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September 23, 2011

Fenway Park book giveaway

*Today (Friday) is the last day to submit your story for consideration!

The good folks at St. Martin's Press have been kind enough to offer three copies of their new book, Fenway Park: The Centennial: 100 Years of Red Sox Baseball (reviewed by yours truly here) to The Hardball Times' readers.

And the powers that be at THT have allowed me to determine how the recipients of those three copies will be determined.

Let's keep this simple. In the comments below, post your favorite Fenway- or Red Sox-related story. It might be an in-person account of a trip to the ballpark, a particularly memorable game you saw on TV, or perhaps a made-up scenario you have always dreamed about (a Red Sox-Cubs World Series, for example).

The three best stories—as determined by this unbiased, non-Bosox fan judge—will have their very own copies of Fenway Park: The Centennial sent their way.
Posted by: Greg Simons

July 22, 2011

A bargain worth considering

All right, in the interest of full disclosure: yours truly is the furthest thing from an objective source regarding this book. The author, Bill Gould, befriended me and I read his manuscript and offered him my editing advice. And more than that, I noticed a couple of questionable baseball facts in the manuscript, so Bill hired me to serve as his baseball fact-checker.

So, if you find any misstatements of baseball fact in this book, I'm the party to blame!

But with all those caveats noted, Bargaining with Baseball: Labor Relations in an Age of Prosperous Turmoil is a must-read book for anyone seriously interested in the labor history of baseball.
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Posted by: Steve Treder

April 09, 2011

Lucky Eddie

Perhaps it isn't the singular event the baseball world has been waiting for, but nonetheless it's good news for those with an interest in the history of the sport: Eddie Robinson has published his autobiography. Lucky Me: My Sixty-Five Years in Baseball is a good read.

Robinson wasn't a Hall of Fame-quality player, nor was his long post-playing career in the front offices of various organizations one of the greatest, but in both phases Robinson was quite good. And he was extremely well-traveled, playing for the Indians, Senators, White Sox, Athletics, Yankees, Athletics (again), Tigers, Indians (again), and Orioles, and then working in coaching and multiple executive capacities for the Orioles, Colt .45s, Athletics, Braves, Rangers, and Yankees, including stints as the General Manager in Atlanta and Texas. If one is inclined to think that on such a long and winding road Robinson met a lot of interesting people and has a lot of interesting stories to tell, this book amply proves one correct.

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Posted by: Steve Treder

February 07, 2011

The Havana Heat is on again

There are writers of historical baseball fiction, and then there is Darryl Brock. There are the rest, and then there is the best.

It's been more than ten years since the original publication of Havana Heat, Brock's rollicking second work in the genre. His first novel, If I Never Get Back, published in 1990, was a delightful hit, a fanciful time-travel adventure in which a modern-day fellow is transported back to spend the summer of 1869 on the road with the Cincinnati Red Stockings. Havana Heat is perhaps not as well known, but if anything it's a better work than If I Never Get Back: a more serious novel, with greater depth and poignancy, dealing with tougher issues.


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Posted by: Steve Treder

November 11, 2010

Thanks, Bill!

Recently, Bill James released the The 2011 Bill James Handbook. You can imagine my delight when, in the book's annual section on managers, I read the following bit on page 362:

Hey, I’ve never done this before, but I’m going to use this space to endorse a book, sort of. Chris Jaffe has written a book, Evaluating Baseball’s Managers, available from McFarland and Co., which uses methods not unlike these, but more complicated and more varied, to evaluate managers across history.

It has long been my argument that it is not our place, as sabermetricians, to stand in judgment of the performance of managers. People are careless about doing that; they pick factoids out of lists and use them to beat up on manages. Talk shows can become managerial bombing runs, often citing the info that we create. I think it is unwise for us to get into that; it creates an antagonistic relationship between managers and analysts, and frankly 99% of the info that is cited in that context is BS anyway (Baseless Speculation).

On the other hand
1) Jaffe’s research is quite outstanding, and
2) The fact that I choose not to get involved in rating or ranking managers doesn’t mean that nobody else can do it either.

I don’t know Jaffe from a hole in the wall; he’s not a friend of mine or something, and also, I have to warn you that he is not a compelling writer. He does really good research. He develops a wide range of metrics by which to compare managers like “Ballpark Adjusted Bullpen ERA” and “Leverage Points Added” and “Average Opponent Winning Percentage” (for pitchers), and I learned a great deal from reading his book.

Yeah, I'll take that. As one of my friends noted, when you've impressed Bill James, you've probably done a pretty good job.

I apologize if this comes off overly self-promotional (well, it is obviously intentionally self-promotional, but I hope it isn't overblown-ly so). Normally I wouldn't waste THT site space for something solely about my book. This ain't my personal blog, after all. That said, this ain't just an endorsement from some random guy in Tacoma. (No offense to all you random guys in Tacoma!) Besides, I really did put a heckuva lot of effort into my book.
Posted by: Chris Jaffe


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