Archive for Readings

Our fearless, not feckless, leader here at NotG recently debuted a series in which he will annotate readings that are germane to the sport of baseball. Judging from the first post, this will be fun introduction to many different intriguing texts.

But on AmazinAvenue, James Kannengeiser has taken an approach to a text that is more comprehensive. While Cistulli will introduce us lightly to many texts – and allow us to decide if we will continue the study on our own – Kannengeiser is discussing one text. He has approached his text, the inimitable Moneyball by Michael Lewis, in an in-depth manner, going chapter by chapter with discussion questions. Since the site is dedicated to a sabremetric approach to the same team that just hired Sandy Alderson, a major character in the book, it’s a convergence of interest and timing that makes a whole lot of sense.

If you will, a few choice moments from his series so far:

From Chapter Four’s discussion questions:

5. Bill James’s wife says in Chapter Four that if she knew the extent of Bill’s baseball obsession when they started dating, their relationship might not have gotten very far. Without getting too specific, has baseball (or sports in general) obsession interfered with a close relationship? Has it aided a relationship?

My wife wants a word with you, James. From Chapter Three’s questions:

2. Is Jeff Francoeur the present day version of 1980s Billy Beane? Michael Lewis writes in Chapter Three:

“He [Billy] didn’t have a baseball mentality,” said Jeff Bittiger. “He was more like a basketball or a football player. Emotions were always such a big part of whatever he did.”

Frenchy isn’t an unhinged buffet table flipper like Billy seemed to be (although Frenchy did bash a water cooler after a game in 2009). Still, I think there is a legitimate comparison — physically gifted player; beloved by scouts; has The Good Face; can’t hit a lick.

That’s a strange parallel for a player so derided by the sabr-crowd. Then a hard-hitting question from Chapter Two:

4. The men in the A’s draft room are depicted packing lips full of chewing tobacco. Have you ever “packed a lip”? What did you think? Awesome or gross?

Good stuff, and it’s led to some great repartee in the comments sections.

It’s worth wondering if this approach would work here. In order to take advantage of the same confluence of interest and timing, it would have to be a book that was relevant to all of us. Could Tom Tango’s The Book be worth a dust-off and a chapter-by-chapter discussion? Alan Schwartz and The Numbers Game? Baseball Between the Numbers? These aren’t novel to the marketplace, and we wouldn’t be breaking new ground, but perhaps we’d learn something together as we reaffirm what we’ve learned?

Over the weekend, I made a case for a way of discussing books in a manner conducive to NotGraphs. You can read those exact words, if you want. Alternatively, you can just believe me when I say that the basic idea is to share lightly annotated passages and ideas from interesting baseball-related books.

Text
A Brief History of American Sports by Elliot J. Gorn and Warren Goldstein

Notes
There are obviously a number of reasons why baseball became popular in the United States. To attribute baseball’s rise in our culture merely to one or the other causes would be foolish. Gorn and Goldstein, for their part, are clear on this point. Discussing the “modernization”-type interpretation of mid- and late-19th c. sport, the pair writes:

The characteristics that historians identify as modern — rationalization, quantification, bureaucratization, mass spectatorship, equality of opportunity — were important elements of American athletics by the turn of the century. The rise of sports depended on new technologies, institutions, and patterns of though. Yet we must not remove the complexity from historical experience. Sports often perpetuated older values, even as modern elements crept in (114).

Elsewhere, they state:

This interpretaion of the rise of sports is at once useful and misleading. Bureaucracies, statistics, uniform rules, an ideology of fair play were all important. Yet those who apply modernization theory — to sports, to agriculture, to religious and ethnic identity — tend to see the tranformation as inexorable. Resistance to the modernizing juggernaut is depicted as either reactionary (because modernization allegedly benefits all) or unimportant (because the changes are inevitable). Modernization flattens historical experience by slighting the cultural tensions and the conflicts of power that accompany all major social transformations. Certainly there was nothing smooth, simple, or automatic about the rise of sports after the Civil War. Baseball’s relationship to the idea of equality, for example, was troubled (111-112).

These lines — in particular, those regarding the complexity of historical experience and historians’ tendency to flatten it — will likely be music to the ears of the sabermetrically inclined. Constantly, there’s this question of how fine to parse player performance. On the one hand, there’s the need to tell a story. There has to be some narrative quality to a stat in order for it to capture our imaginations. On the other hand, we must remain humble before the great complexities that lie beyond the narrative.

Consider FIP, for example. The accomplishment of the metric is that it (a) says quite a bit about a pitcher, but (b) requires only three widely available inputs — i.e. strikeouts, walks, and home runs allowed. So, its narrative powers are strong, which is good. But Gorn and Goldstein would ask us to remember — as would Tom Tango, I’m sure — that, while FIP is useful it can also be misleading. Or, rather, it will mislead those who ask too much of it. Each player presents to us a unique arrangement of uncontrolled variables. We oughtn’t forget it. Ever.

If I’ve failed to mention it previously, allow me to state vigorously right now that one use of NotGraphs will be to provide for the readership reviews of forthcoming (or recently released) baseball books. In fact, provided the good people of DeCapo Books — publishers of Jim Collins’ excellent Last Best League — provided they’re not lying liar faces from Liarville, I’ll soon have in my possession two books — Tim Wendel’s High Heat and Sean Manning’s Top of the Order — whose contents I’ll be very happy to consume and disclose in the near-ish future.

However, I don’t think it’s book reviews proper that I intend to discuss right now.

If I’m understanding correctly — and it’s quite possible that I’m not — but if I am understanding correctly, book reviews generally come in two forms. In the first kind of review, the writer serves, more or less, as a deputy for the consumer. His (i.e. the reviewer’s) job in this case is to acquaint himself with a text and relate to the people at home whether it’s worth their time and/or money.

In the second kind of book review — what we might, in fact, call “criticism” — the worth of the book in question is more or less taken for granted. In these cases, the author serves not as a deputy for the consumer, but as an Idea Man.

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Carson Cistulli has recently “become literate.” Allow him to celebrate his new skill by sharing selections from his reading list.

Text: A Brief History of American Sports. (Click here for Google Books page.)
Authors: Elliott J. Gorn and Warren Goldstein
Pages: 290
Pages Discussed Here: Preface and pp. 1-23

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Carson Cistulli has recently “become literate.” Allow him to celebrate his new skill by sharing selections from his reading list.

Text: “Beyond the Game: The Imagery of Major League Baseball” from Journal of Sports & Recreation, Vol. 3, Issue 1, 2009. (Click here for full text.)
Author: Roy F. Fox, Professor, English Education, Univ. of Missouri
Pages: 11 (including pictures)
Pages Discussed Here: All

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