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The boys of summer, past and present, play ball
REVIEWS BY MARTIN BRADY
By Jose Canseco ReganBooks, $25.95 304 pages, ISBN 0060746408
The Red Sox rule
By Mike Vaccaro Doubleday, $24.95 384 pages, ISBN 0385513542
By Dan Shaughnessy Houghton Mifflin, $23 272 pages, ISBN 0618517480
History lessons
By Frank Deford Atlantic Monthly, $24 256 pages, ISBN 0871138859
Behind the icon
By Jonathan Eig Simon & Schuster, $26 432 pages, ISBN
Baseball by the numbers
Full-blown fanatics will probably read the book straight through, but casual fans will find plenty of reward simply browsing through selected chapters, such as "The Decline and Fall of the Starting Pitcher," "Highly Paid Irrelevance" and "Rating the General Managers." Useful appendixes lay out the facts in all their numerical glory.
By Bill Felber Thomas Dunne, $23.95 368 pages, ISBN 0312332645
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Baseball has had its share of PR comedowns during the past several decades, including player strikes by grossly overpaid
athletes, spiraling costs passed on to Average Joe fans, and the reluctantly accepted reality that football has surpassed
it as the national pastime. The recent publication of Jose Canseco's Juiced—with its highly publicized revelations
about steroid use by big stars—certainly hasn't helped matters. Yet baseball endures, and several new books have
arrived to remind us of the game's rich lore, its indelible personages and its perennial allure.
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If ever there were cause for baseball's rebound in the public consciousness, it was last fall's performance by the Boston Red Sox, who miraculously defeated the dreaded New York Yankees on their way to their first world championship since 1918. New York Post columnist Mike Vaccaro's Emperors and Idiots: The Hundred-Year Rivalry Between the
Yankees and Red Sox, From the Very Beginning to the End of the Curse is an eminently readable history of the combative Yankees-Red Sox relationship, from the turn of the 20th century (back when they were the Highlanders and Pilgrims, respectively) through the recent era, with special focus on the infamous 1920 trade that brought Babe Ruth from the Sox to the Yankees and supposedly initiated more than 80 years of jinxed Boston baseball. Vaccaro's narrative highlights the dominance of Yankee dynasties (Ruth/Gehrig, Mantle/Maris, Jackson/Munson, etc.), pits Joe DiMaggio's uncanny winning ways vs. Ted Williams' endless disappointments and details the Sox's heartbreaking postseason collapses. Inexorably, the book winds down to October 2004, when at last the Red Sox broke the Yankee spell and thrilled their many devoted, long-suffering loyalists.
In a similar vein is Dan Shaughnessy's Reversing the Curse: Inside the 2004 Boston Red Sox, which overlaps some of Vaccaro's historical perspective but mostly functions as a blow-by-blow account of the unlikely 2004 Sox triumph. Shaughnessy, a writer for the Boston Globe, profiles the colorful members of the team, including long-haired wildman center fielder Johnny Damon, stalwart fireballing right-hander Curt Schilling, and the "Latin Mafia" of Pedro Martinez, Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz, all instrumental in making history as the Sox snatched victory out of the jaws of certain defeat against the Yanks, and then swept the St. Louis Cardinals in four straight games in the World Series. Shaughnessy also runs down in detail the critical personnel changes enacted by youthful Sox general manager Theo Epstein in the wake of Boston's gut-wrenching 2003 playoff loss to—who else?—the Yankees.
Award-winning sportswriter Frank Deford has been contributing to Sports Illustrated since 1962, and has also done his share of TV and radio work, including weekly commentaries for NPR. In The Old Ball Game: How John McGraw, Christy Mathewson, and
the New York Giants Created Modern Baseball, Deford trips down memory lane to the first decade of the 20th century, when the game gained serious commercial strength and distinctively captured the imagination of the American public. His primary focus is New York Giants great Christy Mathewson, a handsome, strapping, Bucknell-educated pitcher who embodied the virtues of integrity, good sportsmanship and hard work. Mathewson came to his well-earned matinee-idol persona under the tutelage of rough-and-tumble manager John McGraw. Deford adroitly describes their lives, careers, and surprisingly devoted friendship, offering along the way a vivid slice of social history.
Perhaps no baseball player has been as lionized as Lou Gehrig, whose well-known battle with the disease that now bears his name was almost as prodigious as his hitting feats for the Yankees in the 1920s and '30s. Jonathan Eig's Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig is a major biography that benefits from excellent research, stylish writing and a fierce determination on the part of the author to get beyond mere legend. Playing in the shadow of Ruth, Gehrig nonetheless carved out his own place in the baseball record books. Eig doesn't stint on the sporting anecdotes, and the era of the early Yankees dynasty comes fully alive. But equally interesting are his accounts of the battles between Gehrig's doting mother, Christina, and his strong-willed, ex-flapper wife, Eleanor. Finally, there is the story of Gehrig's illness, still riveting in its pathos, which Eig covers with revealing medical and personal details. A frailer, more human and less-iconic Gehrig emerges here, but one no less courageous.
Like any modern business, baseball utilizes increasingly sophisticated methods for assessing the abilities of its personnel and gauging the nature of success on the diamond. Statistical analysis as a baseball tool has grown primarily through the efforts of Bill James, whose series of published "abstracts" have examined player performance and plotted new paradigms for evaluating it. Newspaper editor and baseball researcher Bill Felber has the same interest, and with The Book on the Book: A Landmark Inquiry into Which Strategies
in the Modern Game Actually Work he serves up a thoroughly credible deconstruction of the effects of the game's strategies and the ultimate value of a player's worth when it comes to winning and losing. Felber's text gets unrelievedly technical sometimes, with almost every area of the game reduced to mathematical formulas. It's hard to take issue with the conclusions, though, since Felber's methodology is well supported.