Archive for Review

According to its associated Facebook group, Boog City, which probably isn’t named after Boog Powell, “is a small press now its 20th year. It’s also an East Village community newspaper of the same name. The press has published more than three dozen volumes of poetry and various zines, featuring … theme issues on topics ranging from baseball to women’s writing, Louisville, Ky. to The Ramones…”

According a post in said Facebook group, Boog City is putting together another baseball issue; presumably anyone can submit baseball-themed poems or art.

A previous baseball issue of Boog City is available for viewing, the premise of which, in the words of editor David A. Kirschenbaum, was this: “A major league roster has 25 players on it, so I found 25 poets I dig who were willing to write an original baseball poem. I then assigned them each a position on a baseball team, from starting pitcher to backup first baseman, and everything in between. They were then told to pick anyone in the history of baseball who has ever played their position, be it in Major League Baseball, the Negro Leagues, the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, the minor leagues, college, a kid from the schoolyard, or anyone else and write a new poem about them.”

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“What beats me,” he said with a trembling voice, “is why did it always have to happen to me? What did I do to deserve it?”
–The Natural (1952)

“But I didn’t see it coming.”
“How could you possibly know she’d hurt you? How could anyone?”
“I didn’t see it coming.”
“You think you should have?”
“Yes. But I didn’t. Why didn’t I?”
–The Natural (1984)

The film version of The Natural is saccharine and sentimental, laden with heavy-handed imagery and emotional manipulation. It eschews the dramatic tension of the text for a pulpy, feel-good ending. It is fantasy fodder for middle-aged men. And despite common belief, it is vastly superior to the book in nearly every way.

Bernard Malamud’s novel was published in 1952, and the era sits heavy in the pages. It’s a work about heroes, but at the same time it doesn’t believe in heroes. It’s a book about baseball that captures none of the game’s spirit.  The Natural is a product of its lame times.

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Pictured below, among the ephemera of my bedroom office, is a First Edition (Fifth Printing, though) copy of A Thinking Man’s Guide to Baseball (1967) by Leonard Koppett, lent to me by a friend. In subsequent editions the title was changed to A Thinking Fan’s Guide to Baseball, because, well, people who aren’t “men” are baseball fans, too.

For some reason the lamp has a sticker on it that reads “Spay or Neuter”.

In the introduction, Koppett makes explicit his assumptions about his readers: Read the rest of this entry »

When I was a younger person than I am right now — like by 10 or so years, actually — I emailed David Berman (author of Actual Air, frontman of the Silver Jews, and graduate of UMass-Amherst’s MFA program that’s way better than Iowa’s dumb MFA program that’s dumb) and asked him where, if I were in Nashville ever, I should make a priority of going. The Gold Rush, is what he responded — if for no other reason than the members of 1980’s hair-band Cinderella were regulars there.

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There aren’t a lot of classic baseball books out there, relatively speaking. This isn’t to say that there aren’t a lot of great baseball books; it’s just that the genre is temporal, and not many works last from one generation to the next. Unless the subject is a legend or the author’s writing style is groundbreaking, the names of the players and their personalities eventually fade, the ideas fall out of fashion.

So it goes with Daniel Okrent’s 9 Innings, a Proustian voyage through a single June 10 game between the Milwaukee Brewers and the Baltimore Orioles. As the tale begins in the clubhouses before the game and winds its way through the ninth, Okrent pauses to reflect on the players, transactions, and history that brought that particular game into its state of being. Between these anecdotes, the author weaves in the game, continuing on in the background.

9 Innings isn’t the kind of book that ranks among many people’s list of favorites, and that’s sad. Okrent’s writing is thorough and honest, although his touch is a little heavy, not quite unable to escape the journalistic plodding of the beat writers of the time. The book is primarily failed by the players themselves, particularly the 1982 Milwaukee Brewers. The most famous players of that team, Paul Molitor and Robin Yount, are perhaps its driest characters; Okrent pointedly summarizes Yount as “cooperative and patient, but also singularly unexpressive, inarticulate, even dense.” Jim Palmer appears in the dugout and Cal Ripken, in the middle of his rookie season, is present but unformed.

Meanwhile, the most interesting characters in the book have largely been forgotten: names like Vuckovich, Oglivie, Gorman Thomas, and even Ted Simmons have faded into semi-obscurity, their statistics remembered but their faces forgotten. And because of this, in the end 9 Innings becomes more of a Milwaukee Brewers book than a baseball book, and an indication of how difficult it is for any author, no matter how talented, to make fans care about other team’s ballplayers.

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Tuesday night, Texas Rangers outfielder Josh Hamilton became just the 16th player in major-league history to hit four home runs in a single game (box).

Here are notable reviews of those home runs by some of America’s most celebrated critics (with links to video of each individual home run).

No. 1
“Josh Hamilton’s first home run is taut, terse, brisk and immediately engaging.” – Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times

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I was surprised, at the completion our offseason crowdsourcing project, to find that FanGraphs readers had ranked Houston Astros broadcasters Bill Brown and Jim Deshaies fourth overall among the league’s 31 television broadcast teams.

Of course, I could also be excused: there has been little reason for anyone to go out of his or her way to watch the Astros over the last couple-few years.

With a new, data-driven front office in place, however, and a team that’s currently ranked 10th in FanGraphs’ totally infallible SI.com power rankings, there are reasons to watch the Astros at the moment.

What I didn’t expect before turning on Sunday’s game between Houston and St. Louis was the degree to which Brown and, in particular, Deshaies could augment a fan’s viewing experience. The duo are both genuinely entertaining (not just “entertaining for baseball broadcasters”) and responsible with the numbers.

By way of illustration, here are five brief sound clips of Deshaies — literally all of them from the first three innings of that Sunday game against the Cardinals.

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Sometimes readers will ask me — on the present site, on Twitter, on the lawless streets of America — they’ll ask me, “Hey Carson, will you keep me abreast of products that might be of some use to me, as a consumer of base-and-ball?”

To which query I’ll respond: “You want me to keep you a breast of products like that?”

To which they’re like: “Yeah, abreast.”

At which point, I’m like: “A breast?”

And then they’re like: “Yes. Abreast. It’s a real English word, and has nothing to do with the female anatomy, like you’re clearly pretending it does.”

In any case, my answer to the original question is: “Yes, but probably only, like, a month after such a product has been released, because what am I, a machine?”

A thing that fits all of the above criteria was brought to the author’s attention over the weekend in the form of this tweet:

You know how the Red Zone channel only shows you all the important stuff? Check out MLB version here with mlb.com/fullcount

— MLB (@MLB) April 28, 2012

In fact, some cursory research reveals that the operator of the MLB Twitter account is not lying. MLB Full Count (link) is a video service (in collaboration, it seems, with Yahoo) that provides “look-ins” to games in progress — and, it would also seem, highlights of completed games. Also, it’s free.

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Nothing says baseball like David Baldacci’s novel, Zero Day.

I can’t give the book its needed credit, so here is the description from Amazon.com:

John Puller is a combat veteran and the best military investigator in the U.S. Army’s Criminal Investigation Division. His father was an Army fighting legend, and his brother is serving a life sentence for treason in a federal military prison. Puller has an indomitable spirit and an unstoppable drive to find the truth. 

Now, Puller is called out on a case in a remote, rural area in West Virginia coal country far from any military outpost. Someone has stumbled onto a brutal crime scene, a family slaughtered. The local homicide detective, a headstrong woman with personal demons of her own, joins forces with Puller in the investigation. As Puller digs through deception after deception, he realizes that absolutely nothing he’s seen in this small town, and no one in it, are what they seem. Facing a potential conspiracy that reaches far beyond the hills of West Virginia, he is one man on the hunt for justice against an overwhelming force.

It is 448 pages of heart pounding action for the baseball fan, especially if you are at Kauffman Stadium watching the Royals lose their 11th in a row.

(h/t to focs at Royals Review and the NSFW version)

Like most of us, I knew him only as the almost spectral presence who delivered sex-drenched commands and remorseless taunts from on high. He paid us in corsair’s doubloons. He claimed to have invented new smells and colors. He lifted not barbells but paid whores left pliant from hours of driving coitus. He carried a razor in his sock. His voice was so gravelly that actual gravel spewed from his maw. If a man is something dimensionless and awful to behold, then he was man. He was David Appelman.

This past weekend, in the deserts of America, I met him. By way of introduction, he beat me with a cactus and then kissed my fresh wounds. Such is his power. Such is his malaise. Like someone from a Garcia Marquez novel, Appelman is followed everywhere by a pack of menacing tarantulas. “My spider-sons,” he calls them. His appetite for illegal drugs and sex as locus of control is both boundless and without bound. As he ravishes you on whim, the only consoling knowledge is that whatever he’s doing to you at that moment is but a taste of the horrors ahead. You can always buy another bodice, he tells you. I saw him brawl with Christ. David Appelman is an animated urge.

We are not equipped to remember our births, which is a necessary survival device. We are also not equipped to remember the precise things that David Appelman does to, at and on us. We cannot, lest we combust from vice and rot. Every so often, though, the gossamer parts, if only for a moment, and you remember something about him. He is hairy beyond plausibility. His member is untold and prehensile. It turns out there is an eighth deadly sin.

I am in need of physicians.