Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 980: The Baseball-Book Draft

Episode Date: November 23, 2016

Ben, Sam, and Andy McCullough of the Los Angeles Times draft a few of their favorite baseball books.

There's a long hard book that needs reading. So do what you must but don't touch. I'm ever so silent. Good morning and welcome to episode 980 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectus, brought to you by The Play Index, Baseball Reference, and by our Patreon supporters. I'm Sam Miller of ESPN, along with Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Hey, Ben. Hello. And we're joined by Andy McCullough of the Los Angeles Times. Andy, how are you? I'm great. How are you guys? Good.

Nice of you to do a podcast in the off-season. Yeah. It's really sorry to pull you out of your hibernation. It's a month today. It's been a month today since you recorded a podcast with Pedro. Yeah, we were going to do one at the GM meetings, which was a couple weeks ago, and then there was this thing on Tuesday that sort of took the wind out of our sail. And then we decided to just, you know, try and live.

I don't know. I mean, we would like to podcast, I guess. It's like a combination of my laziness and then also, like, I'm on vacation technically right now. So, I don't know. When I started at the register and got to know the sports department and how things ran a little bit, there was a little bit of a clash between the sort of old and the new because the guys who'd been there a long time, they were used to a sort of a schedule where they would work every day for eight or nine months, just every day, brutal schedule, grueling, awful,

horrible, life-ruining. And then they would comp like three and a half months straight. They would just walk out the door on the last day of the season and never come back until camp. And the editors at the time, who hadn't quite been there as long, they were like, dude, this is like, it doesn't stop. We got to keep you out here. We got rumors to report. We got trades happening and press conferences and, you know, charity bowling tournaments. We need you. We need you all year round. And by the time I left it, it still hadn't really been resolved. It was just basically people seething at each other. What's your schedule like? Do you get out of, do they comp you?

Do they give you more time off during the season to allow for that? I mean, I assume you're going to be working pretty hard for many days over the next few months, at least. I don't know. I mean, I don't really work hard during the off season. It's all just sort of faking it and confirming Ken Rosenbaum's news, isn't it? Yeah, like I think I'm off this week. I'm back on after Thanksgiving,

and then I'm on probably from, like, the winter meetings to the Super Bowl, and then I'll probably be kind of off from the Super Bowl to, like... No, no, no, excuse me. The winter meetings till Christmas, and then I'll be off from Christmas to the Super Bowl. Thereabouts, probably. But then, like, you know, when winter meetings till Christmas, and then I'll be off from Christmas to the Super Bowl, thereabouts, probably.

But then, like, you know, when they trade Puig or whatever, I'll come and write it, or, you know, you know what I mean? Like, it's kind of like hard weeks. Yeah, yeah, for Ryan Braun, you heard it here first. Like, it's like there's weeks where it's, like, off, off, and then it's, like, sort of, you don't have to write. Like, so, like, right now I'm, like, off. So, like, the Dodgers traded Howie Kendrick, and, like, I don't have to write. So right now I'm like off. So the Dodgers traded Howie Kendrick, and I didn't write about it.

But I'm sure there will come a time probably in January where I'm not really responsible for writing a story that day, but if news happens, I'll go after it, I guess. Or if I come across news in my hyper-sleuthing off-season reporting that I do, I'll write it. Uh, well we, um, we brought you here for a particular off season topic. I have a tradition of reading baseball books in the off season and, uh, for the most part, never reading baseball books during the regular season unless forced to. Uh, and so I, uh, like I'm gearing up,

like I'm, I'm totally ready. Like I'm taking three baseball books up to my parents' house this weekend. I am ready to go. And I thought that we, since we get asked from time to time, what our favorite baseball books are. And since Andy always wanted to do a book club with me, let's talk about it. We'll talk about it. We'll talk about it. We'll talk about it. I think that I think we're, we're getting there way. Let's talk about it. We'll talk about it. We'll talk about it. We'll talk about it. I think we're getting there, but we'll talk about it, okay? Okay. We're going to do a draft.

We're going to do a quick draft with Ben and Andy and myself in which we each draft a favorite baseball book. We're going to do three rounds each. I don't know if it has to be your three favorites. Mine are not going to be my three favorites, but there are three books that I think that I would like people to read and that either some combination of not everybody has read it or at least not a ton of people have read it. So anyway, we all have our own, I think, ways of determining which three we're going to pick, but that's what we're going to do.

So I don't think Ben really had my, Ben had almost no preparation for this. Andy's been preparing his whole life. So I expect Andy will win the draft. John, John Chenier will keep score and we're ready to go. So Andy, Andy, since you're the guest, why don't you lead us off? Okay. Yeah. My, my first pick is a book that came out last decade. I'm not exactly sure. I think maybe 2004, 2005. It's called The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty. It's by a little-known writer for ESPN named Buster Olney.

I like that book. It's like one of my five favorite books, I think. Wait, of any topic? You like it more than the Dark Tower series? Dude, the Dark Tower is a bit much for me. Now, do I like it more than The Stand? That I don't know. I think The Stand is ahead of it. The Fight by Norman Mailer is ahead of it. Friday Night Lights is ahead of it. And What It Takes is ahead of it. So it's either fourth or fifth. What It Takes is the political one? is ahead of it and uh what it takes is ahead of it so it's either fourth or fifth what it takes is the uh what it takes is the political the one the the is that the richard ben kramer book yeah no one's ever finished before we go on in this but can we maybe we should uh calibrate every

ourselves for everybody we now know andy's four favorite books ben what are your four favorite books i don't know i mean, Andy might have just named one. The Stand might be on my list too. So you're definitely the low man on The Stand in this trio. But I don't know. I don't have like a tier in my head really. I never bothered to think about it. So certainly not going to do it right now.

Okay. to think about it. So certainly not going to do it right now. Okay. But I don't think there would be a baseball book in the group. You don't think there would be? Yeah, I don't think that there would be a baseball book in mine either. I think mine would probably be the Electric Kool-Aid Ac lonesome dove uh the house of mirth and maybe mrs frisbee and the rats of nim wait what is the house of mirth uh it's uh edith wharton it's a

a comedy about social manners oh interesting might put great expectations in there like that one yeah okay all right andy tell me about buster only and joe tory book five of uh harry potter book six actually yeah i would say so uh last night of the yankee dynasty um if you haven't read it it's kind of like the same sort of structure as uh nine innings by dan okrent which is a kind of the first i think of, of the genre to do like each inning is like a separate chapter almost. Brother, I'm going to tear that myth apart in a little bit. Woo! This is exciting. But yeah, it's basically the story of the late 90s Yankees told through kind of the device of Game 7 of the 2001 playoffs,

you know, when it was Curt Schilling against Roger Clemens in Arizona. And just Buster was on the beat at the time for the New York Times, and his level of detail in this book is somewhat astonishing, just the amount of anecdotes and things that come across that it's just like it's really a great it's just a fantastic uh sort of book and and you learned so you learned so much about like not just the yankees but how like the sport functioned it's kind of like you know you learn really how the you know the sport functioned in the 90s heading into the early 2000s the factors around the the league and around sort of the American League East

that allowed the Yankees to build a dynasty, kind of how Stick Michael was sort of able to find all these players, you know, and you just, you learn so much on such like a, like almost a molecular level about these guys' personalities that it's just really incredible. And I really love it.

And it's one of those books that people talk about, like, you know, season on the brink or whatever as sort of being like sort of the classic of this type of thing. And I just think this is like so much better and I wish more people read it. It's great. Yeah, I read it.

That was kind of my childhood team. So I read it because of that. And it's also a really good book. I had that on my list too. I don't know that I would have drafted it And it's also a really good book. I had that on my list too. I don't know that I would have drafted it, but it's a really good one. I was going to let you go next, Ben, but I want to segue to a more natural segue, I think. My first pick is Nine Innings by Daniel Okrent. And I, this is like Andy says, this is a book that basically takes random game in June,

in the middle of June between the Orioles and the Brewers. Two pretty good teams, but this was not a game that you would have picked out as a classic in advance or anything. And it didn't turn out to be a classic. And Daniel Okrent basically reported this game out for what seems to be many months before and after. So he has basically details about all these players and about the teams and about the style of play and about the people who put it together, all weaved in sort of semi-seamlessly with the action. And so I'm reading this morning, I read the Roger Kahn review of it in the New York Times that ran at the time in 1985. And this is a, I mean, this is a classic. We would agree that this book is generally held up as a classic

right now, right? Roger Kahn hated it Just crushes it And he actually says that So just to your point Andy He starts this with The idea of setting a book within a single baseball game Goes back at least to 1955 when Arnold Hano Published a splendid since neglected

Piece of reporting called A Day in the Bleachers He had the good sense to pick a World Series Game between the Giants and the Indians Which provides provides a framework of great tension. And then Roger Cohn goes on to basically blast Daniel Okrent for picking a game that didn't matter enough, for basically becoming too obsessed with detail, which I have read many, many bad pieces of journalism where the reporter bows at the altar of detail without necessarily caring whether the detail is significant. And so I sort of get the feeling. He also complains that he is trying too hard with his vocabulary, that it feels like basically an exercise in looking

things up in a thesaurus. And it just was not, it did not describe the book that I remember. But I sort of feel like this is a case where the stakes of the game being relatively low really does matter if you're reading it at the time. If you're asked in 1985 to devote 300 pages to a game that didn't matter, players who were fairly generic, you might find it very interesting and informative, but I could also see why it might be sort of a slog. But the further away you get from it and the more that these players become not actual players that you know or care about or have heard of, but become sort of archetypes of the sport, the more effective it is.

So in a way, it's the same frame as the only book, but a really very different experience because these are not players that you know or naturally care about. And so if I could, I would like to just read a quick passage that I think gives you a sense of how he does this. At one point, he's describing the pitcher, his fellow named McClure, pitching to a batter named Dempsey with his catcher Charlie Moore behind the plate so he began with a curve for a strike and followed that with a slider just low for ball one a fastball next was perfectly planned for the off-balance Dempsey it came in across the outside edge of the plate conventional misnomer corner is particularly

inapt for a straight fastball and Dempsey fouled it back. Ball two was a slider low, and then Dempsey fouled off another curve into the seats along the first baseline where Charlie Moore, McClure's catcher, dove into the lap of a fan in vain pursuit of the ball. Moore was in a game populated by not a few boars and juveniles, a gracious man. He was nobly so whenever he committed one of the blunders that seemed to punctuate his career. Frequently, his mental lapses had cost Milwaukee victories. Two years before, in a critical game against New York in the 11th inning, Moore took a throw from an infielder and stepped on home, thinking he had made a forced play when none was

in effect and a tag was necessary. This blunder cost Milwaukee the game, yet Moore later stood stoically by his locker, waiting for the last reporter from the dinkiest paper to ask the predictable question for the 50th time. He was equally gracious the time he was playing in the outfield and a ball was hit over his head. Moore, still a catcher in overdrive, threw off his cap before chasing after it.

And in 1980, Moore was actually caught in a rundown between first base and the Milwaukee dugout as a result of a sequence of events that defy description. Yet Moore never shrank from trying, I italicized, trying to explain to credulous writers what it was that found him again and again in such peculiar circumstances. On June 10th, 1982, having failed to capture Rick Dempsey's pop foul as it veered into the box seats, Charlie Moore pulled himself

out of the fan's lap, touched the man's shoulder, apologized, asked about his health, and returned to his position. The count on Dempsey was two and two. And the idea of reporting out a pop-up into the stands

to that detail is really just an amazing i i would say an amazing feat of imagination if nothing else and there really is a lot in this book that you will learn about baseball i feel like in a certain way a lot of roger angels writing at the time too feels like it was sort of like a golden age of of smart writers telling you how baseball is played. There wasn't so much about the drama of the games or anything like that. And it wasn't so much about statistical analysis or so on. It was really about talking to the coaches, the players, and so on, and really explaining how the game is played on a very minute level.

And there's a lot there that I think is still really interesting and useful. Can I make a couple points yeah real quick best part of nine innings is the random moment when uh bud steeling strolls into the press box and you remember holy shit bud steeling owns this team point number two roger khan is awesome but he's like a supremo hardo um like i don't know if you guys have ever read october men his book about like the uh what would it be like the bronx is burning era yankees but like a not insignificant amount of that book is dedicated to like settling old scores with murray chaffs which i guess i should reread now which would probably be more interesting now that i have worked in new york journalism before

and then three um do you think and not to just uh keep ben from ever talking in this podcast but um based on what i i guess i'd be curious of what you guys think you know based on what you were saying about how nine innings feels timeless um because we're sort of removed from it do you think like in five years uh three nights in August will seem less crazy? Well, it won't to us, but it would to somebody who's graduating college right now and reads it in five years probably. Yeah, maybe not to Diamondbacks fans who've just gotten to know Tony La Russa from his time with that team. They live two years in last place. Oh, boy.

Me? Yeah, you. Okay. I think I'll take Baseball Between the Numbers, which I think is my favorite of the stat genre of books. And I don't even know how well it holds up a decade on, but just flipping through the index of the table of contents, more than half of that book is written by people who now are running major league stat departments. And of the remaining half, a lot of it is Nate Silver and a lot of it is really excellent,

more literary writers like Stephen Goldman and Joda Carey and Dane Perry and Neil deMoss, who's excellent. There is no bad writer in this book. There is no like even average writer. There's no weak link in this book. Every chapter is written by someone who is great. And at the time, at least, a lot of the research was very cutting edge and groundbreaking. And it's such an incredible diversity of topics. And this book probably had more to do with my focusing on baseball and writing about baseball than any other one book. So I owe it for that. And, you know, the quality of the stats and the research is great.

And the writing is, of course, very good because all of these writers are really good. So I think it's about the best sort of sabermetric style book you could possibly have. And I think it's tough to replicate. Of course, there's a sequel to it that I contributed to and it came out much later. And by then, it was really hard to do a baseball between the numbers book. It was like really hard there was sort of a brain drain from Baseball Between the Numbers that kind of seeped over into every subsequent book. But I think it's just the best. It's just the best you can do with this sort of book. That was like 2007 or six? Six, yeah.

Six, yeah. That really, I think an you're right that book is amazing and anytime somebody emails us and asks like what's a good book for getting into to stats or getting into whatever i usually reply with like three and then like i just count to 10 and then here comes ben replying also baseball yeah so but i think uh maybe an aspect of that that uh besides the fact that these are just like really genius people who are all working together in this um like like uh you know hot box of intelligence is that the market or whatever for baseball perspectives that point was like super peak because yeah a ton of people were reading this stuff because moneyball had come out because the red sox had won the world series because this was very trendy and everybody was talking about it

and yet there really was very little that you could you know start your day with uh as far as baseball writing goes you know you you still mostly had nair writing at espPN three days a week or two days a week and BP and a little bit of stuff at hardball times. And then everything else was still kind of like either message board or like, you know, people commenting at like, you know, baseball primer or something like things that were like really internal and sort of isolated from the mass audience. And BP, my take on BP at the time, because I was one of the sort of mass of people who were looking for this stuff, is just that the company was just kind of big.

I think that Baseball Perspectives is, I always think of it in some ways as being like Saturday Night Live, where everybody is always complaining about how the season before was better because they went on to make movies and it's just constantly creating this new churn of awesome people who five years from now are going to be like, oh, wow, that's right, he was at BP. So I don't think there's a general decline or anything like that. I'm just saying that the market was super rich for them right then.

And it's not just the low-hanging fruit of research. It's like the low-hanging fruit of the market. And like the work that came out of the site at that point and also the books that came out of the site at that point were really, really good. I mean, that is definitely one of multiple golden ages, I think, for the company. And it was a really good time stats-wise because there were a lot of really interesting questions good. I mean, that is definitely one of multiple golden ages, I think, for the company.

And it was a really good time stats wise, because there were a lot of really interesting questions that you could still answer without them being old hat. I mean, now there are a lot of topics that are covered in that book that you couldn't really cover now because they were covered in Baseball Between the Numbers and many other places. And at the time, they were original. And it was like just on the verge of PitchFX. PitchFX was not around yet. So you were using like play-by-play stats. And so I think it's accessible. You know, there are people who maybe don't want to dig too deep, but Baseball Between

the Numbers is like just deep enough. And it's just a great introduction. And I love it. I'd like to revisit it and it's just a great introduction and and i love it i'd like to revisit it and see how much of it is wrong now but uh it's great regardless all right andy round two yeah i probably would have endorsed that book on november 7th let's see what do we got number two uh number two for me is uh the lords of by John Eliar, which is basically a story. It came out in the 90s, like a historical look at the roots of collusion in Major League Baseball. And it's kind of essential, I think, to understanding the business of baseball, understanding kind of how the union was formed, Marvin Miller's influence,

you know, the factors that led to, you know, the strike in the 90s, or I mean, there was tons of strikes, actually, but just kind of a history of labor strife in Major League Baseball. And I mean, collusion was crazy. The whole thing is, it just sounds like completely insane in retrospect, but it was a real thing. And it didn't happen like in the 40s. It happened in the 80s, which doesn't really seem possible. And so it's, you know, it's interesting to read for sure. And it's just, if you like, I think, from my perspective, like, you know, working in journalism, and kind of trying to understand the financial aspects of some of these things, and why they're important, I think it's kind of essential.

I'm glad you recommended it. I have not read it. And it's there, I think, a few books that I have on my shelf, or that I've been planning to read, or that sometimes I think eventually I'll read that are about basically business issues or industry issues. And I always look at them and think that's got to be outdated by now. And so I never know whether I should actually read it because the finances of 2016 are so different than, you know, 1990, whatever, 1987. It's also not the sort of topic that you glance at the cover and think, oh, well, this is going to be a yarn.

So the fact that you're endorsing it tells me that both of those concerns are not going to apply here. Well, I think it's, you know, like we always talk about how baseball has like a much stronger union than most of the other sports. I don't know if we always talk about that, but that's generally believed to be accurate that baseball has the strongest union of all the sports leagues, and this is kind of the history of how they became that way, and Helyar is a really good writer. I believe he worked at the Wall

Street Journal for a long time. He may still work there, but he co-wrote Barbarians at the Gate, that book in the 80s about kind of the takeover of R.J. Nabisco with Brian Burroughs, and so he's like, he's a really talented business writer and makes it entertaining.

It's not like a great book in terms of literary descriptions of baseball per se, but it's definitely not dry. Yeah. All right, that's good. Okay, sounds good. I read a book, this is not my endorsement, but I read a book. This is not my endorsement, but I read a book that about a year ago called Baseball's Power Shift by Krister Swanson. And

it's all about the union over the course of a century. And I would just generally recommend that. It is not my pick here, but I want to recommend it just because I imagine there's a book that very few people know exists and that I was riveted by. All right. I'm going to pick with my second pick a book that came out not long ago, 2014, 15, 14, I think 14, by Scott Simkus called Outsider Baseball and subtitled The Weird World of Hardball on the Fringe, 1876 to 1950. And to a little tiny degree, this was a little bit of a book that made me excited to write our book. It is all about independently baseball and fringe baseball and lower league baseball and aspiring major leagues that didn't become major leagues from the first century,

more or less of the game's professional history. And I will tell you why I love it in a second. But one of my kind of less popular baseball book opinions is that I don't really like The Glory of Their Times all that much. I like it fine. It is a book that I think a lot of my friends think is the greatest baseball book ever. And I feel a bit sad that I don't get quite as much joy out of it as I'm supposed to. But Gloria, There are Times is basically a book that is an oral history of early Major League Baseball. And it's interesting and

there's good stories, but I don't think early Major League Baseball itself counts as Major League Baseball. I think it's a farce masquerading as, as major league baseball. Like I don't really take it that seriously. And so if I'm going to read about that era, I actually really prefer to read about the super weird. And this book, outsider baseball is like about the super weird. It is like really a great tour through these leagues that you can hardly believe exist of, you know, men playing in dresses and things of that sort, but also of leagues that were very aspirational and really like we're trying to get to the same level as the major leagues and that were continually coming up short because of their own incompetence and lack of professionalism.

And there's also within it, there's this sort of through line of Scott Simkus trying to basically solve the mystery of how all these leagues compare to each other in terms of quality and whether any of these leagues were really as good as the major leagues, how close they were, how do you translate stats? What do you do if you know that a guy, you know, had certain numbers in 23 games of barnstorming in, you know, 1908. So he takes this on as like this analytic mystery that I found very enjoyable. I think that there are, if you're not really into writing analytical baseball pieces, that part is sort of superfluous and takes you out of the narrative a little bit, but it's really easy to skip. It's usually just at the end of the chapter.

He does a little math. But for me, it was great. It was like two separate books in one. And I just loved it. I took a lot from it and remembered it and remember being sad it was finished. Yeah, I've been meaning to read that for a while because I know you liked it a lot, but I haven't gotten around to it yet. It sounds good though. All right, I'm going to take Vekas in Wreck, which I think is probably the best baseball book I've ever read.

I read it in 2012 and just, I think I got like four articles out of it as I was reading it, I think I got like four articles out of it as I was reading it because just like everything in it seemed to apply to something in 2012 baseball. And it was written in the early 60s. So it's been around for a while and it just the writing is really fresh. I mean, this is pre-Ball 4 and yet it's just a very unvarnished look at the game. And it's co-written with Ed Lynn, the sports writer. And it's just, I guess the main takeaway is that you want to be Bill Beck's best friend as you read it, and you're really, really sad that you can't be Bill Beck's best friend because he seems like just the greatest company and the smartest guy and the most original thinker.

And there are tons of great stories spanning his whole family's long history in baseball. Of course, the crazy promotions and everything that he had done up to that point. But also he just takes you behind all of the personnel decisions and the business side of the game you learn a lot about. And he's just, you know, a very out of the box sort of thinker. And so even though this was written a long time ago, he seems like he would

have adapted perfectly to baseball at any point. If he had come along later, he would have been the first to embrace stats or whatever. He would have been at the forefront of whatever movement happened because he was just incredibly creative like that. And it's just a fun read. And there's like a lot of baseball wisdom in there, timeless baseball lessons. wisdom in there, timeless baseball lessons. So I think it's probably the most fun I've had reading a baseball book and maybe the most I've learned and none of it feels out of date. So go read Becca's in Wreck. I made a big mistake early in my life. I was at a used book sale and there was a copy of it for a quarter and so I bought it. And so it has been the copy that I've had on my bookshelf all this time.

And it is a terrible copy. It's gross. It's falling apart. It doesn't seem like it would hold together very well. And for that reason, I never choose to read it. And if I had just not bought that, I would have bought a good copy years ago, and I would have read it, and I'd be very happy. I loved the piece that you wrote about reading it in 2012. And you should link to that on the Facebook page because that was, that is also

a very good read. Uh, but I, uh, I think I even bought a new, a better copy of the sequel or like his followup book. And I'll probably end up reading that one first because it's just such a nicer bound copy i gotta throw it away in fact hang on you should put this on your um patreon uh get your supporters to buy sam buy sam a new copy let him spend the five dollars for a used copy on amazon.com yeah he just threw it out that sounded like a book going into a garbage can all right okay tomorrow tonight or tomorrow morning i'm going to order a copy of it i no longer own the book and i will read it as soon as it shows up okay oh man good times okay uh my last pick is season ticket by roger angel uh it is 1988 collection it spans from i want to say yeah 83 to uh 87 and so you know those are some and so basically like the way roger angel

collections work it takes just kind of all his stories about baseball from you know the new yorker during the period of years he's got there was a bunch there was the summer game came out i think in like 70 uh five seasons came out in 75 uh late innings came out i want to say like i don't know like five years after that anyway they all span about five years they're all great season ticket is my favorite uh because it contains um i think i think it it barely beats out uh late innings late innings has uh his profile of bob gibson uh distance which is probably my favorite roger angel story but this one has his profile of dan kiesenberry uh it's also got uh this entire essay about uh the pittsburgh cocaine trials which were insane you know it talks about the 85 Mets, the 86 World Series.

I think his sort of essay on the 86 World Series, Not So Boston, is probably, you know, for obvious reasons, is incredible to read in retrospect. So yeah, there's just, I mean, Angel is just such an enjoyable writer. He's probably the biggest, I mean, he's the first writer I remember reading and really giving a shit about baseball. I played football when I was a kid and, um,

baseball just seemed like a dumb sort of thing for people who couldn't play football. And, uh, but I also really liked reading and stuff. And so, um, you know, once I started reading Roger Angel is when I sort of was, became somewhat interested in the sport of baseball. So, uh, yeah, and this is his favorite collection. I try and read one of his collections at some point every year. I read the late innings this year, but I'll probably take another stand-up season ticket next year.

Yeah, the only reason why I didn't take an angel book with an earlier pick is that I wasn't sure which one to take. I had to have to go back and reread them to figure out which one was best and so i just felt like i couldn't take any of them but but yeah i mean that's that's a great page there's also there's a great one in uh late innings where he uh it's like the first essay i want to say is when he's um talking about sort of how outrageous the contracts have gotten and uh and i remember reading it i think uh yeah a couple couple months ago and thinking uh you know like wow like george brett had a five year six million dollar deal and just reading all these things and i said man all these guys make more money than sal

perez yeah it's a long setup there's also the collection uh what it? Game Time? The one from like 2004-ish And it's It's like a career-spanning one Right, right He also did a book with David Cohn I read that Yeah, I have not read that book I read that one

Yeah, well, I read that one Yeah, that's a good one I remember enjoying that one Yeah, they're good together It's a little bit stretched, I think, as a topic I think, well, isn't it He wanted to do like a year in the life With David Cohn, and I think it was the year

That Cohn went to the Red Sox And was like absolute trash And so it didn't exactly Work out, I guess, but you know It's Roger Angel writing about David Cohn It's not bad Yeah, it's good I took about David Cohen. It's not bad. Yeah. It's good. I took a lot of notes from that book.

Alright, my last pick is Prophet of the Sandlots by Mark Weingartner. Have either of you read this? No. So this might be my favorite baseball book. Dollar Sign on the Muscle might be my favorite baseball book. This one is, in a sort of sense,

it's kind of a good companion book because it is also about scouts and particularly one single scout. And they came out within a decade of each other. And so they're actually kind of fun to read one after the other. I think I like this one more, which is kind of amazing based on how much I like Dollar Sign and the Muscle. They're very different despite being about scouts. I sort of always feel like Dollar Sign on the Muscle is the book about scouting that was written for stat heads. And Prophet of the Sandlots is kind of the book about scouting that was written for scouts. And so Mark Weingartner is a novelist now.

And I believe like a creative writing teacher in an MFA program or something like this. This is his only baseball book, I believe might even be his only nonfiction book. He was 27 ish. And he somehow he hooked up with this guy, this scout, Tony Lucadello, who at the time was in his mid seventies.s and is one of the names that you sometimes hear or that is sometimes offered as the greatest scout who ever lived. He had signed dozens of players. He signed Mike Schmidt. He signed Fergie Jenkins.

And he was still going for the Phillies in the late 80s. And so this 27-year-old writer guy, probably a grad student or something at the time, latches onto him and says, hey, can I just follow you around? Can I just ride with you for a while? And they end up riding together for a really long time, for a year or something. And he learns everything there is to know about scouting from this guy who's going around to these tiny schools,

tiny junior colleges and also big schools and trying to keep going. And it is, you know that movie spellbound about the spelling bee no really seriously what are you talking about how do you not know them how do you not know spellbound it was like super twee documentary classic yeah like maybe seven eight years ago it was a big old Not all of us just sit around on Netflix all day, man. Anyway, so Spellbound is a documentary about the Spelling Bee, and they follow like eight kids.

And at the end of the documentary, like one of the kids they found that they were following like won it, I think, or was in the final. And there's, I don't know, there's like 300 people in the spelling bee and they only followed eight of them. And you're like, what, how, what are the odds that you would get the guy who won or the girl who won? It's like amazing luck. Or did you just actually follow all of them and you just didn't show us or what? And you're trying to figure out like how they reverse engineered the results of the spelling bee so that on day one of practice, they knew who to be with. Anyway, this book sort of feels like that at the end. The ending, the final chapter is just

incredible and shocking. It's an amazing book all the way through. Every page is great. It's very melancholy. It's much less, well, it's not just a story about scouting like dollar sign on the muscle, but it is really a deep story about this one scout. It's a story about a lot of really kind of dark sort of aspects of, you know, life. And at the end of it, you're like, wait a minute. Like this is, how did he know that this was the scout to follow to write one of the greatest baseball books ever? Anyway, I love this book. I think it's an incredible book about baseball. You see the reflection of every aspect of the game in this guy. So you, you see, you know,

what this sport means to everybody from GMs to junior college coaches to players in these very brief glimpses through his eyes. And then you see a lot about him. I can't say enough about it. I think it's a masterpiece. I will say one thing. Under no circumstances should you read the foreword before you read it. The foreword is by Dan Okrent. And you're going to go, oh, he's good too. I want to read this. Don't read it. Don't even read one sentence. You just have to flip past it. forward is by Dan Okrent and you're gonna go oh he's he's good too I want to read this don't read it don't even read one sentence you just have to flip past it it is a book killer to read the forward go back and read it afterward just read this book it is a masterpiece I can't recommend it enough is it spoilers in the word yeah it is definitely like spoilers yeah yeah it's spoilers what's the name of the book again it's called

prophet of the sandlots okay all right well i don't even know what to take now i was uh i was gonna take either dollar sign or a roger angel book if they were still on the board and uh they're not so i guess i will take the numbers game. I like the numbers game a lot. In fact, I would probably, if you were to send us that email about how you learn about baseball stats or how you get into baseball stats, that's probably the number one place to start. Not so much for the actual stats and the research and the sabermetrics and all of that, but just the history of baseball stats, which goes back as long as the history of baseball. And it's by Alan Schwartz, who's a really good reporter. And it's not even the first book that comes up if you search for the numbers game on Amazon. There are many books named in numbers game, so do the one with baseball on the cover.

And it goes back to the very beginning, Henry Chadwick and how he decided what stats to keep. And it goes all the way up through Bill James or probably after Bill James. It came out, I think, the year after Moneyball. informative and readable summary of the history of everyone who has ever cared about baseball stats and tried to preserve them and shaped the way that we track them today. So it won't teach you how to be a sabermetrician or anything, but it's almost more valuable than that just so that you know what came before and how long these efforts have been going on and what all the steps have been throughout the decades. So really good book. As I recall that and also Dollar Sign on the Muscle, I think, correct me if I'm wrong about Numbers Game,

but I think both of those books are also kind of bank shot biographies of Branch Rickey, if you want to read good biography of Branch Rickey. Yeah. of bank shot biographies of branch ricky if you want to read good biography of branch ricky yeah um and uh there i i have i have not read a good branch ricky biography i don't know if there is a good one and i just have missed it or if there isn't a great one but there is a lot of good stuff about branch ricky if you pick up pretty much any baseball book about the middle of the century yeah and by the way if you're new to the podcast or new-ish to the podcast, we did a dollar sign on the muscle episode about three years ago, episode 324. And we had the author on, Kevin Corain, because the book had just been re-released by BP,

which you can buy it on Amazon and you should. So you can go back and listen to that if you weren't with us then. I think you can also probably go find the story I wrote for Sports on Earth about that book. Oh, that's right. You went to Delaware? Oh, because you live in Philly. I was living in Jersey then, yeah. So I went to Delaware to talk to Kevin Curry.

He was great, really nice guy. And I enjoyed the book. I just did some Googling and found out out how uh sam's book ended and uh holy shit yeah you guys should read that book wait what wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait i just told you he just spoiled it i just told you not to anything i just said i just said read it but for you spoiled it for yourself i'm bad at I mean, this, I guess, is a flaw in my personality. I don't really like surprises. Yeah.

So, like, if I'm watching a show or something like that, like, I'll just read all the Wikipedia summaries to find out what happens, I guess, and then watch it. Or sometimes read along. And, yeah, I don't know. I just sometimes, because I want to yeah, I don't know. I just sometimes, because I want to know what happens, you know? And so it takes some time to watch it. So yeah, no, I'm going to go read that book. I'm really excited to read it.

I want to see how it gets to that place. I do the opposite. I don't want to start new shows. I don't want to have to watch shows. Once I start a show or once I'm watching a show, it just takes over, you know, I don't work until it's done. And so I will frequently read all the plot summaries just so that I don't watch it.

As soon as I get the spoilers, then I go, okay, now I know how it ends and I leave it. That makes sense. So I read a lot. I read a lot of TV shows summaries that I never see an episode of. It's like a defense. It's like a vaccination.

I don't like recommending baseball books, by the way, because I feel like people expect me to have read more of them than I actually have. I feel like since I write about baseball and wrote half a baseball book, I should have read more baseball books and I should have like an encyclopedic knowledge of baseball books. And often the person who's asking might have no more baseball books than I do. Like I've read, I guess like the most concentrated period of baseball book reading in my life was probably like eighth grade or so. Cause my homeroom teacher, Mr. Ryan had his whole classroom was full of baseball books. Just every shelf was covered in baseball

books. And so I would just constantly read them. them and it was like all I read at the time was baseball books so I read you know all the like classic like baseball in 41 and the boys of summer in October 64 and kind of all of those sort of narrative driven season books and now I don't really remember them I have vague impressions of how I like them and I remember the names in the stories and stuff, but I couldn't really tell you in detail how good the books were. So a lot of my baseball book reading is kind of lost to memory, at least in the specifics, and I don't read them as much now. So if you're looking for more and some less obvious ones, there is a thread in our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild. Like every week someone will

ask, what are some good baseball books? Instead of searching for like the 50 previous threads started with the same question and all of them have like a hundred comment responses. So you can just, you know, find a reading list for the rest of your life just by searching in that group if you're interested. Ben does have, by the way, an encyclopedic knowledge of every baseball article that's been written on the internet in the last seven years. That's true. That's what I've been doing instead of reading baseball books.

Right. Yeah. Reading smaller books. Do you have any non-baseball books to recommend, Ben? I always blank when someone just asks me for a book. There are so many of them. How am I supposed to pick one? I'm reading Console Wars right now, which is about the Nintendo Sega console war in the late 80s when Nintendo was dominant with the NES and Sega tried to take over the market with the Genesis. It it's pretty good. Pretty interesting.

What are you reading, Andy? I'm reading the invisible bridge by Rick Pearlstein. It's kind of a history of the American conservative movement from 73 to 76. I just started it today. I finished today, black flags by Joby Warwick, his book about ISIS. So, you know, really optimistic stuff. Trying to just ease into the winter, you know, just learn about the world. When I was trying to come up with my fourth favorite book, it was between Mrs. Frisbee and Nixonland. It was actually between those. I've never, I don't know if I've ever been more

engulfed in a nonfiction book than I was by Nixonland. And I hated Invisible Bridge. I probably read 150 pages and then, and then just skimmed like mad after that. What, I mean, because it's, it seems, I mean, I'm like 15 pages in, it seems the same. What's the issue? It just felt like, it felt very, much more repetitive. And it felt a lot more kind of like just disconnected data dump of like headlines from each week. And I'm almost afraid to revisit Nixonland because I'm worried that it's that it actually was the same. Yeah, Nixonland definitely took some work, but I very much enjoyed it. And I think because Prostein kind of framed this book as almost like, you know, why the concept of American exceptionalism won out when it probably shouldn't have in the 70s. We watched at all times. We went back to being a nation where our leaders should be trusted at all times. So I thought that was particularly intriguing given stuff going on out there in the world.

So, yeah, I don't know. I'm curious to see how it goes. I imagine it's going to take a little while. I enjoyed Nixonland, but I also just I'm a big Nixon guy. I very much enjoy reading about Nixon. Yeah, me too i much prefer reading about the 60s than the 70s and i much prefer reading about nixon than almost anybody else my we're a nixon family not not like pro nixon but like like we go to the nixon museum and like we really just like that like that very small sliver of american history is my favorite era i think yeah

nixon's my second favorite movie uh the movie really how great is that movie yeah that movie is great it's like one of the funniest movies ever made yeah what about uh the kirsten dunst michelle stewart vehicle dick was that did you like that with dan hediedaya as Nixon? I don't know that I've seen Dick. Alright guys. That's it. That's the first annual Effectively Wild Baseball

Book Club. Alright. Have a good holidays. Alright, so that is it for today. Speaking of baseball books, while we were recording this episode, we got an email from our editor that our baseball book, the only rules it has to work, our wild experiment building a new kind of baseball team is getting a third printing. So a bunch more copies are coming out for the holidays. They'll have a few corrections incorporated into them, which means, of course, that you should all go rebuy the book. And if you do want to buy it,

there is an Amazon Lightning deal on the book this Sunday, November 27th at 7.15 p.m. Eastern. I don't know exactly what the Lightning deal is, but it's some sort of sale. So set a reminder if you want the book. You can probably get it cheap cheap then Or if you want to get it for someone for Christmas You can do that then too And of course the website for the book is Theonlyruleisithastowork.com You can join our Facebook group at Facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild

And you can rate and review and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes Get the discounted price of $30 on a one-year subscription to the Play Index By going to baseballreference.com and using the coupon code BP. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. Five listeners who have done so already. Troy Clowder, Niels, Matt Richards, Josh Gosser, and Doug Gale. Thank you. I have a new episode of the Ringer MLB show up.

Michael Bauman and I talked to Jay Jaffe about the Hall of Fame. And we also talked to the Astros' Alex Bregman about his first year in the big leagues. And the video game podcast I'm doing with Jason Concepcion is still churning out episodes, usually weekly, two this week. If you're interested in checking that out, you can find it on the Channel 33 feed. If you want to contact me and Sam, you can email us at podcast at baseballperspectives.com or message us through Patreon. We hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving.

If you're traveling, we hope you stay safe and we will talk to you soon. One of the things that me and my friend Barry Zeruga like to talk about is the idea that the worst possible thing a book could ever do is like if it's you on the cover holding baseball. That's what the cover of your guys' book should have been. It should have been Sam wearing the outfit he wore every day and Ben wearing a catcher's mask or something. That would have been good. One of us would be making a face and then the other would have his arm around the one making a face

and be looking down. And I'm not sure which should be making the face. I guess I should be making the face i guess i i guess i should be making the face probably like a big like laughter face like the kind of things like regional covers east coast and west coast why'd you leave silicon valley to run the padres yeah well it wasn't to stand around on a day it wasn't supposed to rain and waste money and waste money. No, seriously. Why baseball?

Uh, you know, it was the math, the patterns. I learned that if you study the data long enough, it's like you can predict the future. So you came here to be a fortune teller? Yeah, I've done it right for myself. For a guy from Queens? Yeah, well, look, I needed something to believe in, something that I could predict,

something that'll let me know I was gonna get out of there. And sabermetrics, math, did that for me. Look, I know what you're trying to do here. You're trying to keep me out of the umpire's room. It's not gonna work. Seems to be so far.