Winners

Dayn Perry, baseball writer for Fox Sports and Baseball Prospectus - as well as an occasional Primate – has added book writer to his resume. The title of his debut tome best expresses its purpose: Winners: How Good Teams Become Great Ones (and It’s Not the Way You Think). Though the concept inspiring, it is similar to 2003’s Paths of Glory by Mark Armour and Dan Levitt. Still, enough differences between the two exist to prevent a reader of the elder book from experiencing déjà vu while flipping through Perry’s work. Whereas Armour & Levitt mainly structured their book by looking at a dozen teams over the last 100+ years, Perry approached the subject by doing a group analysis of examines the 124 play-off teams from 1980-2004 (except for 1981 when Bowie Kuhn had a psychotic break and thought MLB was the NFL, and 1994 when there was no play-offs) to reveal what underlying traits these squads had in common. Also, Perry organized it thematically instead of the other’s team-by-team approach, with chapter like “The Slugger,” “The Closer” and “The Money Player” in Winners designed to show how important these aspects of a team are, and what makes them important.

A…

Read More ...

Sayonara Home Run!

Sayonara Home Run!

The Art of the Japanese Baseball Card

John Gall/Gary Engel

Forward by Steven Heller

Chronicle Books, San Francisco, 2006

Our indefatigable efforts to dissect baseball from a numerical standpoint have had a tendency to overshadow another necessary elements in our understanding of the game’s significance. One such element would be the history of the game’s images and how what they signify has either changed or remained constant.

This is an area that remains underrepresented in the current glut of materials published about baseball, but there are pockets of hope out there. One such is the superbly designed and rendered Sayonara Home Run!, which manages to sketch out a tacit cultural history of post-war Japan as it systematically examines the art/artifacts associated with its baseball leagues from the mid 1930s, when the first professional leagues began, through the late 1960s, when the first serious incursion of American players (the gaijin) began to change the particularities of Japanese baseball.

This slow-but-steady cultural shift is nicely outlined by authors Gall and Engel as they take us on a breathtaking beautiful tour of Japanese baseball cards. What’s noteworthy about this, though, is that it’s presented indirectly—permitting the changes in imagery and production…

Read More ...