There are thousands of young men on minor-league baseball rosters working toward a spot in the majors. Most of them won’t make it. With this in mind, essayist Lucas Mann spent the 2010 season in Clinton, Iowa, watching the city’s Class A team, the LumberKings. In his new book, Class A: Baseball in the Middle of Everywhere (Pantheon), Mann writes about becoming intimate with the players, the fans, and the town, and explores the themes of nostalgia, failure, and hope.

The link is a question ...

Among the most compelling baseball books this season is UCLA law professor Stuart Banner’s “The Baseball Trust: A History of Baseball’s Antitrust Exemption” (Oxford University Press: 304 pp., $29.95), a look at the game’s idiosyncratic legal status: Of all the major sports, it is the only one exempt from federal antitrust law.

How did this happen? “The most common explanation emphasizes the unique position of baseball in American culture,” Banner writes, before arguing that like ...

Behold!

Mike Piazza’s got a new autobiography in the bookstores, and I spent a week sort of semi-obsessed with it.  I can’t figure out precisely why this particular ex-ballplayer’s memoir got inside my head. But I have a couple of ideas.

One, the book is exceptionally well-written, which isn’t all that surprising, considering Piazza’s co-author was Lonnie Wheeler, who’s written or co-written a number of fine books over the years… And two, Mike Piazza—and I should be very clear that when I write ...

Seems perfect for the Red Sox.

Have you read My Baseball Diary by James T. Farrell? He wrote a ton of books, most notably the Studs Lonigan trilogy. His baseball memoir has a lot of great reminisces about baseball during the teens. Apparently one of his first literature essays was a high school paper called The Fall of Prince Hal, written in 1920 after finding out that Hal Chase, one of his favorite players ,had been involved in fixing ball games.

I generally dislike the genre. . ..personal ...

Baseball Hall of Famer Bill Veeck (1914–86) was an inspired team builder, a consummate showman, and one of the greatest baseball men ever involved in the game. Bill Veeck’s Crosstown Classic, drawn from his uproarious autobiography (cowritten with the talented sportswriter Ed Linn), is an unforgettable trip packed with anecdotes and insight about the history of baseball and tales of players and owners—some of the most entertaining stories in all of sports literature.

Milwaukee Journal, January 4, 1912:

HISTORICAL POINTS OF 1911.
Indiana didn’t secede from the Union.
Kaiser Wilhelm was not seen on the vaudeville circuit.
Vienna was refused admittance to the Tri-State league.
Shibe Park was not converted into a moving picture show.
Connie Mack did not unconditionally release Eddie Collins.
...
Count Leo Tolstoy neglected to write a musical comedy.

...and it’s a damn shame he didn’t.  I’d pay big bucks to see the singing, dancing grand finale of War and Peace: ...

Pearlman: Give ‘Em Enough Rope (sent this over to

Steve

...errr, Jeff).

Rocker says he’s written the book partly in response to a 1999 Sports Illustrated article that he says ruined his good name forever.

Interviewed during Eyewitness News at 6 Wednesday, he referred to the old proverb that says “Don’t pick up fight with a guy who buys ink by the truckload.”

He told 13WMAZ’s Frank Malloy, “I decided to buy my own truck.”

...Rocker says he wrote the book with J. Marshall Craig to add “meat” ...

No, this is not an Onion article; this exists.

Conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith’s work is simultaneously among the most mundane and the most maddeningly provocative writing being done today.

A few years ago, I published a super-boring book that was a radio transcription of a Yankees–Red Sox game. I included everything that was on the radio, from the pre-game show to the ads to the broadcast-booth patter.

. . . .

When the book was published, I sent a copy to the Yankees organization. ...

It seems Moneyball has opened world-wide and some of the reviews I’ve been reading are eloquent ####### pips.

It’s certainly true that, in the field of literature and film, this Atlanticised form of rounders has inspired many fine works, of which Moneyball is just the latest. While admitting I may be a little parochial here, I think it’s a shame that some of the best films about sport – Field of Dreams and Eight Men Out to give two examples – have been about baseball, a game that most in ...

Speakeasy of Everything…an excerpt from Mark Ribowsky’s new book on Howard Cosell.

During the 1984 American League Championship Series between the Detroit Tigers and the Kansas City Royals, Cosell and play-by-play man Al Michaels took to sniping at each other, though what viewers didn’t know was that Cosell had been drinking during the game. After Michaels disagreed with a point he made, believing Cosell’s explanation of a baseball strategy “made no sense,” Cosell waited until after the game ...

Don’t have time to thumb through all of it (flood of Waylon Thornton and the Heavy Hands EP’s take precedent!), but this…

However, the people who make this objection don’t seem to grasp the basic principles of imitation and catch-up. Once all teams are playing Moneyball, then playing Moneyball no longer gives you an edge. Indeed, the richer clubs have the means to play it smarter. The New York Yankees recently hired 21 statisticians, Beane marvels.

...Lewis breaks in: “To be totally fair ...

Buzz La Bissinger returns! (checks Sequel-Buzz for further info)

Whether you loved Tony La Russa, as many millions of fans did, or hated him, as far too many millions of fans did, the verdict on him is simple. In the aftermath of Monday’s surprising announcement, three days after his St. Louis Cardinals won the World Series, that he was retiring after a 33-year managerial career, we might as well get the boilerplate of his legacy out of the way so there is no confusion:

Over the past ...

David Maraniss: The Prince of Cannotsee.

But I absolutely hate the movie “Moneyball” and everything it stands for. I think it is a fraud, one that people I respect bought into, for what they thought were noble reasons having to do with the little guys vs. the big bullies. I also dislike the philosophy of moneyball as it is applied to sports. My problem with the movie is a matter of truth. My problem with the philosophy is a question of art and beauty.

...The thrill of baseball has ...

While Mark DeRosa has 74 career errors…Joe DeRosa looks for some in Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding.

A ballplayer could react to a terrible slump in a number of ways. But all of them should be vastly different to a person reacting to the loss of a supernatural gift. A slump usually begins with the wrong mix of flawed mechanics and dumb luck and spirals into Adam Dunn-level tragedy when the player gets trapped inside his own head. Henry’s situation is closer to Prometheus and his gift of ...

Beane Spill

WATCHING I like music documentaries. I just recently saw “We Jam Econo — The Story of the Minutemen,” who were a California punk band from the ’80s. The Minutemen were one of those bands that didn’t really catch on in the mainstream and yet was incredibly influential on other artists that did make it.

The other one that I saw was “Hype!,” which is about the Seattle grunge scene. It has great archive footage of bands like Nirvana and Sound Garden and also Alice in ...

Belth catches up with Glenn Stout, author of Fenway 1912: The Birth of a Ballpark, a Championship Season, and Fenway’s Remarkable First Year.

BB: One of the incredible things about Fenway Park is that it has changed over 100 years, and although it may seem antiquated, the current Red Sox ownership has done a lot to add modern touches without tearing the place down. Can you talk about some of the most significant alterations the place has seen and why it continues to last.

GS: Fenway Park has ...

We Want the San Jose Airwaves! ~~ Part I and Part II.

TB:  How do you figure out - is there a metric that you guys have outside of the really simple one of wins - but is there a metric to figure out whether your manager is doing a good job? Do you sit down at some point and review every decision they make in a game and then give him a ranking, or is it strictly the wins and losses? How do you guys go about judging that?

BB:  We don’t have a specific metric for evaluating a manager. I’ve ...

Last Chance: Behind the Scenes at the Final Eight…

As soon as the last day of the regular season concluded, I was convinced there was a book to be done that would focus strictly on that final day, arguably the most dramatic in regular season baseball history. I thought—think—that if you go back to the eight teams involved in those four deciding games, focusing on the four teams fighting for the playoffs but also including the other four teams and get players, managers, coaches, ...

Hirsch: Without a Clue.

All told, there is zero evidence to support one of Moneyball’s pillars: Beane’s unique ability to identify and draft undervalued prospective stars. Indeed, Beane’s weak track record drafting players clearly contributed to the team’s disastrous performance in 2011. Many low-budget teams fared better – not just this year but over the past several years.

In Lewis’s telling, the A’s use of advanced statistics also produced superior game management. The team ...

The Further Adventures of Slugger Kinsella…

So Butterfly Winter should be a very big deal in Canadian publishing. The author of Shoeless Joe is back. He’s writing about baseball. He’s including hallmark elements of magic realism.

...Nevertheless, Butterfly Winter should appeal to his core audience. It’s the story of twins Julio and Esteban, baseball players from the fictional Caribbean country of Courteguay who aim for the big leagues while being controlled by a mysterious man in a ...

By the one and only Billy Bean..

e

.

At the time, as I was becoming more and more recognized as a member of the LGBT community, I was sure that Billy was getting the short end of the stick. It was OK for me to be confused with a general manager of a Major League Baseball team, but I wasn’t so sure how he felt about people thinking that he was “the gay baseball player.” He’s a straight Republican, who’s married with kids, and I’m a gay Democrat with two Jack Russell Terriers. To make ...

The Million-Dollar Throw-Up Challenge.

Terry Francona didn’t talk about OPS numbers on Friday after he was fired in Boston. He didn’t talk about Pythagorean winning percentages or range factors or runs created or win shares. He didn’t talk about Bill James or Billy Beane or sabermetrics, the cult that now runs baseball. Francona essentially spoke of how the men on the field playing the game for the Red Sox this past September weren’t enough of a team when their season exploded all over the ...

Right on the tail of “Lion King” were baseball drama “Moneyball” from Sony Corp.‘s Sony Pictures and the family film “Dolphin Tale” from Time Warner Inc.‘s Warner Bros. Pictures. According to early studio estimates, the former grossed $20.6 million from 2,993 theaters while the latter grossed $20.3 million from 3,507 theaters.

An adaptation of the non-fiction book by Michael Lewis, “Moneyball” stars Brad Pitt as Oakland As general manager Billy Beane and appealed primarily to older audiences. ...

We didn’t get it today, but we battled and we will be back at the Oscars next year!

Former Oakland Athletics manager Art Howe (above, right)  hasn’t seen ‘Moneyball’ yet, but he’s talked with people who have and he says he isn’t thrilled with the way he’s portrayed in the film.

Here’s Howe on SiriusXM’s Mad Dog Radio:

  “Considering the book wasn’t real favorable to me to start with I figured it would be something like this but to be honest with you it is very disappointing to know that ...

As “Franko” Cassavetes repeatedly repeated in The Dirty Dozen...“You SLOB! You SLOB!”

Why are Beane, author Michael Lewis and the A’s getting a free pass from the sports media on this?

...What other dopers did the A’s have on that team? Well, Jeremy Giambi later confessed to the use of anabolic steroids, but did not specify 2002. Reserve outfielder-third baseman Adam Piatt says he dealt steroids to other players but has been ambiguous about whom besides Tejada he dealt them to.

Is it ...