2021 MLB Preview

For the baseball fan, there is always a certain anxiety that comes with spring. Yes, it is the season of hope and new beginnings, the season where all things seem possible. But it is also the season when one starts to fret about one’s favorite team, imagining all the things that could go wrong in…

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Categorized as Baseball

Ron Shandler’s Baseball Forecaster Book Review

One afternoon when I was about twelve years old, I sat down in my bedroom and cut out five hundred small slips of paper. With the assistance of the USA Today Sports section, I began writing out the names of each prominent position player and pitcher on every major league baseball team, one name per…

The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. Book Review

This 1968 novel by Robert Coover tells the story of Henry Waugh, accountant by day and game enthusiast by night. His special obsession is a self-made baseball dice game, complete with eight teams and carefully calibrated charts listing every possible outcome for each dice roll. For those familiar with Strat-O-Matic baseball, the setup is easy…

The MVP Machine Book Review

This recent entry to the world of baseball literature, written by Ben Lindbergh and Travis Sawchik, explores a simple premise: player development is the new market inefficiency to be exploited by enterprising players, coaches, and front office personnel. If the old Moneyball approach was to identify and acquire players with skills undervalued by the market,…

The Wax Pack Book Review

For several months this winter I have been gazing fondly at a particular baseball book sitting on my bedside table: Brad Balukjian’s The Wax Pack: On the Open Road in Search of Baseball’s Afterlife (2020). What continually drew my eye to the book cover was not a stunning piece of original artwork that produced a…

Christmas Books Still to Read

“You sure got a lot of books, Daddy.” This was the assessment of my five-year old daughter upon surveying my Christmas haul at approximately 11:03 a.m. on Christmas morning. I think she was somewhat mystified by the narrow range of gifts I received. Aside from a long-sleeve T-shirt, a candy cane, and a homemade reindeer…

What Makes a Sports Book a Classic?

A key element of The Sports Shelf Project is the multi-shelf book ranking system. The idea is to create and regularly update a set of three bookshelves holding volumes that represent the best of the sports genre. The top-tier shelf (the Showcase Shelf) houses the true classics. The second-tier shelf (the Display Shelf) holds the…

Origin Story

It was during the lethargic post-Christmas period in late 2020 that the idea first came to me. Surprising, perhaps, given that this is generally the week where my primary activities are eating the exact same meal of Christmas leftovers for several days straight and sitting around with no discernible purpose while awaiting New Year’s Eve.…