Category: Uncategorized

The book: “The Performance Cortex: Now Neuroscience Is Redefining Athletic Genius”
The author: Zach Schonbrun
How to find it: Dutton Books, 352 pages, $28, released April 17.
The links: At Amazon.com, at the publisher’s website.

A review in 90-feet or less: It might be shelved under categories such as “medical books” or “sports psychology,” even “training and conditioning.” But when it shows up the baseball section – the cover illustration is a hint — it’s likely because this is the sport where the basis of this thinking and probing emanates, so don’t over think too much outside the batter’s box too much.
Or, as Schonbrun says in the introduction, his narrative remains “anchored by the baseball diamond, to that purest of athletic exchanges, when a batter stands at the plate awaiting a pitch…. It’s time to give those milli-seconds their due.”
We saw in Bob Tewksbury’s new book “Ninety Percent Mental” there is all sorts of ways the mind can be used in the baseball process. Here, we go to the real science of what appears to be more than just intuitive, thanks to the inquisitive approach by Schonbrun, a New York Times contributor since 2011 with a masters in journalism from Columbia.
He logically explains that this is just baseball’s latest outside influence, following in the succession of orthopedists, psychologist, optometrists, strength coaches, nutritionists, sabermetrics, sleep doctors and yoga instructors.
He’s allowed to follow the journey of Jason Sherwin and Jordan Muraskin, who started a company called deCervo, which aims to be a neutral bystander in the measuring and improvement of cognitive performance.
There is a point in the book — perhaps early, but our brain is still processing it — when this all sounds like something best digested in an audio version. The written words on the pages can be very intimidating, like a college intro science elective for a dance major.
And then there’s another chapter? Does this really have a conclusion? It’s like a magazine story unraveled.
In our head, we hear the voice of famed neurobiologist Dr. Amy Farrah Fowler reciting the paragraphs to a point where even Sheldon Cooper’s impatience gets the best of him. Continue reading “Day 24 of 30 baseball book reviews for 2018: Don’t be too dense in getting a cerebral cortex around a baseball vortex” →

The book: “Winning Ugly: A Visual History of the Most Bizarre Baseball Uniforms Ever Worn”
The author: Todd Radom
How to find it: Sports Publishing, 176 pages, $24.95, due out May 15
The links: At Amazon.com, at the publisher’s website.

A review in 90-feet or less: It was June 5, 1999. It turned out to be very a ugly Saturday afternoon.
Fox’s new ownership of the Dodgers was trying to mark its new-way-of-thinking territory. In L.A., that can be encouraged as progressive thinking.
But consider tradition before you tread forward.
The Dodgers-Angels Freeway Series meeting at Dodger Stadium was also a Fox national telecast.  A perfect day to make a statement.
The Angels already were in their periwinkle blue pinstripe PJ and winged-A logo arrangement, the residue of their Disney takeover (1997-2001) and a desire to Mickey Mouse-up everything.
Referencing page 121 of “Winning Ugly,” Radom explains that “it actually could been worse. … The originally approved uniforms called for double pinstripes, rendered in periwinkle and navy, along with widely flared banded stripes around the shoulders that looked like something out of a dystopian science fiction movie.”
In fact, back in 1997, Disney actually issued a dark blue Angels jersey with periwinkle sleeves for the Freeway Series meeting with the Dodgers (see page 120, in the chapter entitled “Diamond Duds.) It was so hated that they never did it again.
Now it was the Dodgers’ turn.
Here, in Chapter 7, entitled “When Good Teams Go Bad,” Random explains on pages 112-113 how the Dodgers’ model of consistency — “the classic blue ‘Dodgers’ script, kissed by red player numbers” — had been assaulted with a reverse-image dark blue top and piping, a white script and white borders around the numbers. Was this supposed to be their batting practice jerseys? Was someone pulling a prank? Fans were confused.
And then all heck broke loose.
A bizarre brawl broke out between the Dodgers’ Chan Ho Park and the Angels’ Tim Belcher, after Belcher fielded a bunt by Park and tagged him out, and Park decided to go all ninja on him.

Perhaps – and we’re just guessing here – neither player was crazy about the uniform they were wearing. This incident just brought it all to a head.
Continue reading “Day 23 of 30 baseball book reviews for 2018: When MLB fashion follows form, here’s the book on the worst of it” →

The book: “Baseball Italian Style: Great Stories Told by Italian American Major Leaguers from Crosetti to Piazza”
The author: Lawrence Baldassaro
How to find it: Sports Publishing, 292 pages, $24.99, released March 6.
The links: At Amazon.com, at the publisher’s website.

A review in 90-feet or less: Mike Piazza says on page 204:
“My dad said he would be called ‘dago’ and ‘wop’ when he was a kid,”  “and all the Irish kids would want to fight him, and he would try so hard to assimilate himself to be an American. Then when he grew up and started losing that ethnic identity, he would strive to be more Italian.
“I remember, this Italian Amerian group gave me the Brian Piccolo Award. At the banquet, I was giving a little bit of history of my family and I said I’m only half Italian, my mother is Slovak. There was this deafening silence over the crowd, and my dad said, ‘Why did you tell them that?’
“I said, ‘It’s your fault; you married a Slovak.’”
In what could have easily come off as something perpetuating stereotypes or cultural chest-bumping, Baldassaro manages in his assembling a collection of first-hand stories of more than 40 players, managers, umpires and a couple of GMs to dig a little deeper about each of their Italian roots, what it means to them and how it shaped their attitudes about life, kinship and how the game should be played.
Baldassaro, a professor emeritus of Italian at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, started this as a project related to his 2011 book, “Beyond DiMaggio: Italian Americans in Baseball,” and realized he had interviews amassed along the lines of Lawrence Ritter’s 1996 oral history project, “The Glory of Their Times.”
“Just to be clear: readers should not expect to find dreamy reveries of the timelessness and sociological significance of baseball,” Baldassaro writes in the introduction. “To be sure, there are, on occasion, nostalgic reminiscences of bygone days. But by and large, the narrators provide a dispassionate look into the game as they know it.”
And all seem to have a Joe DiMaggio worship-related story along the way.
The lineup is impressive.
For those with Southern California ties, there are the usual suspects from Joey Amalfitano to Barry Zito, with Tommy Lasorda, Mike Scioscia, Ned Colletti, Joe Torre, Jim Fergosi, Al Ferrara and Bobby Valentine thrown in.
For those going back to the playing days of the 1930s – Frank Crosetti, Phil Cavarretta or Nino Bongiovanni – up until Anthony Rizzo or Joey Votto of modern day, you can read how the times changes through generations in how they identified and then perhaps never thought much else about their background when it came to the giant melting pot of baseball. To some, playing for Italy in the World Baseball Classic was the highlight of their professional career. That’s interesting considering how Lasorda explains things as he remembers them as a kid.
Continue reading “Day 22 of 30 baseball book reviews for 2018: So then Lasorda says to Piazza … Aw, let’s just go eat” →

In the time between we documented Hank Azaria’s trip to L.A. to promote Season 2 of IFC’s “Brockmire,” and the time the column finally posted, Brent Musburger has retaliated.
Azaria, as Brockmire, went off on a Musburger-related rant, the video of which on the Rich Eisen show we have included in this column or, watch above.
Since then, Musburger replied via Twitter:

The response:

Musburger then circled back to Eisen’s show on Friday to say this:

Friday, Azaria was on the Dan Patrick Show — as himself — so we’re wondering if he even saw it.

Yo, Brent: Why don’t you have a bobblehead?
Let the star-cross-promotion begin.

The book: “Baseball Greatness: Top Players and Teams According to Wins Above Average, 1901-2017”
The author: David Kaiser
How to find it: McFarland Books, $35, 250 pages, released Feb. 16.
The links: At Amazon.com, at the publisher’s website.

A review in 90-feet or less: In one of the most unassuming yet powerfully potent paperbacks anyone can possibly find and reference today to win a baseball argument, SABR veteran Kaiser, a 70-year-old university history professor and well-received author from Watertown, Mass., almost single-evenhandedly  waters down all the arguments that Wins Against Replacement (WAR) is a superior measurement of one’s greatness when compared to how Wins Above Average (WAA) determines the greatness of a player within the context of his team’s success.
Individually, WAR has taken sabermetrics to new levels of understanding about an individual performance. But what if this guy’s team doesn’t win? Isn’t that the point of the game?
WAA, a Pythagorean formula that can be applied to any player in any era, is simple: Expected winning percentage equals teams runs scored squared divided by the sum of teams run scored squared and teams runs allowed squared. It has since been modified to substitute 1.82 for 2 as the exponent, but … you get the general point and decimal points. Hopefully.
If not, Kaiser has a basic explanation in the intro, but a much more detailed breakdown in the appendix.
He takes us chapter by chapter, era by era as determined by sociological experts (The Lost Generation, Boomers, Gen X, etc.) and redefines what players contributed the most to their team’s successes by running these new set of numbers.
Trust us, it’s not all that difficult to digest.
Just know that for someone to have star-season status in Kaiser’s calculations, he must have a 4 WAA, meaning his team probably won four additional games because of him in the lineup rather than an “average” player.
With that, Kaiser’s standard for greatness is a player who has five or more seasons of a 4 WAA or better, a standard he calculates has been met 93 times in baseball history so far (that’s one half of one percent of all who have played). There have been 1,773 “superstar” seasons posted by players since 1901, about 15 per year.
Take it for what it’s worth with this quote as well from Kaiser:

“With the obvious exception of track and field, there are few if any human endeavors, inside or outside of sport, in which performance can be measured as accurately as in baseball. And now, with more than a century’s worth of evidence upon which to draw, using simple, powerful statistical methods, we find, generation after generation, an astonishingly small number of men who are much, much better than everyone else, and who indeed have shaped the broader story of winners and losers to a remarkable extend. … This book is about how great players make great teams. Historically, hitters have been more important than pitchers, all the more so because great pitchers very rarely remain great for very long.”

Sold.
And with that, a few intriguing things to note from Kaiser’s findings that relate to Dodgers’ history: Continue reading “Day 21 of 30 baseball book reviews for 2018: When WAA wins out over WAR, it’s a win-win for everyone … and this formula appears to bear that out” →