A delight for baseball lovers but also a useful parable about the power of habit and tradition, barriers to accepting...
From his many years at ESPN and his current perch at the MLB Network, the TV face of the “Baseball Age of Enlightenment” reflects on the rise of analytics and the torpedoing of decadeslong conventional baseball wisdom.
Today, virtually every team’s front office features an analytics department dedicated to evaluating player performance along lines promulgated as far back as the 1970s by the game’s original sabermetrician, “The Godfather,” Bill James. With a powerful assist from Michael Lewis’ Moneyball (and the subsequent Brad Pitt movie), James’ potent rethinking of the game—Kenny rates him among the seven most influential figures in baseball history—has penetrated a popular audience beyond baseball’s boundaries. It’s fair to ask, then, do we really need another book explaining why batting average, runs batted in, or errors mean less than we have previously supposed? Or why it’s pointless to assign a “win” or a “save” to a pitcher’s outing? If you answer “no,” then you’ve woefully underestimated the continued resistance of the old guard, particularly managers, narrative-driven baseball writers, and most fans, to see and properly analyze the game. In a casually friendly tone that occasionally turns marvelously cranky, Kenny deconstructs the gauzy nostalgia surrounding the Triple Crown, warns against mistaking appearance for reality—Jack Morris just looks like a better pitcher than Mickey Lolich—explains how MVP voting has gone awry, makes the numbers-based case for admitting Keith Hernandez, Dwight Evans, Alan Trammell, and Tim Raines to the Hall of Fame, and forecasts an even more radical, numbers-based baseball future. (Will we someday see an IT coach in the dugout?) A helpful glossary defines most of the new metrics applied to today’s game, and Kenny supplies plenty of flesh and blood anecdotes about players, baseball executives, and media colleagues to satisfy even the oldest, most computer-averse fan.
A delight for baseball lovers but also a useful parable about the power of habit and tradition, barriers to accepting answers hiding in plain sight for years.Pub Date: July 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-0633-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Effectively sobering. Suffice it to say that Pop Warner parents will want to armor their kids from head to toe upon reading...
A maddening, well-constructed tale of medical discovery and corporate coverup, set in morgues, laboratories, courtrooms, and football fields.
Nigeria-born Bennet Omalu is perhaps an unlikely hero, a medical doctor board-certified in four areas of pathology, “anatomic, clinical, forensic, and neuropathology,” and a well-rounded specialist in death. When his boss, celebrity examiner Cyril Wecht (“in the autopsy business, Wecht was a rock star”), got into trouble for various specimens of publicity-hound overreach, Omalu was there to offer patient, stoical support. The student did not surpass the teacher in flashiness, but Omalu was a rock star all his own in studying the brain to determine a cause of death. Laskas’ (Creative Writing/Univ. of Pittsburgh; Hidden America, 2012, etc.) main topic is the horrific injuries wrought to the brains and bodies of football players on the field. Omalu’s study of the unfortunate brain of Pittsburgh Steeler Mike Webster, who died in 2002 at 50 of a supposed heart attack, brought new attention to the trauma of concussion. Laskas trades in sportwriter-ese, all staccato delivery full of tough guy–isms and sports clichés: “He had played for fifteen seasons, a warrior’s warrior; he played in more games—two hundred twenty—than any other player in Steelers history. Undersized, tough, a big, burly white guy—a Pittsburgh kind of guy—the heart of the best team in history.” A little of that goes a long way, but Laskas, a Pittsburgher who first wrote of Omalu and his studies in a story in GQ, does sturdy work in keeping up with a grim story that the NFL most definitely did not want to see aired—not in Omalu’s professional publications in medical journals, nor, reportedly, on the big screen in the Will Smith vehicle based on this book.
Effectively sobering. Suffice it to say that Pop Warner parents will want to armor their kids from head to toe upon reading it.Pub Date: Nov. 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8757-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
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