch of the imagination. Now that Vin Scully has retired, every baseball announcer is guilty of spouting noise pollution, to some degree or other. But OB is the announcer I have to put up with.

Pace of Play and Disagreeing with Bill James

Melvin orders an intentional walk . . . but unlike in every other season before 2017, Melvin's pitcher doesn't actually have to throw any pitches.

The "automatic" intentional walk was introduced just this season, as part of Baseball's ongoing, if fitful, efforts to address "pace of play" issues. There's now (apparently) serious talk about enforcing rules limiting pitchers' time between pitches; in fact, the clocks are already in place in stadiums, but to this point they've essentially been ignored, due largely to objections from the players' union.

So this season, for the first time ever, the intentional walk can easily pass without notice. Because instead of the manager giving some signal to his catcher, followed by four pitches delivered (usually) way high and outside—and so practically impossible to hit—now a manager need merely make a signal to the umpire . . . and off trots the batter to first base, having witnessed not a single pitch.

The point of course is to quicken the pace of play.

The old intentional walks took around one minute apiece. Now, one minute of dead time: that's not nothing. Except these days there just aren't many of those particular dead minutes to kill. ...

In 2016, there were only 932 intentional walks all season. In 2017, there will be only 970. (With their seventeen intentional walks apiece, the A's and Astros will tie for second fewest in the majors, with Terry Francona's first-place [Cleveland] issuing fifteen. In the National League, Bud Black's Rockies will finish last with only twenty.)

So, let's see . . . 970 minutes spread over six months is 162 minutes per month, or ____ minutes per week, or 6 minutes per day. Not for every team, or every game. For all of Major League Baseball. Which seems like . . . not a lot?

In fact, it really is not a lot. It's hardly a smidgen. ...

The most obvious way to speed up the pace would be shorter commercial breaks. They used to be shorter, and still there was enough time for the teams to switch places on the field, for the pitcher to get his warm-up tosses. Now, you could (reasonably, I think) argue that cutting thirty seconds of advertisements between each half inning would (a) bring in lower revenue in the short term, but (b) bring in more revenue in the long term, with a slightly quicker game leading to slightly higher ratings, and (thus) ad rates.

So far, it doesn't seem that anyone's much appreciated those extra six minutes. It also doesn't seem that anyone's much missed the four-pitch intentional walks. Yes, the prospect of the new rule deeply offended some sensibilities. At least one journalist blamed the rule on those damned millennials. ...

Still, such a fundamental exception to the game's fundamental rules—you know, four balls for a walk, three strikes yer out, etc.—is defensible only if it's part of something larger. And in 2017, it's really not. The commercial breaks are the same, and there's a pitch clock but . . . just in the minor leagues, with the aim of helping umpires enforce the long-standing rule, minors and majors, that a pitcher must deliver a pitch within . . . well, you're probably not going to believe this, but within twelve seconds. It's right there in the book, Rule 5.07(c): When the bases are unoccupied, the pitcher shall deliver the ball to the batter within 12 seconds after he receives the ball. Each time the pitcher delays the game by violating this rule, the umpire shall call "Ball."

You wanna guess how many times a major-league umpire has enforced Rule 5.07(c) in 2017? Okay, so I don't know. But if the number isn't zero, it's very, very, very close to zero. It's difficult for umpires to hurry along the pitchers, and it's difficult for umpires to hurry along the hitters. As long-time umpire Dale Scott told me, "All we could do was write up the chronic violators, and then the league will send them a letter, and then maybe they'll fine them. But the union takes the teeth out of everything. The fines aren't large enough to deter anything, and MLB didn't want ejections." ...

Bill James thinks all these measures, or half measures, even if implemented, would make little difference. "The essence of the problem," Bill will write in a few weeks, "is that there are many, many, many things which can be done inside of a baseball game to waste time, and it is always in someone's interest to do these things. Pitchers can stand on the mound without pitching. Catchers can visit the mound. Pitchers can throw to first.
Managers can change pitchers. If you limit pitching changes they will start changing outfielders in the middle of the game, or holding up the inning to move the outfielders around. Batters can ask for time and step out between pitches. Base runners can ask for a sliding glove. Batters can change bats. Networks can sell more commercials between innings."

More Bill: "Baseball is trying to address a general problem with remedies targeting one issue or another. This is never going to work, because there will always be something else that can pop up that will waste even more time than whatever you were trying to stamp out before. I'm glad they are trying to fix the problem, but it is never going to work. It's like swatting mosquitoes. There will always be more mosquitoes." ...

I think Bill is wrong. Or wrong enough. Most especially, Bill is largely wrong when he says Baseball is trying to address a general problem with remedies targeting one issue or another. Baseball hasn't actually made any real commitment to such remedies. Go back and look at that list of ways to waste time. None of them have actually been addressed in meaningful ways. And you can't even include intentional walks, because the point of them was never to waste time; it just worked out that way. ...

Ultimately, it all comes back to the pitcher. He's the one with the ball in his hand. Unless he's got a really good excuse, he simply must deliver the next pitch within a reasonable number of seconds. If he doesn't do that, it's a ball. If he does but the batter's not ready, tough shit for the batter. Essentially, it comes down to reasonably clear rules and the umpires' willingness to enforce them.

Because when it comes to the pitch clock in the minor leagues, nearly everyone who's been quoted on the subject says essentially the same thing: Before you know it, you've forgotten it's even there. This was just one of the changes in Double- and Triple-A a few years ago, designed to speed things up, but it's the clock that seems to have made the biggest difference. In 2015, the first year of the clocks, Triple-A game times dropped by twelve minutes.

That said, it's far from clear if just a pitch clock would have the same impact in the majors. Because it turns out most of the dead time between pitches comes with runners on base, when the pitch clock's turned off, because of the time required to mind those runners. Considering that research shows most pitchers, in the absence of baserunners, already deliver the next pitch within twenty seconds, the time saved might be negligible, or less than we'd expect.

Or maybe it's not really so much about the time at all. Automatic intentional walks, as we've seen, make little difference in anything. Except maybe perception. With every supposed remedy, at least Baseball can say, "Hey, get off our back! Can't You see that we're doing something?"

There is literally not a human being on earth who could discern the few minutes per week "saved" by junking those four-pitch intentional walks, just as there's not a human who could notice, with their eyes, the difference between a .250 hitter and a .300 hitter. But tell someone a guy's a .300 hitter, and they'll figure they saw it all along.*

[* Over the course of a whole season, as Crash Davis relates so vividly in Bull Durham, the difference between .250 and .300 is roughly one hit per week.]

Same thing with pace of play. It's not all just psychology and persuasion. Some, though. If Baseball keeps saying they're concerned about it, and actually does throw in a few time-saving wrinkles, most fans might well believe the pace has picked up. More than it actually has. And so everyone wins, a little.

This is just the fifteenth time all season that Melvin's called for an intentional walk, a tactic that's become wildly unpopular since Bill James pointed out, way back in the 1980s, that teams typically give up more runs with the intentional walk than without. Which is a pretty strong argument against doing it. [pp. 191-197]

The Public Hates Slow, Dragging Games

Games taking too long? Too-long games were considered a scourge a century ago. Not to mention nearly every year since then. In 1915, when the average game didn't last even two hours, Federal League president James Gilmore complained, "Something must be done to speed up play, as the public does not like to see unnecessary wrangling on the field and a slow, dragging game." [p. 220]

Jim Bouton (1939-2019) And The Lasting Impact Of "Ball Four"

Jim Bouton, a former major league pitcher and a proudly liberal thinker in a sport dominated by ignorant conservatives, died on Wednesday at the age of 80.

In 1970, Bouton published Ball Four, an iconoclastic diary of his 1969 season with the Seattle Pilots and Houston Astros that Bruce Weber of the New York Times praised as "raunchy, shrewd, [and] irreverent". Alex Johnson of NBC News wrote that Bouton had "destroyed the myth of baseball as a wholesome pursuit of God-fearing, milk-drinking young men".

Ball Four was called "detrimental to baseball" by Commissioner Bowie Kuhn (who tried to get Bouton to sign a statement saying the book was completely fictional), New York sports columnist Dick Young infamously trashed Bouton and Shecter as "social lepers", and Pete Rose of the Reds made his opinion known by shouting from the opposing dugout: "Fuck you, Shakespeare".

In the subsequent fifty years, the players who have written inside-the-clubhouse books could fill several big league rosters — I can easily remember enjoying The Bronx Zoo by Sparky Lyle as a fifteen-year-old back in 1979 — but none of them touched off the firestorm of controversy that Bouton did. The baseball world changed forever after Ball Four — and it would never go back.

Mark Armour, in a biography of Bouton for SABR's BioProject, wrote:

There was a growing divide in the New York press at this time [the early-to-mid-1960s], between the old-school writers who believed their job was to present the players as heroes, and the new wave of journalists who were looking for a story, or some deeper understanding of what the players were thinking on and off the field. The Yankees players and management were used to being treated as royalty by the likes of Jimmy Cannon, and resented the young writers, whom Cannon derisively referred to as "chipmunks." When Bouton joined the team [in 1962] he was warned to stay away from the press, but he soon found that he had a lot in common with the newer writers ... For their part, the writers discovered that Bouton liked to paint, and to make jewelry, and to talk about more than just the day's game. When asked his opinions about the Vietnam War, or about civil rights, Bouton would answer directly and honestly. Bouton was good copy, though becoming less popular with his teammates and management.

Weber:

Even as a young player, he had a pugnacious wit and a willingness to speak his liberal mind, most notably to reporters, whom other Yankees made a habit of disdaining, and on subjects like the war in Vietnam, student protests on campus and civil rights, that raised hackles of teammates and Yankees executives.

During his time with the Yankees, Bouton battled with management over his contract every spring. He began telling the press what he was asking for and what the Yankees were offering. Yankees GM Ralph Houk wanted to know why. "If I don't tell them, Ralph, maybe they'll think I'm asking for ridiculous figures. I just want to let them know I'm being reasonable." When the writers learned that Bouton had been forced to accept only $18,500 for the 1964 season, most of them sided with the pitcher, which (obviously) infuriated the Yankees' front office.

By 1969, Bouton was trying to revive his career, at age 30, by throwing a knuckleball for the expansion Seattle Pilots. Armour notes:

Making Bouton's job a bit tougher was his continued willingness to speak up when he felt there was a worthy cause at stake. In early 1968 he signed a statement supporting an American boycott of the coming Mexico City Olympic Games if South Africa's whites-only teams were allowed to participate in international competitions. The country had been barred by the Olympics beginning in 1964, but still took part in other events around the world. Bouton went to Mexico City to try to meet with representatives of the US Olympic Committee about the issue, but was rebuffed. He wrote about the cause and his ordeal in an article for Sport the next winter ["A Mission in Mexico City", Sport, August 1969].

During the 1969 season, Bouton took notes (sometimes during games) and spoke into a tape recorder almost every day. He and writer Leonard Shecter worked in the off-season turning the notes and transcripts into a book. Excerpts were published in Look magazine.

Weber:

In Bouton's telling, players routinely cheated on their wives on road trips, devised intricate plans to peek under women's skirts or spy on them through hotel windows, spoke in casual vulgarities, drank to excess and swallowed amphetamines as if they were M&Ms. [Bouton later observed: "Amphetamines improved my performance about five percent. Unfortunately, in my case that wasn't enough."]

Mickey Mantle played hung over and was cruel to children seeking his autograph, he wrote. Carl Yastrzemski was a loafer. Whitey Ford illicitly scuffed or muddied the baseball and his catcher, Elston Howard, helped him do it. Most coaches were knotheads who dispensed the obvious as wisdom when they weren't contradicting themselves, and general managers were astonishingly penurious and dishonest in dealing with players over their contracts. ...

Over all, Bouton portrayed the game — its players, coaches, executives and most of the writers who covered them — as a world of amusing, foible-ridden, puerile conformity. ...

The commissioner at the time, Bowie Kuhn, called Bouton in for a reprimand; some players shunned him for spilling the beans to players' wives about what players did on road trips. ... A few players, including Elston Howard, claimed Bouton was a liar. And many of an older sportswriting generation felt Bouton had done irreparable damage to the game out of his own self-importance and desperation.

In addition to calling Bouton a "social leper", Dick Young, the reactionary writer for the New York Daily News, added: "People like this, embittered people, sit down in their time of deepest rejection and write. They write, oh hell, everybody stinks, everybody but me, and it makes them feel much better."

Others writers, particularly those who possessed a measure of intelligence, held a different view. Roger Angell (The New Yorker) called Ball Four "a rare view of a highly complex public profession seen from the innermost inside, along with an even more rewarding inside view of an ironic and courageous mind. And, very likely, the funniest book of the year."

Robert Lipsyte (New York Times) noted that reading the entire book provides the necessary context for the more revelatory passages, which appear as "a natural outgrowth of a game in which 25 young, insecure, undereducated men of narrow skills keep circling the country to play before fans who do not understand their problems or their work, and who use them as symbols for their own fantasies."

When the New York Public Library celebrated its centennial in 1995, Ball Four was the only sports book among the 159 titles in the "Books of the Century" exhibit. In 2002, Sports Illustrated named it #3 on its list of the top 100 sports books of all time.

Filmmaker Ron Shelton ("Bull Durham") was a minor league infielder when Ball Four was published. In 2010, he said:

It shines light on sports from a different angle. Baseball is about the guys that play it and it's about all the things that happen in between the big plays. It's a working-class game. It's approached with great romance and poetry and lyricism by outsiders and writers. And if you play the game, there's no myth or poetry. You're just trying to improve your statistics. You're trying to meet a woman in a bar. Those are the things that drive you. And I think Ball Four got at that somehow.

In 2000, ESPN published a series of articles marking the 30th anniversary of Ball Four. Rob Neyer spoke to Jeff Neuman, who worked as an editor for Macmillan Publishing and Simon and Schuster:

Ball Four is, if not the most famous baseball book, certainly the most important, and in good ways and bad. It changed the expectations of what not only sports books, but sports journalism could be. It created a very different appetite among the fans for inside stories, and especially for inside dirt. It was the first book to pierce the veil of the locker room -- and once Bouton started telling these stories, how could the press ignore them any longer? This, in turn, radically changed the atmosphere in locker rooms. ... Before the book, there was an understanding between players and writers about what you could write and what you couldn't. Those old rules are gone, and players today, to a much greater extent, feel surrounded by hostile forces.

Jim Caple wrote:

Back when he lived in a different house, Pirates assistant general manager Roy Smith kept his copy of Ball Four in a prominent place where he could always turn to its pages when he needed to look up a bit of wisdom from Joe Schultz or Fred Talbot.

"I kept it in the bathroom," Smith said. "That and 'The Godfather.' That pretty much covered it all. What else do you need? Well, I guess I could have had The Bible."

Perhaps. But does the Old Testament tell you how to play for a manager whose advice for most any situation was generally limited to "go pound some Budweiser"?

Smith estimates he's read Ball Four in its entirety five times, which is about average. I know several people (myself included) who read all or part of it every February as a spring training ritual. Just as pitchers and catchers report to Florida and Arizona, fans report to the pages of Ball Four, the best book ever written about baseball.

Armour:

The diverse reaction to the book was part of the social and political divide the country was going through. Bouton, a "communist" to some of his critics, unabashedly supported the war protesters, and held decidedly liberal views on civil rights, religion, the rights of women, the new player's union, poverty, and the other divisive issues of the time. ... George Frazier, a Boston Globe columnist who later showed up on Richard Nixon's enemies list, called Ball Four "a revolutionary manifesto. ... What is happening among baseball players, their doubting the divinity of demagogues ... is what is happening among housewives and their husbands who have had their fill of the shoddy wares and planned obsolescence foisted on them by American industry." ...

The most considered of Ball Four's negative reviews was written for Esquire by Roger Kahn [who] admired Shecter and Bouton, but is particularly critical of their depiction of life on the road, especially when Bouton and Shecter name names. ...

Bouton defended himself against this type of criticism, responding that he portrays himself as a part of the off-field stories, the drinking, the beaver shooting, and all the missed curfews. This is true, but Kahn correctly counters that Bouton did not show himself cheating on his wife, an act which carried, and still carries, an additional level of opprobrium from friends and family. ... (Kahn's view on issues of decorum evolved over the years. In his 1987 book Joe and Marilyn, for one example, he claims to reveal details of their private body parts, and discusses the quality of their love-making.)

In a separate article on Ball Four, Armour wrote:

When Bouton joined the Yankees in 1962, he was warned by his teammates about associating with reporters, especially Shecter, or "that f**king Shecter." Bouton rarely did what he was told, so he not only talked with the reporters, he became friends with many of them, including Shecter. ...

[Excerpts of Ball Four, in the June 2, 1970 issue of Look,] included details of Bouton's contract negotiations with the Yankees, a depiction of many players as ingenious peeping toms, salacious dialog that included sexual humor about players' wives, the widespread use of amphetamines in the game, and playful kissing between inebriated Seattle Pilots on the team plane. Most of the passages were benignly funny, and included Bouton's poignant insecurities about his place on his teams (on and off the field).

Although Bouton spent the majority of the book dealing with his day-to-day 1969 life with the Pilots and Astros, his comments on his years with the Yankees predictably generated the most controversy. ...

Bouton's first appearance in New York was on May 31 against the Mets, when he allowed three hits and three runs in one-third of an inning. He was booed from the time he began walking in from the bullpen until he retreated into the dugout after his appearance. He later wrote that it was his lowest moment ever on a baseball field. [1970 was also Bouton's final season in the majors, save for five starts in September 1978.] ...

The book struck a chord with so many people, perhaps, because while readers could not relate to throwing a 90-mile-per-hour fastball or hitting a slider, they understood too well the frustrations of daily life, spending time in close quarters with people with whom you had nothing in common, and dealing with arbitrary and petty regulations set down by unimaginative bosses. ...

His fellow players still did not like it. Joe Morgan, his teammate on the Astros, said, "I always thought he was a teammate, not an author. I told him some things I would never tell a sportswriter." By the time the book came out, the Seattle Pilots were extinct, having relocated to Milwaukee as the Brewers. Many of his ex-Pilot teammates, including Fred Talbot, Wayne Comer, and Don Mincher deeply resented the book and Bouton. ...

Jimmy Cannon, predictably, was not amused. Cannon blamed Shecter, though he never mentioned the collaborator by name in his scathing July 28 column. "The book is ugly with the small atrocities of the chipmunk's cruelty. In a way, Bouton is a chipmunk, a man who obviously cherishes himself as a social philosopher. The influence of the ghost is obvious … The literary critics take him seriously. It is as though he were assaulted with a sudden inspiration and rushed to a typewriter and put it all down in a flurry of creation. But he went to the spook, and one has to speculate where Bouton stops, and the ghost begins. Whose hatreds are these, whose theories? Which ones ethics governed the partnership?" ...

Ball Four sold 200,000 copies in hardcover, and countless more in paperback. ... In 1971 Bouton and Shecter collaborated on a sequel, I'm Glad You Didn't Take It Personally, discussing the circus surrounding the publication of Ball Four. Bouton dedicated the new book to Dick Young and Bowie Kuhn.

In addition to Ball Four and I'm Glad You Didn't Take It Personally, Bouton also wrote Strike Zone (a novel, with Eliot Asinof) and Foul Ball (about trying to save Wahconah Park, an old ballpark in Pittsfield, Massachusetts), and I Managed Good, But Boy Did They Play Bad (compiled with the help of Neil Offen, his research assistant).

The definitive edition of Ball Four was published in 2011 as Ball Four: The Final Pitch, which included epilogues from 1981 (Ball Five), 1990 (Ball Six), and 2000 (Ball Seven).

Book Review: "Waiting For Pumpsie", By Barry Wittenstein (Illustrated By London Ladd)

Waiting For Pumpsie
By Barry Wittenstein
Illustrated by London Ladd
(Charlesbridge Publishing, 2017)

Bernard is a young baseball fan living in Roxbury, a suburb of Boston. Bernard is "crazy, crazy, crazy about the Red Sox" and he longs for the day when someone with dark skin like his is wearing a crisp, white uniform at Fenway Park ("the most beautiful place in the world").

As the 1959 season begins, Jackie Robinson has been retired from baseball for two years and the Red Sox still do not have a black player on their roster.

(In looking online for information about Green, I learned – to my astonishment – that the Boston Bruins integrated before the Red Sox. Willie O'Ree became the NHL's first black player in January 1958. However, he was the only black player until 1974.)

Every year, Bernard's father takes the family to a game at Fenway. Author Barry Wittenstein offers subtle hints of racism at the ballpark. Sitting in the bleachers for a Red Sox-Yankees game, Bernard and his sister cheer when New York's Elston Howard (the only black player on either team) gets a hit. Other fans get angry and a policeman tells the children they need to "learn how to behave". For Bernard, the confrontation is a small clue why there are not a lot of black faces at Fenway.

The Red Sox have a promising black infielder in the minor leagues. Elijah "Pumpsie" Green impressed a lot of people in spring training, but to the surprise of many fans, he did not make the season-opening roster. It is not until July that the Red Sox, at the bottom of the American League standings, finally call him up.

Bernard and his parents and younger sister listen to the game on the radio. The Red Sox are in Chicago on July 21, when Pumpsie comes into the game as a pinch-runner in the 8th inning and then takes over at shortstop.

Pumpsie has played in nine games by the time the Red Sox return from their road trip. The family gets tickets to his first game at Fenway Park. It's a Tuesday doubleheader against the Kansas City Athletics and in the first inning of the first game ...

"Leading off for the Red Sox - number twelve, Pumpsie Green!" The announcer's voice echoes through Fenway. We're stomping our feet so much, the stadium starts to shake. ...

The pitcher winds up. Pumpsie pulls his bat back. The ball shoots out of the pitcher's hand like a rocket. Pumpsie swings.

WHACK! The ball climbs higher and higher. I think it's going to make it over that mean Green Monster.

No! It clanks off the top of the wall and bounces back onto the field. Pumpsie rounds first base and runs like his own uniform can't keep up. The outfielder heaves the ball back in.

Pumpsie slides. Safe at third!

Wittenstein is accurate in his portrayal of Pumpsie's timeline and the games in 1959 (though the left field wall was not yet known as the Green Monster in the 1950s). Bernard and his family glow with personality, and the baseball scenes are spot-on. Bernard is innocent yet aware, and boundless hope will win readers' hearts. London Ladd's illustrations powerfully and beautifully complement the simplicity of Wittenstein's narrative.

Wittenstein has written two other books: Sonny's Bridge, about jazz saxophonist Sonny Rollins, and The Boo-Boos That Changed the World, about Earle Dickson, the inventor of the band-aid.

The age range for Waiting for Pumpsie is 6-9 years old. I received a complimentary copy of the book from Charlesbridge Publishing.

Bill James: Popular Crime: Reflections On The Celebration Of Violence (2011)

In September 2017, I posted about a forthcoming book from Bill James. The Man from the Train: The Solving of a Century-Old Serial Killer Mystery was researched and written by James and his daughter, Rachel McCarthy James.

Before I write about that book, however, I want to share some bits from James's previous crime book, Popular Crime: Reflections on the Celebration of Violence (2011). James writes and offers a wide array of opinions on dozens of cases in that book, as well as commenting on many true crime books. However, the snips below are more general.

Although this is not a book review, I trust you can tell - from the fact that I am posting several excerpts from this book and my oft-stated respect for James and his research and writings on baseball - that I absolutely recommend this book.

One thing you can always count on from Bill James: He is never dull and he will make you think.

The modern American phenomenon of popular crime stories is in absolutely no way new, modern, or American. That it is truly a universal phenomenon throughout human history perhaps should not be asserted without a more complete survey, but I know of no society which did not have sensational crimes and huge public interest in them, except perhaps societies which were so repressive that the government was able to quash them. ...

We are, not as a nation but as human beings, fascinated by crime stories, even obsessed with them. The Bible is full of them. On your television at this moment there are four channels covering true crime stories, and five more doing detective fiction. And yet, on a certain level, we are profoundly ashamed of this fascination. If you go into a good used book store and ask if they have a section of crime books, you will get pile of two reactions. One is, the clerk will look at you as if you had asked whether they had any really good pornography. The other is, they will tell you that the crime books are down the aisle on your left, in the alcove beside the detective stories. Right next to the pornography.

The internet service that I use headlines news stories with links to them. A huge percentage of these are crime stories—yet in the chart attached, where their news summaries are sorted into categories, there is no category for crime. Maybe a third of their top news stories are crime stories; you would think that would rate one category among their 25. Apparently not. ...

If you go to a party attended by the best people—academics and lawyers, journalists and school bus drivers, those kinds of people . . . if you go to a party populated by the NPR crowd and you start talking about JonBenet Ramsey, people will look at you as if you had forgotten your pants. If you are a writer and you try to talk your editor into working on a book about famous crimes, he or she will instantly begin hedging you toward something more ... something more decent. Maybe if you included a chapter on Watergate, it would be alright. If you write anything about JonBenet, you need to say how unimportant that really was, compared to the attention it drew; that's really the only appropriate thing to be said about that case.

If you try to talk to American intellectuals and opinion-makers about the phenomenon of famous crimes, they immediately throw up a shield: I will not talk about this. I am a serious and intelligent person. I am interested in politics and the environment. I do not talk about Natalee Holloway. It is as if they were afraid of being dirtied by the subject.

Of course, no one has a social responsibility to be interested in Rabbi Neulander; that's not what I am saying. What I am saying is that given the magnitude of this subject, given the extent to which it occupies the attention of the nation, there are a series of obvious questions which one might guess would be matters of public discussion, but which are not discussed anywhere because the kind of people who participate in the national conversation are terrified of being thrown out of the boat if they confess to an interest in such vulgar matters. Why do some crime stories become famous? Why does the Scott Peterson case become a national circus, while a thousand similar cases attract nothing beyond local notice? Why are people interested in crime stories? Is this a destructive phenomenon, as so many people assume it to be, or is there a valid social purpose being served? Who benefits from this? Who suffers from it? Who makes the critical decisions that cause crime stories to explode or fizzle? Are these stories actually significant to the nation, or are they truly as petty and irrelevant as intellectuals tend to assume they are?

Beyond this roomful of questions there is another room where the questions are yet more important. Does our criminal justice system work well? How could it work better? When it fails, why does it fail? How could this failure have been avoided? Do the rules make sense? What does it take to earn a conviction? What should it take? ...

Of course there is a national discussion about those types of issues—among the lawyers. When the rest of us try to comment, we are reminded firmly that we are not lawyers and therefore don't know what we're talking about. No one writes about these issues. ...

It is my belief that the lay public—non-lawyers—should participate actively in the discussion of crime and justice. It is my notion that popular crime stories could be and should be a passageway that the lay public uses to enter into that discussion. ...

This book is about three things. First, it is about famous crimes, and in particular about famous crimes which have happened in the United States since about 1880. Second, it is about crime, in a general way, about the kinds of issues I have tried to introduce here.

And third, it is about crime books. I am not a lawyer or an academic, nor even a cop or a court groupie. My understanding of these issues is based on what I have read, which includes a thousand or more crime books. There is, to the best of my knowledge, no book about crime books.

I argued before that popular crime stories are much more important in re-shaping our culture than we are generally willing to see. I don't mean to overstate the importance of the Mary Rogers story, and I'm not expert enough in all of these areas to be certain that I am not over-stating it, but ... if you read a history of metropolitan police departments, I am certain that it will reference the significance of the Mary Rogers case in leading to the re-organization of the New York police department in 1845. If you read the early history of abortion law, I am confident that it will reference the Mary Rogers story. If you study the history of the detective story, I feel sure that you will find that the Mary Rogers stories were critical to that genre's breaking out of its narrow early trench, and becoming a part of the culture. If you know anything about the history of journalism, you certainly know that the newspaper business rode on the backs of crime stories for a hundred years, the Mary Rogers case being one of the sturdiest carriers. But if you read a history of America in the 1840s, it is likely that not a word will be said about Mary Rogers.

America between 1890 and 1915 was driving toward revolution, or toward a second civil war. I always find it amazing how little people understand this, and how little they know about it. It seems to me that, since we didn't actually arrive at the revolution, people dismiss the whole concept that this could have happened. One might expect historians to disagree about how close we were to revolution or civil war, but it doesn't seem to me that they do ... We weren't at the brink of civil war in 1914, as Kentucky was in 1900, but we were headed in that direction. ...

I am trying to write here about the serious consequences of the trivial events, the tabloid stories. Tabloid stories have been around at least since 1700 and are omnipresent around us today, but in some sense they reached their apogee in the 1920s, culminating, of course, in the Lindbergh case in the early 1930s. It was the golden age of something horrible. All of the big cities in 1920 had multiple daily newspapers. These newspapers competed with one another to nakedly exploit horrific human tragedies for their own profit.

The great crime stories of the 1910-1920 era were vitally connected to the struggle for the nation's soul. They had to do—almost all of them—with rich against poor, with labor against capital, with radicals against the establishment, with the South against the North, with the pacifists against the militants at the time of the Great War, with immigrants against natives. By 1922, somehow, most of that had simply vanished, at least from the crime stories. Looking back on it from 90 years later it seems almost like a miracle, as if all of these rifts were somehow suddenly healed by the nation's prosperity. Things somehow jumped into packages. Labor split off from radicalism; fiery labor agitators were replaced by tough labor union professionals. Crime became organized and professional and horribly lethal, while "journalism" learned to package and market cheap, tawdry stories of cheating wives and spoiled rich kids who murdered for fun. ... I wish I could tell you what happened to America in 1921, but the truth is that I do not understand it, and I haven't seen the evidence that anyone does.

In 1980, after discovering the bodies of 21 murdered children, the Atlanta police said they were not certain that they had a serial murderer on their hands.

This is a constant theme. If you checked out 50 serial murderer cases before 1980, I would bet that in 45 of them, the police would be quoted in the newspapers insisting that the crimes were not linked, even as the newspapers suggested that they were.

The capacity of mankind to misunderstand the world is without limit. The external world is billions of times more complicated than the human mind. We are desperate to understand the world; we struggle from the moment of birth to understand the world—but it is beyond our capacity. We thus sign on to simplifications of the world that give us the illusion of understanding. Experts are not less inclined to sign on to these simplistic explanations than outsiders; they are more inclined to sign on to them. They have more need of them.

I couldn't actually read In Broad Daylight [by Harry MacLean (HarperCollins, 1984)]; it gave me nightmares. In all my years of reading grisly murder stories in the moments before drifting off to sleep, there are only two books that have ever given me nightmares: that one, and The Shoemaker (Simon & Schuster, 1983) [by Flora Rheta Schreiber].

One of the books that I thought I might write, at one time, was a book entitled How Serial Murderers Are Caught. We are all interested in how to catch serial murderers, how to catch them quicker. Might it be that one way to learn something about that subject would be to study how previous serial murderers have, in fact, been caught? Why not do a systematic review of the subject? Find as many details as I could about the capture of, let's say, 300 serial murderers, then try to organize that information. What happened, to bring them to the light? And also, knowing what we know about the murderer now, after he has been caught, how could he have been caught earlier? If we had tried this, would it have worked?

My greatest fear, in writing this book, is that I will be unable to convince you that John and Patsy Ramsey had nothing to do with the death of their daughter. The Ramseys, having suffered a horrendous loss, then became the victims of a fantastically botched investigation which spent several years pointing fingers at them, and of public scorn, condemnation and ridicule stemming from that. I feel a responsibility to do what I can to clear their names, and I fear that I will be unequal to the challenge. I will do my best.

On April 10, 1836, a New York City woman working under the name of Helen Jewett was murdered in her brothel. A 19-year-old man named Richard Robinson was arrested and charged with the crime, and was tried but acquitted.

The murder of Helen Jewett occurred at the birth of the modern newspaper industry—a moment very like 1990, the birth of the internet. For a few years newspapers sprouted like dandelions. In a climate of many competing newspapers with small audiences and extraordinarily lax editorial practices, the story of the murder of Helen Jewett emerged as one of the most famous crimes in American history. Patricia Cline Cohen wrote a 1998 book about this case, The Murder of Helen Jewett, published by Alfred A. Knopf.

Helen Jewett was a prostitute, yes, but in saying this I am as much misinforming you as the opposite. She was a prostitute, but Robinson and Jewett had an intense, passionate relationship which had been going on for a year before her murder. They wrote one another love letters, dozens or probably hundreds of them. They bought one another gifts; they went to the theater together. They teased one another and fought petty battles that seemed to both of them larger than life. They shared secrets. They carried small, hand-drawn pictures of one another. She sewed on his buttons, and mended his shirts. When Robinson had dalliances with other women, she was furious with him, and he had to work his way back into her good graces.

She was, then, more of a surrogate wife or a surrogate girlfriend than she was simply a sex worker, as we think of a prostitute in the 21st century. What is unclear, even having read the book, is to what extent this was unusual in 19th century New York. ...

Ms. Cohen's research is quite remarkable, and the story she tells is twice that remarkable, at least. Helen Jewett's name at the time of her birth was Dorcas Doyen. For several years as a young girl Dorcas worked as a live-in domestic servant with the family of Judge Nathan Weston, in Maine. It's a distinguished family; Judge Weston's grandson became Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court. In the 1820s there was a woman named Mrs. Anne Royall, who travelled around the United States visiting towns and staying with people and recording her experiences in self-published travelogues that were often petty and vindictive. Ms. Royall visited the Weston house, met Dorcas Doyen briefly, was very much charmed by her, and wrote a couple of very flattering paragraphs about her in one of her nasty little books. No one at the time made any connection between this unnamed servant girl and the woman who, nine years later, became the infamous Helen Jewett, but Ms. Cohen nonetheless finds the passage and uses it effectively to help re-construct Ms. Jewett's early life.

That's remarkable research. There are many such discoveries in her book. Nathaniel Hawthorne attended Bowdoin College at the same time as a nephew or cousin or something of Judge Weston, and visited this same small town in Maine for several weeks one summer when he was in college, flirting with a servant girl who worked in his friend's house. Hawthorne wrote about this, and wrote about the family and the little town in letters or journals that still survive, and Ms. Cohen finds these and uses them to re-construct the time and place. The wallpaper in one room of another cousin's house still survives, in an off-the-beaten-track museum somewhere, and Ms. Cohen finds this wallpaper and writes about it. Ms. Jewett, as a prostitute, had several other small run-ins with the police, and was on one occasion profiled in a newspaper by a sympathetic reporter (who was also a client), and Ms. Cohen has found this profile and used it to help re-construct her life—as well as the court records of all of these other little dustups.

She finds letters from one family member to another, discussing social events at which Dorcas Doyen would have worked, and, as Doyen/Jewett was an avid reader and a great lover of books, she finds advertisements in small-town newspapers for books that Doyen might have read and probably read, and she finds articles that appeared in local newspapers that describe events or stories that Doyen would have known about or participated in. She finds descriptions of people that Doyen would have known. She finds court records and census records that make passing reference to Doyen's grandfather or her great-grandmother or her next-door neighbor's dog. She finds the addresses at which Jewett lived in New York, and she finds out who was living next-door and what they did for a living, and who lived in all the houses up and down the street and what the nearby businesses were.

It would be ungracious of me not to mention that, having read countless crime books, I have never before encountered anything remotely like this level of research. By "research" I do not mean hitting Google and Wikipedia. I mean living for weeks in old libraries and dusty courthouses, trying to recognize a name in a stack of 200-year-old property transaction records, and then moving on to the next old library, the next old courthouse or the next university archive or the next small-town museum or the next stack of census reports. I'm a pretty good researcher; I couldn't begin to do this.

It would also be gutless of me not to call this what it is. It's academic showboating. In 1804 Jacob Doyen, who was Helen Jewett's grandfather, filed a small-claims court action in Hallowell, Maine, against a man named Stephen Smith, having to do with a $12 debt, and then failed to appear in court when the case was heard. Ms. Cohen finds the record of this action and infers actively from it, but it doesn't actually have a damned thing to do with the story of Helen Jewett; it's just showing off Ms. Cohen's research skills. As much as we might admire her research, it does become tiresome. ...

[Helen Jewett's] letters go on for pages. Her punctuation is at times a little non-standard, but the message is always crystal clear. These are the words of a destitute shoemaker's daughter, dropped off at age twelve to grow up as a domestic servant to a wealthy family, and given a few months of schooling by her generous masters. I venture to say that, if you took the letters of a murdered 21st century prostitute, you would not be likely to find such eloquence.

In fact, there is a great deal in this story that calls into question the notion of progress. The life of Helen Jewett, apart from its terrible finish at the business end of a small hatchet, seems infinitely better than the life of a modern prostitute, as best I understand that from the images on my television. She did not service a hundred clients a week; more likely five to fifteen. She lived in a large house with beautiful furniture, where sumptuous meals were served as an inducement to the clientele. Paintings hung on the walls that today hang in museums and are well known to art historians. She drank champagne, and she spent her days reading novels and writing letters and making a daily promenade to the post office. She wore beautiful dresses. She went to the theater several times a week. Some of the theaters had special seating areas for the prostitutes. They valued their patronage, because the presence of the glamorous ladies drew out-of-town businessmen into the theater.

After the [hard cover edition of this] book came out I heard from a number of people who asked me, "Why didn't you include a list of the 100 best crime books?" to which I replied, of course, "Why don't you mind your own damned business?" But after I heard this suggestion a couple of dozen times I eventually had to concede that maybe I should have done that, so here it is. ...

This is not a list of the 100 Greatest Crime Books; it's just a list of 100 Good Crime Books that I will recommend to you, and then we will assume that there are 1,000 more that I don't know anything about. ...

One thing that you probably do know, if you read crime books, is that most books about crimes are terrible. I don't mean to be disrespectful to the people in what is now "my" area, but ... a lot of books about crimes are just God Awful. None of the books that I will list here are bad; they're all pretty good. I'm going to give them "stars," but I wanted to warn you that I'm grading here on a very, very tough scale; even the one-star books on this list are actually good books. I am recommending all of these books; I am just recommending some of them more highly than others.

Only nine of the 100 books on James's list received 4 or 5 stars:

5 stars
In Cold Blood, Truman Capote, 1965
Final Verdict, Adela Rogers St. Johns, 1962

4 stars
Last Rampage, James W Clarke, 1990
Thunderstruck, Erik Larson, 2007
The Rose Man of Sing Sing, James McGrath Morris, 2003
Blind Eye, James B. Stewart, 1999
Twelve Caesars, Suetonius, written about 115 AD
The Onion Field, Joseph Wambaugh, 1973
The Newgate Calendar, original author unknown

James, on The Newgate Calendar:

[It] was published repeatedly (in various forms) through the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, and was one of the most widely read books in the English language for about 200 years, perhaps second only to the Bible, or third behind Pilgrim's Progress. Newgate was a large prison in London, where criminals were executed. The Newgate Calendar was a collection of short accounts of the lives of famous and terrible criminals. The book was used for generations to teach children about the wages of sin, although it has what we might consider an ambiguous moral tone. Though certainly not reliable, the book is easy to peruse online, and is well worth the investment of a little bit of your time.