Brockett Blog

The sports world gasped in delight last season when Omar Minaya, New York Mets general manager, called out Adam Rubin of the New York Daily News amid turnover and turmoil in the Mets front office. It was odd, it was random, and it was a sight seldom seen in a current baseball culture that treats teams like private businesses schooled in proper public relations.

It was nothing compared to what Charlie O. Finley could do.

On Aug. 20, 1961, the owner of the Kansas City Athletics grew tired of a local journalist’s scoops about Finley’s relocation efforts and secret trips to scout Dallas’ Cotton Bowl as a potential venue. So Finley organized Ernie Mehl Appreciation Day to “honor” said journalist. Let’s let authors Roger D. Launius and G. Michael Green explain the festivities:

“Finley ordered billboards that said ERNIE MEHL APPRECIATION DAY – POISON PEN AWARD FOR 1961, with a cartoon of Mehl sitting at a typewriter with a quill pen next to a bottle labeled ‘poison ink,’” write the authors. “He had the billboards mounted on both sides of a flatbed truck, which was driven around the playing field. As the truck circled the field the organist played ‘Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?’”

Charlie Finley: The Outrageous Story of Baseball’s Super Showman takes a clear-headed, strongly researched approach to Finley’s time as owner of the Kansas City (and, eventually, Oakland) Athletics. The authors – both members of the Society for American Baseball Research – pepper the biography with similar colorful anecdotes throughout Finley’s time in baseball. But trying to capture the rationale behind the man is much like trying to win a race against Herb Washington, the track star and personification of a failed Finley brainstorm known as the professional pinch runner: near impossible, and potentially embarrassing.

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The baseball fan’s memory overlooks .500. Sure, if you’re 80-81 on the last day of the season, beating up on a September call-up will give the season the benefit of a nice, round number that squares away successes and failures. But most seasons, that means no big pennant push, no World Series dreams, and no lasting memories. Great teams provide memories by the bushel, and bad teams manage to store their stink in the deep recesses of your mind (plus, there’s probably some good seats available come September). Authors write books about the great teams, the second fiddles, and even the catastrophes clad in stirrups. (The best title in the latter genre? Probably this one, which I want to read mostly for the David Clyde debacle). But .500 and just a team filling space in the standings between first and last? There is no inherent story worth writing or reading in that.

Hovering around .500 also has a snowball effect, which means that future generations will skip right over a pre-birth time period if there’s not much to learn about a favorite team. I was born in 1980, which means I have more than enough literature to teach me about the 1960s St. Louis Cardinals and the valedictory prose from the stellar 1980s squads. To the victors go the book deals. But the 1970s? Besides pictures of Joe Torre’s mutton chops in his (first) autobiography, the Cardinals didn’t offer much reason to venture back to that decade (for the decade, the team went 800-813, which is a figure worth aspiring toward only for current-day Pirates fans).

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I had never been to a book signing/author event, and somewhat feared that they could resemble the scene in “The Squid and the Whale” featuring Jeff Daniels, complete with elbow patches on jackets and excerpts chosen specifically to showcase the author’s exquisite use of oblique imagery.

But I considered myself safe from such pretentions when deciding to attend author/writer/blogger Will Leitch’s event held at Chicago’s Book Cellar Friday night (though it was in Lincoln Park, which for a youngster in rural Illinois always had a certain upper crust feel even though it clearly had the second best zoo in the city).

He was promoting “Are We Winning?” which is the type of nonfiction/memoir type book that I finished and immediately was overcome by the knowledge that it was the type of book I could write, but could never write because now it’s been done so well already. And that’s not even getting into the specifics I shared with the author (Cardinals fans, baseball defenders, good friends with “enemy” Cubs fans from college, etc.).

Leitch’s last book, “God Save the Fan,” bounded all over the place in search of a strong central theme. I think his latest book showcases more of his heart and passion for being a sports fan, all while organized in a way (half innings of a Cubs/Cardinals 2008 game serve as a diving board into all sorts of subjects) that keeps the material focused.

The manic, fast-talking energy that Leitch displays in television interviews, podcasts and book events like these sometimes shows up in his writing. But these blasts of whimsy are balanced by some great moments of introspection that any late-20s/early-30s adult can relate to.

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There are moments when I can’t quite understand why there are pieces of cardboard in various states of protection scattered throughout my bedroom. I consider finding a way to cover them up, and let the other pop culture ephemera have the stage because they wouldn’t be so hard to explain to a visitor. Then I realize I sleep in a room with red shag carpet and wallpaper depicting NFL helmets as worn in the late 1970s (complete with the label under the silver and black helmet eschewing fluctuating municipalities and listing just “Raiders”), and my baseball cards fall down the list in potential bedroom embarrassments.

Two recent books, Cardboard Gods by Josh Wilker and Mint Condition by Dave Jamieson, take wildly divergent approaches to understanding the appeal of these collectibles. I can gaze at my navel long enough to understand why I spend a few bucks here and there to assemble almost every card issued featuring pitcher Barry Zito in an Oakland A’s uniform: the chase, the gamble, the sense of discovery and completion, nostalgia tucked into 9-card plastic pages and three-ring binders, the economics of supply and demand in a microcosm, and, of course, the joys of dealing with eBay powersellers.

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Editor’s note: With the release of another Joe Torre/Tom Verducci book (The Yankee Years), I dug through my archives to pull out this review of their first tag-team effort. The review was written in the winter of 2006-07, which explains the reference to Torre still being the manager after an ALDS loss to the Detroit Tigers.

Title: Chasing the Dream:My Lifelong Journey to the World Series
Author: Joe Torre, with Tom Verducci
Pages: 272
Release date: 1997
Player Most Like: 1996 Bernie Williams

As the year winds to its conclusion, one of the strong themes that has developed in baseball literature is that of dealing with success. There are books about how the greats got there. There are books about how the spectacular failures came about, too. But what about the vessels built for success, the year after? No baseball team ever ends with a “happily ever after” (not since the Montreal Expos were eliminated from postseason contention, anyway).

Seth Mnookin’s book Feeding the Monster examined this in great detail with the post-2004 Boston Red Sox. I live in the Chicagoland area, and the daily papers chronicled a Chicago White Sox team that just couldn’t reach the same heights of the 2005 squad. And as a Cardinals fan, I know that someday soon I won’t be able to refer to my team as the current world champions (like, say, 2010). What we know now informs how we look back at baseball events, many times adding particular meaning to fleeting success. In 1997, Joe Torre capitalized on the Yankees’ first World Series championship since 1978 to write a book about his personal world championship triumph after years of quality play as a ballplayer and mediocre oversight as a manager.

We know, before even opening the book, that Torre went on to lead the 1998, 1999 and 2000 Yankees to world titles. We also know he’s still the manager of the team – helming the league’s richest roster through six straight years of making the playoffs and falling short. For a short time this offseason (although it feels like maybe 2004 with all that’s happened), it seemed like his tenure in the Bronx was up. But he’s still there, the bags under his eyes growing ever larger as he wonders how long Scott Proctor’s magic arm can keep him from using The Farns another night.

And after reading Chasing the Dream, you really wonder if it’s all worth it to Torre. “Storybook” endings sometimes are shoehorned into unworthy vessels, but with Torre’s tale it truly fits. A New York boy emerges from his big league brother’s shadow to become a hitting machine for the Braves and the Cardinals — on teams that vary from mediocre to downright crappy. A natural manager, he jumps into jobs with the Mets and the Cardinals with little success. But he channels his know-how when confronted with the right situation (his first season with the Yankees) and helps create a winner. The book allows for some background into his family life, with a dad who wasn’t there and a body not necessarily conducive to athletic activities. In some places, it actually gets a little uncomfortable reading Torre make fun of his young, fat self in the first person. But then there’s a photo montage of Torre’s always-awkward appearance and you can appreciate his self-depreciation.

Verducci, the main baseball writer for Sports Illustrated, gives Torre a concise, honest voice to tell his story. The book resists the urge to wallow in some of Torre’s problems, but does address even his divorce in a confessional, direct way. Chasing the Dream reserves most of its focus, though, for his managerial exploits in 1996. In this way, the book is a time capsule of his decision-making in leading champions, not allowing for the haze of reminiscing to forget some of the small moves or make too big a deal of others.

In some alternate universe somewhere, maybe Torre and Verducci write a follow-up book, where moving Alex Rodriguez down in the batting order spurs on the Yankees to come back in the Division Series, dashes the A’s hopes once again and eliminates a pesky Cardinals organization that dumped Torre in 1995. But one can’t really sense the same passion from Torre, at least not after years of the baseball spotlight wearing him down. The book’s greatest strength lies in explaining what it’s like to win, and the immediate rush of joy and relief. This makes Chasing the Dream much more interesting than the usual quickie autobiography, in the sense that it makes you wonder: If the dream is realized, then what drives the man?

Each day, it seems, another magazine turns off the press on its glossy pages for the last time. And just as the forms of blogs developed a different, multimedia-assisted way of producing journalism and communicating, so too did the heyday of magazines. Serving almost as a middle ground between the time investment extremes of newspapers and books, magazines allowed the best writers to find topics worthy of that middle ground. Five-thousand words could be used to tell stories that couldn’t carry 200 pages.

The best stuff, though, deserves some kind of permanence that gets lost when a new issue arrives in the mail to replace an old title. Compliations can tell bigger stories, and for books like The Best Sports Writing of Pat Jordan, they can tell great stories, too.

Jordan didn’t enter my consciousness until a great, unique post surfaced on Deadspin in March 2008. Though the piece didn’t conform to the “three paragraphs, two links and maybe an embedded YouTube link” that drives normal blog traffic, it stood out for using everyday interactions to create a big-picture portrait of present-day Jose Canseco. After reading some of his best work, you realize that isn’t anything new for Jordan, who has written the types of personal profiles that magazines used as cover stories for decades.

Jordan’s strengths lie in telling strong stories without overwriting (something at least one journalism contest judge has accused me of in my day, so I recognize its absence). Clear-eyed scenes with just the right amount of description set the stage for the personal revelations to follow. And, when they aren’t as forthcoming, that can reveal even more. Such is the case for a 1997 New York Times Magazine profile of Richard Williams and his daughters, Serena and Venus, where the father’s attempts at media manipulation reveal their own truths.

That doesn’t mean Jordan won’t turn a phrase, though. His greatest might just be this excerpt from “The Pork,” a look back on a unique basketball talent from Jordan’s adolescence:

A basketball in his hands looked like a beachball in the hands of a gnomelike child. He could never even think of palming a basketball, nor could he shoot one-handed like most basketball players, who spread their fingers over the ball, gripped it firmly, and propelled it with their fingertips. When the ball left their hands their fingers would be spread wide as if they were about to cop a feel from Dolly Parton. Alas, Porky’s small hands couldn’t encompass the breast of an eighth-grade girl. So he adjusted.

Inserting one’s self into a magazine story has become cliche, played for laughs in films like Adaptation and the Rolling Stone scenes in Almost Famous. Jordan doesn’t overplay his hand in this regard, but in some cases the interviews turn on what the author brings to the table. The former “bonus baby” pitcher flamed out before reaching his expected heights, but brings an athlete’s mentality and a writer’s introspection to every interview. So an infamous piece on Steve Garvey and his wife might refer to a “companion” or “stranger,” giving the reader the sense that even though Jordan is there with his tape recorder or notepad, he’s hovering above it all to take in a full scene that might not be so apparent to other interviewers. It makes for tremendous perspective, using eyes much more than I’s.

Jordan’s baseball background makes for some of the strongest pieces in this book, on guys like Carlton Fisk, Whitey Herzog, Roger Clemens (including what comic book fans might call a first appearance by Brian McNamee) and Steve Carlton. And he deals a devastating blow to the media echo chamber and the idea of a real-life Roy Hobbs in a 2001 story on “Toe” Nash. The prodigy, opportunists and journalists all come out the worse for wear after Jordan’s trip to Louisiana.

The book wraps a bow on the content with an interview between Jordan and Alex Belth. The questions help shed some interesting light on the back stories for some of the pieces, and the mindset of a guy who has reached for the definitive words to describe the world honestly. Some might say that this ability comes from Jordan’s brief time in the athletic spotlight and the empathy it infused into his mindset. But I think it might be simpler than that. In general feature writing, strength rests on the ability of the subject to be interesting. As Steve Martin’s character said in L.A. Story, showing off is the idiot’s version of being interesting. Jordan doesn’t have to show off, allowing the most interesting among us to talk with a peer for all the world to hear.

“Why do you like to play bridge?” I say.
“It’s a fascinating game.”
“Why is it fascinating?”
Tom [Seaver] looks at me, bemused. “It just is.”
“But why?”
“Why? Why? Why? It’s always, ‘Why?’ with you. That’s sick! I don’t know why! I don’t even think about why!”

You can read more from Pat Jordan and editor Alex Beth here at Baseball Analysts.

“She wrote a long letter/ On a short piece of paper” - Traveling Wilburys, “Dirty World”

For every length of writing, there is something to admire. If you can find the interesting in the mundane, people will subscribe to your Twitter feed for 140-character doses. When that form can’t hold a more complex thought, one graduates to blogs (and the potential for dozens of commenters to complain “Too long!” after more than one paragraph break). Still, some ideas demand more. With long-form magazine writing dying with every shuttered publication, the inspired writer turns to books for a proper medium … and a decent payday.

In a way, it could be like the Bill James concept of the defensive spectrum in baseball. Difficult positions like catcher and shortstop are on the left-hand side of the spectrum, with “easy” spots like first base and DH on the right-hand side. One can move to the right pretty easily (like a catcher moving to first base), but you wouldn’t want Boston Red Sox DH David Ortiz manning shortstop anytime soon. But is the book the most difficult writing medium to master? And is the blog “easier”?

The Onion AV Club highlighted a bunch of books back in November that were adapted from successful Web sites, with varying degrees of success. The Onion itself has archived itself in book form to great success, attributable to the quality of the comedy and interviews found in the newspaper and on the Web site. The holiday season afforded me the chance to check out a few of these books borne from the thousands of writers who have carved out a niche online.

Drew Magary, along with the rest of his cohorts at the site Kissing Suzy Kolber, disintegrates the notion that football fans care more about the jersey than the players wearing them. A post-game press conference or a simple photo can be all it takes for the creative writers to turn someone like quarterback Philip Rivers into an endless supplier of comedic material. And while each writer still holds true to his team alliance, the site offers a home for fans who can laugh at the game that causes so much anguish in others.

Magary used this ethos to write Men With Balls: The Professional Athlete’s Handbook. Through the gimmick of a life manual, Magary manages both to parody the form and the athlete culture that provides so much material for his Web site. The book succeeds where (former) Deadspin editor Will Leitch stumbled with God Save The Fan. With so much potential material, Leitch couldn’t aggregate his various insights into a meaningful form, despite his obvious writing ability. Magary may be more prone to ALL CAPS declarations and references to sexual orifaces, but he rightly concentrates on the humor while letting the (accurate) insights slip quietly into the material. This clear focus results in a quick, funny read that Magary’s Web fans can foist onto friends unfamilar with Kissing Suzy Kolber as a primer to the must-read humor site.

Television Without Pity takes a somewhat different approach. Subtitled “752 Things We Love to Hate (And Hate to Love) About TV,” the book version almost seems like a collection of pop culture references meant to bring you up to speed in the snarky world of television reviewing – like those Lost reruns with pop-up information airing before the season premiere. Authors Tara Ariano and Sarah D. Bunting wrote the book in 2006, but because the topics consist mainly of old television shows, the age of TV Land and DVD box sets keeps the content from growing too stale.

The book arranges information in an alphabetical encyclopedia, with references to other entries throughout its 300 pages. This helps its reading-on-the-toilet function, but the style doesn’t preclude someone from reading straight through. In either case, you realize this isn’t an academic exercise. The authors don’t mince words: The everpresent catchphrase consists of “Shut up, _____” (insert annoying person, place or Dawson’s Creek reference here). Both authors write with a conversational, knowing-but-not-all-knowing style ported nicely from the Web site. Many major sites have co-opted the TwoP style, but few match the type of tone that comes from being a devoted fan with enough writing chops to detail the highs and lows of a relationship with a TV show.

If you watch a lot of television, many of the references (like, say, the “Cousin Oliver-ing” of a character on a long-running show), might not knock you over with a revelatory blow. I’m probably just on the periphery of their target audience: about a dozen TiVo’d shows and a subscription to Entertainment Weekly. But there’s enough “there” there to make for enjoyable, lightweight entertainment … like a well-written episode of a sitcom without the embarrassments of a “very special episode.”

Finally, the launch of the MLB Network and lingering free agents means baseball can’t be obscured by the freezing temperatures, fresh snowfall or a media firestorm emanating from Dallas Cowboys camp. A couple of books have helped in bridging this gap from World Series to Spring Training, and one I have bought the last few years comes from The Hardball Times.

The 2009 Baseball Annual manages to take the “collection of essays” format and turn it into both a look back at the year that was and a macro view of the game and where it’s heading. With this volume, the casual fan can find a few interesting facts lost in the 162-game grind (from writers of the site and other well-known scribes like Joe Posnanski and Rob Neyer), while a statistician can devour whole sections devoted to offensive, defensive and pitching performance, replete with graphs and just about anything else you’d need. But my favorite feature makes it more than just an impulse buy and allows it to sit alongside the other books on my bookshelf: surprising looks back at baseball history.

This year, a couple of essays stood out. Craig Wright takes a great look at Honus Wagner, a man known today more for his baseball card than his remarkable skills. Books like Crazy ’08 worked to change that, and Wright shows how Wagner’s skills showed a remarkable lack of decline into his late-30s and early-40s, before Bonds and Clemens had (possibly through chemistry) changed our notions of a normal career arc. Frankly, if Wagner had played today, his stat line would invite the speculation that befell those titans. That he did so in the early part of the century when offensive production wasn’t so easy to come by? Just incredible.

Another essay (by Craig Brown) examines how Pete Rose went from being a Cincinnati Red to landing with the Philadelphia Phillies in 1979. Now, I consider myself at least somewhat knowledgeable about baseball history, and I have the Amazon.com bills to prove it. But I never knew about the convoluted system that greeted the first free agents, which included teams declaring which players they wanted to negotiate with (and with a cap of two signings per team and no more than 12 teams calling dibs on one player). Rose manages his way through this minefield to end up on a contender with a lot more gambling money in his pocket, and it stands as a unique contrast to current-day free agent maneuverings. Brown details all of this in a clear, matter-of-fact style that becomes this type of history.

Having read all three of these books, the authors trade the immediacy of the Web post for printed quality of various shelflife. Given that a price increase comes with such a change in medium (from $0 to about $15), each must overcome the convenience of an easy-to-find browser bookmark. The key, it turns out, is what makes for any time of good writing: quality thoughts, organized well, that you can’t find anywhere else. The rest is just a change in word count.

Editor’s note: With the race for playoff spots coming down to its final days, analysts in all of MLB’s home markets prepare their postmortems on the season that was and what it will take to be good/better/best in 2009. This archived review tackles a book that looks at that idea with a broad scope. And as I now realize, Emil Brown jokes age rapidly.

Title: Winners – How Good Teams Become Great Ones
Author: Dayn Perry
Pages: 248
Release: 2006
Team Most Like: 2004 Los Angeles Dodgers

Winning. It sells much better than losing, which is why the Chicago Tribune, Phil Rogers and others all rushed out quickie books celebrating the Chicago White Sox and their World Championship and why bookstores aren’t necessarily stocked with Emil on Emil: An Outfielder Makes it with the Kansas City Royals. Dayn Perry’s Winners takes on the interesting task of filtering recent playoff teams through the screen of meaningful statistics to both compare this era’s greatest teams and showcase – in general – the hallmarks of a playoff-bound squad.

And, though the book breezes by on the strength of an authoritarian yet understanding tone, a quick sense of humor and strong organization skills, the basic point of the book only leaves readers wanting more. Yes, it’s a lot of fun to examine the 1995 Colorado Rockies pitching staff and try to figure out how they even won 70 games with “aces” Kevin Ritz and Bryan Rekar. But each year isn’t necessarily about comparing teams to those of years past, and Perry doesn’t even attempt to give in to our ranking culture and name his top playoff teams since 1980. Instead, his analysis bobs and weaves with the idea of comparing playoff teams and playoff players with their league competition, making his points about needing an ace the strongest of the book while leaving the concept of strong middle relief lacking.

The book divides its focus into 10 parts, with each point supported by use of sabermetric statistics and personal backstories of those players involved. As evidenced by some of Baseball Prospectus’ books, introducing new metrics can be like attempting to give new food to a baby – you can try, but they call it a “gag reflex” for a reason. Perry realizes this and his writing still ably introduces the valuable relief pitching stats that hold up so much better than “holds” and “saves.” The main problem, one that crops up again and again in these books, comes from the proprietary nature of such statistics. Anyone on a Little League team can figure out his batting average, but scribbling out VORP (value over replacement player) isn’t possible and causes a disconnect. No matter how indicative a new stat might be on success, if readers can’t figure it on their own there will always be a hesitancy.

Actually, Winners almost reads like an extended, compiled Internet analysis column fleshed out with those aforementioned backstories. The sourcing for much of this information, as listed in the bibliography, comes from such sources as Baseball Prospectus, the Hardball Times and the Business of Baseball Web site. This, in most cases (like the sordid details of some of Pedro Guerrero’s life) cushion the blow of too many data tables while only whetting the appetite for a whole story. On a few occasions, Perry bridges the human interest and data analysis to great effect, such as when the St. Louis Cardinals traded for Cesar Cedeno in 1985. The author’s greater point – that deadline deals seldom impact a team’s ability to make the playoffs due mostly to a limited number of games played with the new team – has caveats like Cedeno, who helped his team replace the production of the injured Jack Clark by batting over .400 in September.

To the obsessive baseball fan, Winners‘ biggest value comes in its multitude of eye-catching findings. Perry gives one of the best dissections yet of how solely looking at stolen bases doesn’t always mean a team creates that many more runs (an analysis of Rickey Henderson shows his ability to draw a walk helped create almost three times as many runs as his stolen bases did). And the author nicely balances his analysis of the average age of playoff teams’ pitchers and hitters with the monetary qualifications that usually cause such averages. By the end, Perry sketches out a theoretical fantasy team that showcases all the hallmarks of playoff teams that came before. It wraps up a book both flawed and successful, one that provides memories and reminders of the enjoyments in being a fan, all while wondering what might have been. In other words, a playoff team that didn’t make it all the way.

The main page featuring content by ESPN columnist Bill Simmons features the stock photo of an average fisherman casting his line. The caption tells readers that the popular writer will return after 10 weeks of working on a book, of which there isn’t much known other than it will involve his first sporting passion, basketball. In the age of readers refreshing Web sites multiple times a day seeking out new content, the same image day after day jars the senses.

Most columnists start out on the general assignment desk, showcasing skills that bump them up to specific beats. As the circulation of the employers grow, the biggest beats develop such scope as to be definitive: “the White House” or “health care” or “Major League Baseball.” And after years of becoming the definitive source on some particular parcel of information, the inevitable siren song grows louder to break free of the word-count confines of a heavily edited column and “explore the studio space” with a definitive, illuminating book on said parcel.

Sometimes, that information fits into a broad concept, as in Jayson Stark’s The Stark Truth. Stark, an ESPN scribe with Philadelphia roots, deals both in news and statistical minutia for ESPN.com and its other agents of horizontal media integration. He can stir it up with a trade deadline winners-and-losers column (1,148 comments and counting), but his overall tone makes good use of the “royal we,” falling closer to the “modestly informed” side of the sliding scale and avoiding its more pompous uses. This translates to his public persona as well, as evidenced by an enjoyable interview with the On the DL podcast recently.

The book takes this conversational, knowing tone and runs with it as Stark details his picks for the five most overrated and underrated baseball players at each position. He often cites that mythical bar where well-reasoned arguments take shelter, where people aren’t too drunk to think that the day’s results should determine the manager’s job status (or that hitting on bartenders ever gets you anywhere). His most overrated and underrated get the longest write-ups, and he argues in the vague way required by the nature of the terms “overrated” and “underrated.” Sometimes, he uses statistics to make his point, but he tries very hard to stand clear of being labeled a “stat geek.” A small box gives the pertinent back-of-the-baseball-card information, and for this Stark picks the statistics to hammer home his argument.

The choices? Well, he does a good job of being an equal opportunity offender, although Yankee fans may not be too happy with the number of pinstriped players making an appearance on the wrong rated side. Even then, he isn’t making fun of Graig Nettles’ mother, a point he takes GREAT strides to make again and again. The humble nature that seems almost folksy in column-length doses comes off as repetitive and middle of the road when repeated for each position. “What I’ll mostly ask, though, is that you hear me out on this,” he writes in regards to Lou Brock. “Theoretically, we’re so deep into this book that I should have firmly established by now what overrated is and isn’t. Hopefully, I’ve proven that overratedness is a fuzzy concept that doesn’t have to represent an insult …” Take care of that in the intro and get on with the guns a’blazing, man! If you’re writing for the people just picking up the book on the shelves and flipping to a random section, it’s to the detriment of the people willing to sit down and see what you have to say in total.

Plus, there’s no way Derek Jeter is underrated.

Still, despite the plaintive calls for debate and stylistic faux pas, the book breezes on by with the knowledge and strength afforded a writer who has seen a lot of baseball in his day and whose brain hasn’t gone to rot in the process. Check out the excerpt here, and realize he wrote it well before Andruw Jones donned the Dodger blue.

Bruce Feldman took a different tactic for Meat Market: Inside the Smash-Mouth World of College Football Recruiting, which – along with some gameplay on NCAA 2009 – should leave you well informed and raring to go as students return to campus and the football field this month. He delves deep into one topic to illuminate a corner of the greater whole; in this case, it’s the year-round process of recruiting as seen through Ole Miss and (now former) head coach Ed Orgeron.

Feldman writes with a strong, no-nonsense style that uses scene-setters only when the drama’s too good not to share. He knows he has great access and a great “sun” for this book’s solar system in the oft-’wooooooing’ Orgeron. The book could be filled with wildman Cajun tales, and Feldman does manage to calculate the amount of Red Bull consumed on especially trying days. But the big picture of recruiting, where game film DVDs and unlimited text messaging plans are as good as gold, requires such book-length depth. As a casual college football fan who attended a Mid American Conference school, I appreciate the game but look at it mostly from the underdog, outside-the-SEC viewpoint that would lead someone to cheer for Hawaii or Utah. But the SEC fans are right, and it’s a different game in their environment.

The planning and organization of the book are the biggest obstacles to overcome, given the wide scope. Feldman articulates the journey of a recruiting class by bringing up the complications at every turn, and that’s done even while discounting the other coaching duties going on at the same time. One problem in using this approach comes when trying to organize all the coaches, players and potential players in your head as the reader breezes through the taut chapters. The most desirous take on their own backstories and personalities as the book develops, as do the coaches jetting off to meet them. A back-of-the-book reference page could help solve some of those problems in the paperback version.

Given the access allowed Feldman, Ole Miss looks pretty good in the spotlight. It’s a program without much recent success, and the coaches strain against the limits of selling that past. But those coaches also say (and, seemingly do) all the right things in terms of running a clean program. In Feldman’s presence, there isn’t a bad-mouthing of rivals or any talk of any fringe benefit greater than being on the same campus as plenty of pretty girls. The other teams lurk in the dark distance, their intentions only disseminated by sightings and chatter on scouting Web sites. This adds both to the drama and the noise of the book, which culminates perfectly on Signing Day. For all the talk of camcorders and Web sites and even televised press conferences, the team still relies on sitting by the fax machine to see the end result of weeks, months and years wooing teenage athletes.

This type of book (discussed here on Deadspin) immediately led me to bookmark Feldman’s ESPN blog, in the hope that this attention to importance and detail carries through to the rest of his work. If I was a recruit, Feldman won me over by staying out of the way and letting the story guide his clear writing.

Read David Halberstam’s books and know an author who liked to work with big ideas and big canvases. He found himself attracted to the big issues of his time, and they were seldom topics that could be settled in 200 pages or with a minimum of interviews (civil rights movement, Vietnam War, etc.) In these works, the journalist established himself as a newspaper reporter who could leap beyond the yellowing newspaper pages and into works of historical nonfiction that serve as invaluable reference materials the further we get from the 1960s.

Halberstam’s leap into sports journalism shares these characteristics, starting with the iconic figures of New York and Boston baseball lore. In many respects, the current golden-tinged auras that outline our memories owe a great deal to books like Summer of ’49, October 1964 and The Teammates (as well as countless other accounts through the years). His blanket approach to interviews and historical context place athletic endeavors in their context, especially that of an east-coast baseball fan during this time period.

Upon his untimely death in 2007, collaborator Glenn Stout collected some of Halberstam’s shorter essays to highlight his work within the broad confines of sports journalism in Everything They Had – Sports Writing from David Halberstam. These selections give an interesting peek into the personal and professional life of this author. Collectively, readers find some of the anecdotes interlap, such as a highbrow, envy-inducing dinner party spent bragging about his interview with Ted Williams. Many of his columns from ESPN.com circa 2001 draw upon this lifetime of athletic fandom to lend perspective to that year’s events. Still, some of the pleasure from this collection comes when Halberstam goes against the urge to unthinkingly celebrate the past, as in “The Good Old Days – for Baseball Owners” from a 1989 New York Times issue.

One of the best examples of Halberstam’s writing style highlights “The Education of Reggie Smith” from the October 1984 Playboy magazine. The six-time All-Star found himself playing baseball in Japan, and Halberstam used both his time in Japan and extensive interviews to write authoritatively, his deep, educated (and maybe highbrow) voice translated directly to the page. He settles into his profile without leaning on quotes, giving voice through other means. I don’t know whether Smith agreed with the accuracy of this piece, but Halberstam brings out an intimacy rare within the confines of a standard athlete profile.

No one piece brings about similar insights into Halberstam, but the closest are ones that deal with his love of watersports – both fishing and sculling. He travels to the far corners of the world seeking challenges in between writing endeavors, and almost always manages to find them. In the hands of authors of less reknown, these pieces may come off as elitist, especially when considering what gets torn apart these days on aggregate sports Web sites and blogs. But a Harvard education, a Pulitzer and multiple best-sellers have a way of imbuing confidence in a writer, and in this even the quiet moments and silly columns take on a riveting form of authority. He will be missed.