Former MLB DOI Agent Eddie Dominguez' Baseball Cop

Primary sources require disciplined listening.  Individuals involved in an activity consciously and unconsciously tend to convey fact tinged with a little haze.  The haze can structure a narrative that is highly directed on the objectives and intent of the source.  If you are a proponent of enforcement then the truth you convey will be from that perspective and may miss details or perhaps orients details from an enforcement perspective.  The haze also tends to be an attempt to make the source appear more favorably to what he thinks you value.  Sometimes this takes the form of someone repeatedly trying to validate themselves in your eyes with name dropping, mentioning of extensive accomplishments, and favorable anecdotal asides.

Baseball Cop is a new book written by the former Major League Baseball Department of Investigations agent Eddie Dominguez, a law enforcement veteran with a long and diverse multi-decade long career that spans from the Boston streets in local investigations to FBI work and to international investigations.  This work is part a biography and part a thesis in how MLB's DoI (largely established as an outcome of the Mitchell PED report) has evolved from a somewhat independent investigative unit to an extension of MLB's executive push at controlling public relations.  While the book is certainly tinged by Dominguez' need to validate his own perspective and his whole-hearted support of enforcement approaches, one cannot deny that his charge against MLB and their DoI program appears valid and needs further assessment.  His book includes many specific details that have been published before in articles and other books, which puts credibility to what he states.

As troubling as Dominguez's allegations are, it is unsettling how little traction this book has gotten in the media, whether mainstream or on the fringes in sports blogging.  The book further carries on a fairly well established theme that Major League Baseball is less interested in the goals of enforcement of rules or establishing a truly useful and comprehensive health and safety drug program in comparison to their heavy handed approaches that appear to be more about making a public statement and suggesting a greater level of control than they actually have.  Some think the lack of attention is due to a greater conspiracy between sports media and MLB offices, but I question that.  However, I have no alternative suggestion.  Dominguez is not Jose Canseco.  From what I can see, his words should be considered.

Briefly, the book is largely about how the Department of Investigation for Major League Baseball was created out of MLB's public crisis in the 2000s from the Performance Enhancing Drugs hearings.  Mitchell's report found a need for developing an independent investigation unit that would be free from MLB or MLBPA oversight.  MLB appears to have gotten frustrated with DoI following up on their own leads and involving law enforcement, so MLB began to isolate DoI and secretly run parallel efforts.  In the end with much of the public outrage subsided, MLB transformed DoI from multiple employees with field experience to more of a court-based, stream-lined group who would contract out investigations.  That transformation led to refusal to further investigate what MLB appeared to gauge as sensitive subjects.

While several important aspects arise, the impact is somewhat mitigated by the author.  Dominguez' writing style is akin to that guy in the bar who speaks louder than is required because he wants people other than his buddy to hear him.  He wants you to know that he knows people, that he is connected.  He wants you to know that he has won awards.  He wants to ensure that you respect him and presents you with the rationale and logic required to come to that conclusion.  To me, it is reminiscent to how a friend of mine who is a Baltimore police detective communicates.  It feels like how someone would communicate to an informant or suspect in order to verbally overpower any hesitancy in accepting the person talking.  While this can be frustrating and ruin the reading experience a bit, if you can work through that as a reader then a great deal of interesting information is there to consume.

The author sometimes appears to not realize instances where he is being used by others.  For instance, there is a story conveyed where Theo Epstein calls Dominguez up to get him to investigate the White Sox behavior leading up to Dayan Viciedo's signing.  It seems, first off, wholly inappropriate that Epstein is pleading with Dominguez to investigate the White Sox and giving a reason being that the Cubs want to sign him instead.  It also is peculiar for Epstein to suggest something untoward is happening because it would be remarkable if Epstein was not involved in similar things.  The Cubs are allegedly one of many (almost every) clubs that pre-agrees to deals with international talent.  That notion is repeatedly made every single year by MLB writers when a new international period ramps up at the end of June and beginning of July.  From the outside and reading Dominguez' account, it looks like Epstein is simply brushing back the White Sox and trying to frustrate them.

It is also important to recognize what law enforcement does.  Law enforcement is not necessarily interested in the truth, but in facts that support a truth.  That is an important distinction.  For instance, Dominguez writes about his contacts and the degree to which they think PEDs are still used in baseball.  One piece of evidence suggested is that increase in home runs that have spiked up over the past couple seasons.  The section is written to put this forward as a primary driver of the increase in power.  What this does is establish the PED issue and enforcement need contained in the book.  The fact that several studies have shown a difference in the ball that results in it traveling further is not noted as it does not carry forward the desired law enforcement objective.  It is important when reading this that Dominguez is offering his best truth and his truth (all our truths are) is impacted by his perspective, how he sees the world.

Again, warts and all, this work is important.  The book declares that MLB values itself more than anything else.  It falls in with a line of evidence in an all too common tale that spans across industries: organizational human resource operations are not there to protect victims or establish truth, but to further the needs of the organization.  MLB likely does not see DoI as a group to enforce rules of law, but a group that enforces rules of law when it makes MLB look good.  Dominguez appears to have misunderstood that reality and it cost him his job.  It is a story that should resound with anyone who works for someone else.  It is a reminder that you may one day find yourself as a victim who is under the heel of your more powerful employer.

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Baseball Cop: the darkside of America's national pastime
by Eddie Dominguez
Hachette Books
pp. 304

Book Review on Better Times: Something Magic

Something Magic: The Baltimore Orioles, 1979-1983 is a fairly straight forward accounting of the last hurrah of the original Orioles dynasty that lasted about 20 years.  The book largely depends on several hundred articles written at the time to piece together the more meaningful aspects leading up to that final run and throughout it.  For those who lived through these events, I would imagine that this work will unleash a flood of great memories.  For those like me born during this run or much later, it is a sober account of what transpired during a more jubilant time of baseball in Baltimore.

Perhaps one of the more interesting aspects of this work is that the first 78 pages describe the path that baseball took in Baltimore from 1858 to the threshold of the 1979 season.  It covers a lot of ground that I had picked up in other books.  Bill Veeck's tenure with the St. Louis Browns and being squeezed out in the sale of the franchise to Baltimore is covered here though not in the excruciating detail you get on the books whose focal point in Veeck and not providing background for the Orioles.

Likewise, the book draws from the Wizard of Waxahachie and a couple other sources to discuss Paul Richards.  Similar to Veeck, the book presents a more positive and less nuanced few of Richards when describing how the Oriole Way is the Richards Way.  For instance, while it notes how much of a tinkerer Richards was and how he was interested in streamlining/standardizing instruction, it fails to mention how his success in finding players largely had to do with having money to buy them because he was actually a fairly
poor evaluator.  He just used a great system.  That said, it probably is outside the scope of this work.

I may have missed it in the citations, but the work also appears to miss the work recently done on Brooks Robinson in the Brooks autobiography that was recently released.  That work would fill in some gaps in the discussion running up through the 50s, 60s, and 70s.  While that book is fairly white bread, it does seem to give the impression that Something Magic perhaps leans on period print articles a bit too much as being completely accurate depictions.

One element that comes up again and again are the depictions of fan programs being used as evidence to show that there was something special about Baltimore.  It is said, but not compared with what was going on around the league.  Therefore, it reads more like public relation work that would appear in newspapers and opinion pieces.  Maybe I am being too harsh, but it seems like a more critical eye and perhaps more first hand interviews could have contextualized these events more.

The final hundred or so pages describes the run noted in the title.  The writing meanders with the ebb and flow of seasonal sports writing.  Spring optimism gets grinded through the season and tid bits of information sprinkle through.  Again, I think for those who lived through the era it would be a great memory jogger as it discusses work stoppages, Jim Palmer acting on television shows, negotiations for what would become Camden Yards, failed attempts to sign Reggie Jackson and trade for Gary Templeton, and the pondering of who could actually replace Earl Weaver.

Perhaps with a longer format, these interesting tidbits could be expanded and something more interesting or profound could be elucidated.  As is, much of the information comes off in tangents off of the main slog which is a very newsprint push forward of this time.

The final chapter brings everything up to the present day.  Highlighting some aspects and quiet on others.  All in all, the book does well to set the tone for this five year period and wind down from it.  Where it fits in the works about the Orioles, I do not know.  I think for a more recent Orioles fan, it teases you with a great number of tidbits that leave you wanting more and, perhaps, searching out books mentioned in the citations and beyond.

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Something Magic: The Baltimore Orioles, 1979-1983
by Charles Kupfer
McFarland and Company, Inc.
212 pp.

Book Review: The Pitcher and the Dictator

The lens through which we understand baseball is history.  The feats of today are automatically compared to those that came before.  The accumulation of home runs or strike outs are placed within a spectrum of greats that have played between those white lines.  History, the numbers, all of it is sacred.  Within that, we try to ignore, sometimes quite successfully, that our history is incomplete.  Our concept of greatness is stained with institutional prejudice.  When we think of the greats, we say Babe Ruth, but he certainly was an incomplete great.  His performance was against competition that was intentionally watered down due to concepts of white supremacy.  Baseball is tainted and that is why we does not reverentially whisper Josh Gibson's name.

And, yes, there were others who were among the best baseball had to offer, but were kept out of the game because baseball was racist.  You probably do not know about Luis Tiant (no, his father).  You probably do not fully understand Cool Papa Bell's brilliance.  You have been robbed of Tetelo.  You probably are unaware of the real Shohei Ohtani, the great Martin Dihigo.  Averell Smith mentions them and highlights Satchel Paige in his book "The Pitcher and the Dictator: Satchel Paige's Unlikely Season in the Dominican Republic."

To improve the optics of a future re-election of the ruthless dictator Rafael Trujillo, the esteemed members of Trujillo's political apparatus decided to throw a country-wide championship in Trujillo's honor with one club bearing his name.  To ensure the team named after Ciudad Trujillo (at the time, the new name for Santo Domingo), the two existing teams were merged into one.  However, they soon realized that with other teams stocking up on Cuban and Puerto Rican stars that the Trujillo team needed their own foreign talent.

The Negro Leagues were full of poorly paid talent that should have been showcased at the MLB level.  Trujillo's team was able to swoop in and throw silly money at Satchel Paige, who decided to jump off his current club and head to the island.  There, effectively as a VIP, he experienced life that was stunningly different from the United States where he suffered through extreme prejudice.  In the Dominican, all seemed welcome.  Whereas, in the States, Paige has to use special books, word of mouth, and sometimes suffer through empty stomachs or sleeping in abandoned box cars while on the road.

As the season wore on, Trujillo's team still floundered.  The club resorted to a full on raid of the Negro Leagues to develop what effectively was an All Star team that could have challenged for the World Series in the States.  The players were also now watched over by Trujillo's death squads to ensure they remained focused on winning.

The book is a fascinating exploration into the life of Trujillo as well as for life of black players in the 1930s.  The book dries up at times, but does well to not so much focus on every ball and strike, but to look at the context of the events.

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The Pitcher and the Dictator
by Averell Smith
University of Nebraska Press
212 pp.

Book Review: Play Ball (Baseball Medical Injury Guide)

A couple years ago, I reviewed Jeff Passan's The Arm.  It is written in a style similar to Michael Lewis' Moneyball with similar aims.  Passan had noted that he wished for the book to serve as a wakeup call and tool for parents to inform them about arm injuries.  The book was fairly popular within the baseball writing circles, but those with a more keen eye for the science found it to be underwhelming.  It was entertaining, but was also a convoluted mess that was often internally conflicting in the message (e.g. Trevor Bauer vs. overthrowing, Kyle Boddy vs. actual science).  In short, the book was about a journey through the muck of arm injuries in baseball, but was somehow presented as a step forward.

This summer comes Play Ball by New York Yankees Head Team Physician Christopher Ahmad and Major League Soccer's Medical Coordinator John Gallucci Jr.  What Play ball aims to do is to familiarize the reader with some of the most common injuries that amateurs and professionals face in baseball, including arm injuries.  The book presents the underlying issues thought to be the cause for these ailments, what symptoms arise, treatment options, and rehabilitation time frames.  The text is dense, but this is really an overview that helps, at least, to direct parents and players to proper information and to convey a message to not get too worked up about some things.

The book conveys similar information, especially about arm injuries, that The Arm does, but does so in a more clinical and, obviously, less entertaining way.  Ahmad and Gallucci are not trying to bro up their language to appear as belonging to the locker room as Passan is wont to do, but present themselves as professionals in the field.  Their writing is straight forward, but some will certainly need to have Wikipedia nearby to understand some of the terminology.

Where the book fails though is that even though the authors try to properly convey certainty in their writing, it falls a little short at times.  For instance, a passing comment about the inverted W, which refers to how a pitcher's arms may look when about to move forward in his throw (why is this not simply called an M, by the way?), suggests this likely increases injury without really any evidence of this.  Other parts of the book where a point is being made, the author provides some specifics about studies he has done or others have done that back up the point.  It makes other statements that are orphaned from scientific evaluation seem like unimportant or meaningless tangents.

Another failure is that while the book regularly mentions studies that have been done, they really should have provided an appendix or footnotes to identify what studies the authors are actually referring to.  For instance, there is a passage in the book about the use of platelet-rich plasma therapy.  Providing substance to the recommendation of this treatment is the mention of a study and how the participants were significantly helped by the therapy.  It should be noted that once tracking down this study that the methodology is poor.  It simply is a case study.  With the handful of individuals in the study, one would want there to be case controls and confounders to be addressed.  The study did not do it, so it really does not back up the recommendation.

The is found throughout the literature with platelet-rich plasma therapy studies.  Very few studies are worthy to be considered. Those studies have poor methodologies. The research base is fairly mixed in how effective it is and that uncertain effectiveness also appears to be highly contingent on the type of injury and severity.  The therapy is also presented as fairly complication free, which it is if you compare it to more substantial surgical approaches.  In reality, this therapy is extensively used in sports medicine and beyond.  With the volume of this work, one would figure there would be a fairly decent approach to evaluate the effectiveness of this therapy and it simply remains an unknown to my knowledge.

So...while this book has some well evidenced perspectives, it does provide a halo to other less evidenced advice.  The authors do a poor job distinguishing that and seemingly obscure it when they, in their expert opinion, truly belief in a therapy.  I see that as problematic, but certainly this is a step up from how The Arm presented the subject and flailed at providing solutions to the subject.  This book provides solutions and potential solutions as well as tries to explain how to prevent, detect, and resolve issues.

Sports injuries, arm injuries particularly, can be complicated.  Therapies sometimes take a long time and a lot of repetition before they establish definitive success.  Life is not always so clear cut.  That said, this book is a great complement to The Arm and, well, if you read one of them you should certainly read the other.

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Play Ball: Don't Let Injuries Sideline You This Season
by Christopher Ahmad and John Gallucci, Jr.
Post Hill Press
238 pg

Beep: Inside the Unseen World of Baseball for the Blind

You may be unfamiliar with beep baseball.  If you are familiar with it, then you may perceive it as an activity inspired by baseball to provide those with vision disabilities functional therapy.  That concept though is outdated.  Beep baseball may well have been started decades ago to get blind kids to more effectively use their hearing, but that activity has grown into an international sport requiring genuine skill and athleticism.  To rephrase Charles Barkley, "They are not for your inspiration."  They play to win and "Beep: Inside the Unseen World of Baseball for the Blind" provides access to these players, to this pastime.

graphic from Popular Mechanics

The book covers the basics of beep baseball.  The team plays six in the field.  The players are all blindfolded (players have varying levels of vision, so the blindfolds equal it all out).  Additionally, each squad has two spotters in the field to provide assistance.  The ball must travel 40 ft to be in play and be in fair territory.  A 170 ft blast, however unlikely, is a home run.

On offense, a team pitches to its own batter.  The pitcher is sighted.  The pitcher's role is to comprehensively know each player's swing, give an audible command to swing, and then effectively hit that player's bat.  Once contact is made, a base, really a tackling dummy, in the field buzzes randomly.  The batter must reach base before the ball is controlled by the defense.  Oh, the beeping ball is a little larger than a softball and houses parts originally invented for use in telephones.

The book dives into the history of the game.  From where it emerged and how it turned into full-fledged athletic competition.  The author writes from a first person perspective and provides intimate contact with several clubs and the life histories of many players.  The core conflict in the book is the rivalry between a team from Austin and one from Taiwan.  It is a fascinating look at the struggle these teams go through to hold practices, get players to games, to train.  It looks into the support staffs of these clubs and how they help or, maybe, hurt their teams.  It is a fairly nuanced look at the sport.

Perhaps the only blight on this work is the choice of the author to place himself in the story.  The author did in fact play some beep ball for a team as a substitute in one tournament.  Maybe the idea arose from there.  However, he places himself into the mix without really providing any payoff.  He had some ups and downs as a manic baseball fan.  OK.  It does not go anywhere.  He speaks of family obligations pulling him from his covering of the sport, which maybe is to parallel himself to the players struggling to juggle things and stay on their clubs.  Probably not, though.  I am confused why it is in there.  He hangs out with the players and goes to Taiwan, which could have easily been written without him inserting himself into the story.  No, it does not distract from the game and the players, but it does take time away from them and suspends the flow.  Having read quite a bit of baseball non-fiction, I am astounded how common it is to place oneself in these works without really any decent recent to do it.

That said, this is a remarkable book on a rather remarkable topic.  It is fascinating how baseball evolved into beep baseball.  How beep baseball has boiled down elements of the game and yet remain true to the core principles of the game.  While people have grown accustomed to a fairly static game of baseball over the past hundred years, it is important to note how varied the game was in its infancy.  How when you traveled to another town to play another field of nine that it was indeed incredibly important to understand the field rules.  How standardization eliminated much of the uniqueness and experimentation in the game.  Through necessity, beep baseball ignored that strict honoring of baseball rule standardization and created something incredibly familiar, quite novel, and brilliant.  It found a way to push a player to the limit.  To cross out the need for one sense and push the others to the brink. 

The people who walk out on the field just like the pros who take the diamond every night to play baseball.  These beep baseball players are inspirations just like baseball players are inspirations.  They may not ask for it or want it, but there is a beauty and wonder attached to anyone who plays at an elite level regardless of the sport.  This book champions that: the elite athlete.  In this case, the athletes just happen to be visually impaired.

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Beep: Inside the unseen world of baseball for the blind
David Wanczyk
246 pages
Swallow Press

Book Review: Once Upon a Team: the Epic Rise and Historic Fall of Baseball's Wilmington Quicksteps

Baseball in the late 1800s is rather foreign to us.  The game was different.  Teams may have had 15 or fewer on the roster, but the club mainly got by with nine players and a second pitcher.  Contracts were largely doled out on a monthly basis and major league level clubs in the 1880s often only lasted a few seasons before disbanding or even falling apart mid-season.  One of the major issues of the time, if you ran a league, was exactly how to backfill teams that dropped out in order to fill out a schedule.  Indeed, baseball as a speculative venture is something that we only get hints of these days with the drawn out process of expansion clubs.

Once Upon a Team is a marvelous book by Jon Springer that explores the primordial ooze from which our current game of baseball emerged. The book investigates the 1880s when the reckless speculative nature of baseball investment was still quite strong.  It is a snapshot of baseball around 1884 with the focal point being the rocket ride that was the Wilmington Quicksteps.  The Quicksteps were a club that lasted for less than a season and were a major investment by John West, who had made his money off a sporting goods store and a gambling house.  His intent was to succeed in Wilmington with baseball where others had failed.  Although his payroll was meager compared to those in the three major league levels (i.e., National League, American Association, Union Association), it was large for the Eastern League, which was a step down from the others.

To give a sense of how unstable the game was, the Eastern League started the season out with eight teams.  By the end of the year, five of those eight had disbanded.  The major leagues fared better in-season with only the American Association and Union Association losing an entry apiece.  This led to the rather amazing fact that the St. Paul Whitecaps (2-6) are the only major league team in history that never played a home game.  Anyway, that is the backdrop.

The story itself follows the trials, tribulations, and success of a Wilmington team consisting of fringe stars like Oyster Burns, the Only Nolan, and Dan Casey.  The team ran roughshod over the Eastern League with those and a mix of colorful players.  However, the fans never really came and West was getting deeper into debt, so when the Union Association's Philadelphia Keystones disbanded, the Quicksteps took up their schedule.  That event resulted in a few players abandoning the club for better deals, such as Oyster Burns signing for a small fortune with the Baltimore Orioles, and the Quicksteps spiraling into terrible play as they entered a league with far more talent.

What really came through in this book though were the personalities and antics of the players.  The behind-the-scenes events that would shape the season and provide great context to the primordial ooze from which our current game emerged.

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Once Upon a Team: the Epic Rise and Historic Fall of Baseball's Wilmington Quicksteps
by Jon Springer
240 pages
Sports Publishing

Book Review: Dick Bosman on Pitching

One of the joys I have in reading biographies of players and coaches is seeing where current ideas and philosophies originated.  Sid Hudson is a name I did not know and, yet, he has a major influence on modern baseball.  Learning who he was and his impact was one of the many kernels of fascinating knowledge that is held within Dick Bosman on Pitching, an autobiography with a bit of help from Ted Leavengood.  It is a remarkable book that not only informs the reader about Bosman's life as a professional pitcher and coach, but also important ideas and approaches that some think are new but are really decades in the making.  For instance, Sid Hudson's push on groundball inducing pitchers.

Pitching is an element of baseball that has struggled emerging from alchemy to actual data science implementation.  You still hear wild hypotheses with little support, such as the dreaded inverted W or emphasis on fatigue throwing in practice.  However, you do find threads of actual data science implementation over the decades.  You, of course, have your earliest attempts with box scores in the 1800s and notions that guys like Branch Rickey or Paul Richards had.  Similarly, you have guys like Sid Hudson with his personal knowledge of utilizing pitch to contact groundball pitchers.

Dick Bosman, a pupil of Sid Hudson, continued on down the path of groundball inducing pitchers, which was seen during his days in Baltimore as a pitching coach in the early 1990s.  It is funny how memory works because I remember him vividly while growing up with the Orioles.  His words largely impacted me on how I pitched.  I developed a nasty two seamer and I had a throw and forget mentality to pitching.  It is fascinating to me, years before the Moneyball groundball mantra, that I was impacted by a groundball guru in Dick Bosman who contracted the idea from Sid Hudson who probably got the idea from someone else.  Yet, this is still alchemy.  Ideas.  Not well tested ideas.  Notions with little desire to push beyond that.  The key was to them that this approach reduced home runs, reduced pitches per innings, and extended starts.  The Athletics (and others) later found this all to be true, mathematically.  Bosman et al. knew it to be true anecdotally.

Where Bosman crossed over into that data science implementation world was his creation of the side step motion to counter the rampant base running that existed in the 1980s.  He found that any catcher worth their salt had a pop time of two seconds or less (which is well evidenced with Statcast now).  He also discovered that good baserunners will get to second base in about 3.5 seconds if they get a decent lead and jump.  Therefore, Bosman realized that as a pitching coach his best way to limit the impact of baserunners was to develop an approach that would get the pitcher from his hand break to the ball into the catcher's glove within 1.7 seconds to have a decent shot at getting the baserunner out.

Did you just twitch?  Yes, this is an idea that Buck Showalter pounds and pounds and pounds with his pitchers.  It is something that hurt Jake Arrieta before he went to the Cubs and they did away with the time to plate ideology.  It is something that hurt Zach Davies before he went to the Brewers and they did away with the extreme use of the idea.  This may make you think Bosman maybe halfway hit on something.  However, Bosman also notes that a side step should not greatly reduce velocity or effectiveness.  You have to work with the pitcher and take him where he is comfortable.

Now, I think perhaps Bosman might well tell you he would prefer not to have a pitcher with Arrieta's mechanics, but I think he would also say that you need to find a way to make him as productive as possible.  He remarks about Roger Pavlik, who he describes as someone with mechanics similar to Arrieta but worse.  Bosman tried to get him to alter his mechanics, but Pavlik resisted.  This led Bosman to do what he could to put Pavlik in the best position possible given the opportunity.


One more tidbit (there are so many to choose from) was about Ivan Rodriguez.  Bosman describes some of the difficulties he faced as a pitching coach and sometimes how the players could impact what you were trying to do.  Even though he was deadset to kill the running game, he found that Rodriguez was too focused on that element of the game.  When runners were on first base, Rodriguez would call for balls away to get him in a better position to throw out the runner.  It led to hitters being able to anticipate the ball.  Rodriguez kept doing this, so Bosman had to instruct his pitchers to take control of pitch calling and shake off Rodriguez in those circumstances.


Bosman now is a minor league instructor with the Rays.  His knowledge over the years still works very well within the heavy data science approach of the Rays.  The book is fairly fascinating and I suggest spending some time with it.

You should consider going to the Barnes and Noble in DC on April 14th to meet him.

Please join us in welcoming Ted Leavengood and Dick Bosman to sign copies of Dick Bosman on Pitching: Lessons from the Life of a Major League Ballplayer and Pitching Coach from 2 to 4pm on Saturday, April 14th. pic.twitter.com/Px2Wol8miA

— BN Potomac Yard (@BNPotomacyard) April 1, 2018

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Dick Bosman on Pitching: Lessons from the Life of a Major League Ballplayer and Pitching Coach
by Ted Leavengood and Dick Bosman
278 p
Rowman and Littlefield Publishers

Book Review: Russell Carleton's The Shift

About ten percent of living an adventurous life is living that adventurous life with the remaining ninety percent relying on the ability to convey how adventurous that life really is.  One of my friends, Richard, is incredibly fascinating.  He grew up in the middle of nowhere on the side of a mountain.  He found himself in a tiny coastal Japanese village teaching English after college.  From there, he quickly earned a law degree and then sort of just globe-trotted to all sorts of destinations to teach a little English, dig a few wells, and whatever else was needed.  Richard has experienced amazing natural and human phenomena, but you need to spend hours and hours with him to figure any of it out because he is completely unable to tell you about it in any interesting way.

Richard really does not know what is actually interesting to share.  He will discuss rather mundane aspects of going to a grocery in Tanzania and completely glossing over running into a band of rebels while he was in Senegal doing work with primates.  His stories have no sense of urgency or trepidation.  Things just happen.  Things resolve themselves.  Nothing ever appears to be at stake.  It is fascinatingly frustrating.

I am reminded of Richard when I read Russell Carleton's offering, The Shift: the Next Evolution in Baseball Thinking.  There is a great story in there, but I do not think he quite knows how to tell it.  Willfully, his analytical approach in the book is light on numbers.  In order to reach out to those who have yet to incorporate data science into their baseball appreciation, a soft approach can be useful.

This increases the difficulty for Carleton.  If you are familiar with his work, you can readily find it at Baseball Prospectus and other places around the internet.  He is a stunningly good analyst.  Carleton is comfortable with numbers, he is comfortable with merging different kinds of research together, and he is comfortable with uncertainty.  He has done incredible work and tackles great questions.  Carleton's online writing sets up his exploratory data science efforts well and the data move forward on their own to drive the stories he tells.  By stripping that away in the book, it removes familiar aspects of his writing and replaces them with what I largely would refer to as language akin to a therapeutic intervention.  While the statements are definitive, they are carefully brought along and padded well in order to try to keep the audience as open-minded as possible and accepting of the journey.

In The Shift, Carleton takes the guise similar to a friendly counselor.  He is there to help guide your journey and uses very infrequent and quite gentle tongue-in-cheek condescension to seemingly establish that he knows what he is communicating to the reader.  It is a style that feels somewhat familiar to me.  My parents, though educated decades before, carry a similar demeanor and I figure it might well be related to their and Carleton's experience in child psychology.  There are gentle rebukes.  There are gentle statements.  There is a lot of hand holding.  The whole process is to move the audience in a direction deliberately, yet not quickly enough to cause anyone to plant their heels firmly onto the ground and refuse to budge.  I would be surprised if anyone threw a tantrum or locked down while reading this book, which is a compliment.  Other writers do not play as nice.

There are actually quite a few introductory data science books you can read with quite varying styles and I will note a few.  Keith Law, for instance, is the crown prince of sarcasm and other barbs.  Ben Lindbergh casts himself often as a babe in the woods who invites you to come and explore with him.  Jonah Keri's several works are done up in a cheerleading style whether the focus is on the Tampa Bay Rays or the Montreal Expos.  Jeff Passan's brand is one of a comrade-in-arms with the players he writes about. The father of this sort of work would be Michael Lewis in his smartest-man-in-the-room-let's-contort-these-facts-into-a-narrative approach.  Pretty much, there is a writer for whoever reaches your soul best.

So, there is merit in what Carleton is doing.  He has found an entry point into what has become a crowded baseball data science field that no one has covered.  In there, he creates a safe sandbox that is light on judgment and filled with muted lights.  For those left unconverted by the existing offerings, this is probably the approach to take to court the rest of the willing.  However, the style falls short for me as it probably should as I am already in the flock.  The examples Carleton provides use minimal data and so the points they address remain vague and abstract.  The slow pacing to bring a doubting mind into the fold is slow and can last for pages with conclusions that come succinctly without much gravity.  The argument is almost wholly in the journey and less so in the destination.

The exploration of baseball data science is half the book.  The half is spaced with personal asides from Carleton on the things he has learned over the course of his life.  The challenges he faces with telling a story about data without much data echo in these sections as he tells stories about his life without telling you much about his life.  His personal story largely is without much introspection or the process toward personal growth.  Carleton's story is largely without adversity.  The greatest adversity that Carleton speaks in detail about is when he watches an Indians game which leaves him exhausted for his flight to see his girlfriend in Atlanta who kindly lets him sleep that afternoon.  The greatest adversity he barely mentions is him effectively ending his career as a therapist.  For someone who offers a process or solutions in how the game of baseball is evolving, he appears reluctant to provide any of that concept to his own personal experiences.  It is a wonder why the stories are actually there.

Carleton largely speaks of a blessed life where things just happen without much consequence.  There is no order.  There is no teasing apart of the world.  The audience is often told to simply accept his word.  For instance, a story is set up about gossipy tales from his father's parking lot business over dinner.  It is a nightly affair, but the stories expressed are in only the broadest of strokes.

His Al Capone's vault style of story telling includes an amazingly improbable run in with a future baseball executive.  It is perhaps the least interesting two ships passing in the night story I have ever heard.  It is a long setup about Carleton looking for colleges and winds up settling down at a school where he eventually goes.  There he runs into an admissions officer who happens to be Jed Hoyer.  Carleton notes how they talked about baseball and wanting to be in baseball.  I am not leaving out any specifics there.  That is it.

His writings about his family bring across everyone as quite lovely and wonderful people without any of the details to explain why.  Carleton is quite smitten with his wife.  That is wonderful.  Carleton calls her the most interesting person he has ever met.  I believe that he holds that as a conviction even though that statement is one offered for us only to be taken upon on faith.  He provides us no stories about her.  He does not try to explain what mesmerizes him.  He keeps us at arm's length.  We are only invited to the sidewalk to peer into their home from across the front lawn.  We have the outcome, but none of the inner mechanics.  The personal stories run so counter to the data science stories.

And so when I finished the book, it felt so much like a sandbox.  Lines were drawn, but they did not carry much definition and they were too easily lost.  The author spoke from his heart and communicated personally, yet what information was I really left with that I had not already possessed before?  Perhaps the intent is to provide a path for the journey devoid of specifics so that we are free, without being led, to provide our own ideas and thoughts along the way.  A kind of therapeutic intervention for those who fear putting a measurement (or a kind of measurement) into a conversation about baseball.

I think it would be fair to say I really wanted to like this book.  Carleton's writing and research is absolutely wonderful and I suggest everyone to read everything he puts on your computer screen.  This effort... I think there is an audience that would greatly appreciate and connect with it.  I do not know who that audience is.

-----

The Shift: The Next Evolution in Baseball Thinking
by Russell Carleton
Triumph Books
368 pg

Danger at the Ballpark

As a child, my understanding of ballpark injuries was the scene at the end of Field of Dreams where the young girl chokes on a hot dog.  Baseball still felt like a secure and safe environment where the only harm comes from freakish occurrences.  That changed in Little League when our man-child, Skip, went behind the dugout to get a few extra swings in for hope in launching the ball over the pond and maybe even all the way to the Random House factory beyond.  Another player on the team, Chad, walked behind the dugout for some reason or another.  All I remember is a thud and a tooth skittering under the wall and ricocheting off my cleat.  Still, the danger of actual baseball seemed largely confined to where the players were.

I feel foolish to admit it, but the danger posed in the stands beyond choking on hotdogs was something that really only came to mind in 2006 when Jay Gibbons hit a line drive into the stands where it hit his wife, bruising her ribs.  At the time he said in an article that did not really take the incident seriously:

Long before the matter became personal, Gibbons had asked team
officials to do something about making it safer to sit in the seats
behind the plate. He contended that the 20-foot screen just doesn't
offer enough protection from hard-hit foul balls.
"It's something you think about every day here. Obviously, it's
something I've talked about [to] deaf ears," said Gibbons,
Baltimore's designated hitter and player representative. "I've got
players coming to me every day saying that one of their family
members got hit or almost got hit. I had an usher take one for my
wife the other day."

He ended the interview with the statement, "It's either come to the game and play Russian Roulette with your 3-year-old or stay home".

At that point I realized how unhinged the baseball industry is in protecting their spectators.  The protective special duty rule, the Baseball Rule, was established in 1914 and says that a team is protected from any liability if it offers protection for the area it deems to be most dangerous.  While all other industries have modernized their concepts of consumer liability, baseball has not and many legislatures have protected baseball from any changes in the application of the Baseball Rule.

This year every MLB team will have extended netting to protect fans.  This was initiated by the gruesome foul ball injury on a little girl at Yankee Stadium.  Somehow this injury sustained the attention of the media and sports industry.  This event did something that previous terrible injuries and death of children and adults did not do, make MLB take minimal actions in protecting their fans.  It is stunning it took so long.  Teams encourage families to buy these dangerous seats.  Teams encourage fans to engage in what happens on the scoreboard, with mascots, with attendants, and still expects them to be fully attentive to the game.  This includes the fan taking on blame for instances where it would be impossible for fans to be able to react in time.

This issue was so well known that MLBPA in the last three negotiations has asked for more fan protection.  The owners dismissed this out of hand and, admittedly, the players moved onto their own more self important issues.

What I am saying here is that the issue is that fans, like me, greatly ignore or underestimate the issue, owners largely do not care at all about the issue, and players care enough to note it but do not make it a core issue.  With the increase it screening, we should expect a decrease in incident rate from 1 in 28,751 fans having significant medical intervention performed at stadiums each year (which is likely under reporting because some incidents immediately seek care outside of the stadium grounds or hours to days later) because the baseball rule still does not adequately protect fans from dangers, such as maple bats splintering that are able to pass through the netting gauge size.  MLB is still playing Russian Roulette.  

This leads us to a book that came out last year Danger at the Ballpark.  The book is a sober overview of the issue.  It covers the early history of spectator injuries, the creation and implementation of the Baseball Rule, and goes through several case studies where teams and the league fought hard to retain the rule to prevent any notion of liability.  The book notes how fans have had their lives altered with chronic pain management, loss of eyes, and the loss of the loved one.  It is a hard read.

The book lacks Jay Gibbons' incident and his words, but it collects the words of many professional baseball players from interviews over the years noting how dangerous it is to sit near the field without protection and how fans are not trained to adequately recognize the danger or protect themselves from that danger.

Fan safety at games has been an issue I have been trumpeting since the day Gibbons, but this book really puts together the evidence and intellectual underpinnings of why MLB needs to change.  If you want to hone up on that rationale or challenge yourself if you have a different opinion, this book will do its best to push you to recognize the danger at the ballpark.

_____

Danger at the Ballpark

Jack Herskowitz

Trimark Press 

Book Review: Keith Law's Smart Baseball

We all can -- and should -- strive to learn something new. That's the main idea behind Keith Law's book, Smart Baseball.

The extended title of the book is Smart Baseball: The Story Behind the Old Stats That Are Ruining the Game, the New Ones That Are Running It, and the Right Way to Think About Baseball, and, well, that tells you plenty. Law undertakes the arduous task of explaining which traditional baseball statistics are misleading or not that informative (part one), and which numbers fans should be looking at instead (part two). Some chapters focus on topics like why batting average is flawed, why pitcher wins can be deceiving, and the issues with fielding percentage. Then, to close things out in part three, Law puts newer stats to use while painting a picture of what's next (including MLB Statcast and how scouting is changing).

If you've ever made your way to, say, the comments section under a MASNsports.com article, or maybe engaged in a debate about baseball on Twitter or *gasp* Facebook, then you know the number of fans who still rely on things like batting average, runs batted in, pitcher wins, and saves to win arguments about the value of current players. Because of the rise of sites like Baseball-Reference, FanGraphs, and Baseball Prospectus, there aren't quite as many of those fans around, but there are still lots of them. And that's OK, because not everyone has to look at baseball the same way.

But for those fans who want to know more about the game and how to more approximately value what's happening on the field, this book is a tremendous help. For someone looking to simply jump headfirst into baseball analytics, I can't think of many better ways to get started. Even for those who already read lots of analytical writing about baseball, Law's work is still worthwhile and includes new ways to approach much-debated topics.

Law tackles complex subjects and breaks them down bit by bit, slowly adding to each part and showing you why things matter. Why is on-base percentage important? What the heck is WAR, wOBA, or wRC+, and why should you not avoid them? How do analysts even attempt to separate pitching and defense? What makes one fielder better than another, and what's the best way to measure that? Why is the clutch baseball player a myth? For those seeking to learn more about the game they love, Law's book is a quick and informative read.

The last line of the epilogue stuck with me: "Using the best knowledge we have right now while remembering that we may know a lot more in the future is the essence of Smart Baseball." There's always something else to learn, and that's especially true if you can't get enough baseball.

-----

Smart Baseball
Keith Law
304 pages
William Morrow
Paperback available: March 13, 2018

If God Invented Baseball

E. Ethelbert Miller is a name that you have heard of.  You have heard him on the radio, perhaps on television, perhaps at some even here or there.  If you are not of the world of poetry, then perhaps that is a name that whispers to you at such a distance that you can just quite make out what is being said yet still remain unsure.  The world we usually walk in is the baseball world and that world does in fact overlap with Miller's in ways that should be readily known to us as if a part of us has always known, but never quite said.

If God Invented Baseball is a collection of Miller's poetry that utilizes the familiar knowledge we share of baseball as a way to communicate that reaches down into our soul.  Baseball lets your guard down and enables the author to reach in with his message before your natural walls come up or your filters lock into place.  Baseball provides a construct and an even ground to offer up personal truths about life.  And that is what the works in this book is about, I think.  I think it is about life.

The book opens with a poem, Ball Four, about Jim Bouton.  A meeting between the poet in his youth and Bouton as a young hurler with enormous potential.  Miller grew up in New York City and focus on a Yankee team that was not as shiny and clean and damily friendly as today's incarnation was.  However, Bouton was always known as a kind soul.  He was someone who would line children up and spend a moment with each as he signed a few autographs.  As an opening poem, the collection asks us to think back to our childhood; the innocence, the naivete.  The truth about that point in life, the narrator's and perhaps your own.

As the collection progresses, we find that not only is this a work that speaks of the author's own experiences, it is a work that tries to expand that message and broaden it.  Later in the book, Miller pens The Trade.  The Trade tries to communicate an incident where part of childhood dies when the greater world opens up.  The narrator speaks of when his parents come to tell him he is being bused across the city to a predominantly white school.  How it was the first time he realized there was a discerning aspect to himself that he did not fully comprehend before: his blackness.  The narrator summons Curt Flood, the baseball player who sacrificed himself to bring about free agency.  With that inclusion, the narrator communicates that there can be loss when forging something new, something that attempts to be better.

The collection continues to wind through ruminations about life as one would progress through it in time.  It ends with two poems.  One about the changing of the guard.  It is about the passing of the elders.  The other is maybe a rebuke to the preceding poem in that life should be lived in the moment as opposed to calculating what has been lost or gained.  The one should give themselves to the moment and fully embrace it with your senses.

The collection was eye opening to me.  I come from a liberal arts education, but veered right into the sciences.  In the sciences, I have been for 17 years.  Poetry is not my normal feed.  I devour biographies, technical writing, and what not.  And perhaps that is where these poems touched me in that it effectively is a biography.  A biography that is stripped, reduced to a familiar syrup at least until about halfway through when the poems began taking me into my future.

Beyond me, the works charge into a political arena as well as into how race connects to many issues.  I found the use of baseball as a metaphor, a construct for these issues to be rather effective.  With that in mind, I would like to leave you one poem to consider.  One aspect you might find interesting is the impression former Oriole Hoyt Wilhem had on the author and how it was a defining moment in his youth that he uses to relate to you something else.

The Knuckleball  

Every black man should be born
with a big mitt.
How else can one catch the world
that flutters in unpredictable ways.  

The sound of a knuckleball
is Parker on his horn.
When Ella scats don’t try
to copy her.  

Oriole Hoyt Wilhelm in 1958 threw
a no-hitter against the Yankees.
It was like Douglass being Lincoln
for a day. It’s impossible to dance
to slavery anymore. It ended with
the hangman’s swing.  

The knuckleball is Bebop.
Don’t be baffled by its strange beauty.
Just keep hitting it with your ears.

-----

If God Invented Baseball
E. Ethelbert Miller
72 pages
City Point Press

In Praise of Shadows: Or Living to Learn with Uncertainty

This off season frustrates writer and fan alike.  A talent log jam continues to impede the off season.  Early on, this was a pretty wondrous thing.  No longer were hopes and dreams dashed to bit during and shortly after the winter meetings.  Free agent signings were allowed to dance in our heads over the winter holidays, but those dances have grown stale and reporting dates for Spring Training are almost here.  What once was a wondrous discussion of how the Orioles would fill up their starting rotation has instead turned into a dreadful pondering about what if the music ends without the a chair to sit on.  To put it succinctly, the Orioles have some uncertainty and uncertainty is a friend of few people.

We all have a familiarity with uncertainty; be it with the outcomes of baseball active roster construction or with our daily commute.  How we handle this varies from person to person, but in general there are three schools of approach.  Two of the major ones are optimistic aggression and defensive pessimism.  Yes, these are extremes, but they are two of the major tent poles that house everyone.

Positive aggression has an allure.  It reminds me of Billy Beane talking about Lenny Dykstra in Micheal Lewis's Moneyball.  Beane was the athletic wunderkind while Dyskstra was  one the thin side of tools.  However, Dykstra saw every failure as an event to forget; as simple bad luck.  He was always sure that he would kill the pitcher with his next opportunity.  Where doubt entered into any decision making process, he overwhelmed that with imaging pure and utter success.  What is alluring about it is to be free from self-doubt, hesitation, and crippling concerns.

How we can do this can range from pure wish casting to imagine preferable outcomes to pushing the thumb down on the projection spectrum.  Science does validate this approach as beneficial.  Being optimistic about your world around and your place in it tends to mean that you do much better being successful in that world.  So, at the plate, optimism helps the final score, but perhaps not so much optimism on your couch in February.  There are limits to its application, but optimism will probably make your life better.

However, defensive pessimism can be a useful approach as well.  The idea here is that you prepare for the worst and enjoy anything above that expectation.  In general, defensive pessimism seems just as successful as optimistic outlooks.  Though, it seems that pessimism is probably poor for your well being.  The studies do not appear to measure the positive impact of being pleasantly surprised, but it appears that the chronic condition of expecting the worse increases certain health risks (e.g., heart disease).  Now, of course, these studies are about overall life perspectives and how those impact the ability and well being of an individual.  It may well be that people who are pessimistic about the Orioles are simply highly compartmentalized and that these studies have no true application to their lives.

Now, there is a third perspective: acceptance of uncertainty.  Twenty years ago, I read Junichiro Tanazaki's In Praise of Shadows (avid readers may recognize that I wrote about this wocolumn for MASN).  It is a quick read, an essay measuring in at 56 pages.  The work was published in 1933, a period of dramatic changes for Japan.  The country was transitioning from one that was very inward looking in terms of practical life and aesthetics into a society that was steadily embracing Western perspectives from Europe and North America.  It was a difficult and frustrating time for many whether they were invested in retaining their past or whether they were busily embracing their concept of progress.  You could draw many comparisons to that time as you could to baseball in the early 2000s if you are ever so inclined.
rk when I had a

The passing of the familiar to the uncertainty of a supposedly progressive future is something we all can relate whether it be to a new school, career path, marriage, kids, or the loss of a loved one.  Sometimes the uncertainty is exhilarating and sometimes it is debilitating.  Humorously enough, one of the sixteen explorations of competing applications of philosophical thought that Tanazaki puts forth is a comparison between the Western design of toilets and traditional Japanese monastery lavatories.  The Western ideal--harsh brightly lit spaces, glaring white, with no corner left without illumination--intends to offer complete transparency and fully define everything into a strong measure of certainty.  The process never accepts the craft of proper restroom maintenance, but to ensure the caretaker makes great effort to show you how well they keep this area.  In contrast, Japanese aesthetic tradition is extolled as a great virtue and surmised as where all great haiku are born.  This aesthetic embraces the outside world, incorporates shadows and rich lacquered surfaces, and highlighting the grain and imperfections of wood.  It encourages you to accept uncertainty.  To place that part of existence away from your mind and to focus or maybe even enjoy that with which you can actually perceive.

Evolutionarily speaking, being certain about the uncertain can render benefits.  By defining the world around us, we can establish a range of possible occurrences.  For instance, if your tribe expects all outside tribes to be dangerous then your tribe may be well prepared for particularly catastrophic interactions by reacting strongly and violent to all outside tribes.  That expectation or stereotype may be wrong, but it may be beneficial to a critical degree when it would actually be an accurate assumption.  That false sense of knowing can be useful.  It probably is why we are so conditioned to fit into one of those first two groups: optimists and pessimists.  You can plan to that.  You can square those part of the world away.  Devise applicable protocols for infrequent incidents.  Your life seems more in control.  Even if the long term nature of pessimism may have adverse health effects, perhaps it is better than to be stuck in the void of wanting to know without being able to know.

To me, when I read In Praise of Shadows twenty years ago, I recognized how firmly I had to know things.  How much I needed the world to be defined.  It was not necessarily that I was liberal in taking the shortcuts that stereotypes provide, but I certainly was less interested in methodology of determining correctness than I was in being able to perceive that I was correct.  What I took forward with me though was that I need to strive into something I referred to as practiced indifference.  In other words, we can plan and ponder what the world is or will be, but not spiral when my knowledge starts thinning out.  Instead, I practiced to accept that some aspects of my own knowable world will open when they open whether there is a reason for when that happens or even if there is no reason for when it happens.

So, it worked for me.  I let go of the need to know things in life and replaced that with the open and interested exploration of what I was able to look at.  And it may be something that might not work for others.  Some have grown frustrated with me for my lack of extreme disapproval for Dan Duquette's tenure and others have become frustrated that I do not speak about his greatness.  Some claim that my goal is to be measured without true assessment of the positives and negatives.  Rather, I would say my outlook is one where I require a certain amount of clear facts before I become committed to a certain outlook.  Yes, conclusions should be fluid entities that can alter based on new information coming in, but we should acknowledge the uncertainty in a given scenario to ensure that our conclusions are meaningful.

This in no way means to be paralyzed by inaction.  If the facts are not clear and presentable to determine the ability of the current front office to bring success to the Orioles, then we fall back to different ways to assess the club.  We can look to exhibited philosophies, of actions, of expressed desires while noting that this information is often not an actual representation of the objectives of the front office.  Some of it is intentionally misleading.  Some of it is a product of constraints put into place by ownership, by occupying one of the smaller markets in Major League Baseball, or simply a matter of logistics.  While I am reserved in my declaration of where Dan Duquette stands on the spectrum of GM aptitude, I can say that the style he exhibits would not be my own or what I would prefer to see with the club.  However, I can say that perhaps his style may well be best for the context this club exists in.  Ultimately though we are left with fairly uncertain terms to provide a judgement, so I think it is appropriate to acknowledge that uncertainty.

And that is where we are.  We simply do not know what the Orioles are doing.  We simply do not know what the rest of MLB is doing.  There is very little movement anywhere.  Yes, the Orioles have needs, but so do others.  For me, it is difficult to get upset or irritated because there are shadows everywhere.  We have no clarity.  In those shadows, you can envision great, wonderful things happening.  You might also be able to extrapolate and conjure truly catastrophic outcomes.  Or you can just sit and wait until something more clear comes through while you may or may not gently infer about just what might well be happening..

So, I ask you not to lecture me about "What does pessimism ever get you?" or "You are deluding yourself with Orange Kool-Aid."  Both of those perspectives have merit.  For me, I find the required dogma of those outlooks to be a bit exhausting, unproductive, and fraught with unneeded surprises.  Just leave me in the shadows until the light naturally breaks through.

Book Club: The Only Rule Is It Has To Work

Disclaimer: Ben Lindbergh and I wrote this piece on Spring Training performance and the John Dewan Rule, so I know him somewhat.  Sam Miller was my editor during my stint writing for Baseball Prospectus and we actually briefly discussed potential talent to acquire for the Stompers...very briefly.

Before computers were a staple in most homes, I had baseball cards.  My favorite ones were not the sought after rookie cards, but those that covered a player's final season and all that came before.  Rookie cards mattered if they included minor league seasons.  Hours were then spent with my brother "drafting" teams, constructing lineups, piecing together rotations, and arguing which team was superior.  We would create model ballparks and discuss differences between playing fields in how they impacted performance.  That is what my brother and I did when it rained or snowed or if we were up at 1am and UHF channels were boring.

With that kernel to my being, Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller wrote a book that slots right into the more primordial substrates in my brain.  In The Only Rule Is It Has To Work, the duo write about their experience in jockeying into position to run a professional baseball team for a season.  No, they were not able to instruct the best players in the World at the MLB stage.  Instead, they worked with a rung of very, very good baseball players; the kind that exist on the lower rungs of professional baseball.  For a season, they ran baseball operations for the Sonoma Stompers.

While those familiar with the Baseball Prospectus and Five Thirty Eight writings of the two might expect an analytical book, that is not what this is.  Yes, the authors underpin their choices with analysis, but that is not the focus.  The focus is how exactly do you incorporate these ideas into an organization that would likely benefits from those ideas, but is greatly suspicious of your ability.  In other words, this book is primarily a process oriented book about people without industry credibility figuring out how to implement change.

The preponderance of and imperfect approach to achieving some level of control of the club is what gives the first half of the book its amazing helium.  Ben and Sam clash with the manager who the players generally dislike, but still admire more than Ben and Sam.  Navigating through that is quite compelling.  It actually is something a reader can look at and think of how it may reflect their own experiences in their industry.

The second half of the book though unravels a bit.  For reasons often beyond their control, their team begins to fall apart.  This leaves the authors into a great deal of self reflection.  The second half winds up taking on a completely different tone and somewhat gets lost in itself.  In a way, we learn more about Ben and Sam, but that increased knowledge does not exactly inform us about who they are within the context of running this club.  It turns from applied memoir to a more traditional in-the-mind memoir.

If I was to compare it to another work, I would call it a Full Metal Jacket book.  Like Full Metal Jacket, the first half is at times stunning and impactful.  I read many things that I have actually seen quite similar in the experiences of friends in MLB analytic departments.  The second half, like Full Metal Jacket's second half, takes on a different tone and I am a bit nonplussed as to how, as a reader, I am to take it.  There certainly are memorable moments in that second half, but it struggles to sustain the energy that continually fuels the first half.

Yes, you should pick this book up.  It is one of the best baseball books to come out in the past few years.  No, it is not transcendent.  It won't make you question your beliefs unless you are one of those data science or die stereotypes that supposedly fill up mothers' basements.  It is however a solid and enjoyable case study.  There are lessons to be learned, though you might have to figure out what exactly those are on your own.

-----

The Only Rule Is It Has to Work: Our Wild Experiment Building a New Kind of Baseball Team
by Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller
368 pages
Henry Holt and Co.

The Most Important Baseball Book Is A Swamp

The Tommy John epidemic, my stomach turns and an eye roll image occupies my mind.  The word epidemic, in this context, is chosen when the person speaking wishes to gin up concern in his audience.  Epidemics, of course, result from infectious agents while pitchers bust UCLs by throwing a baseball. Properly translated, the message is that the incidence of ligament replacement surgery for arm injuries is increasing at epidemic proportions as pitchers at the professional and amateur levels are lying down on operating tables in record numbers.  That hard count concerns many and Jeff Passan's The Arm addresses this issue.  Passan intent is for his work will have far-reaching consequences.

We want every person involved with youth baseball to #ReadTheArm. I think it's an important book. I think you'llagree once you read it.

— Jeff Passan(@JeffPassan) March 23, 2016

The book familiarizes the reader with how elbow ligaments are torn and how the joint is repaired.  It opens with a description of the procedure that Frank Jobe created and performed on Tommy John.  Briefly, holes are drilled through bone.  A tendon is then procured from the patient or a cadaver, is laced through the holes, and ties the joint together.  Over time, the tendon transforms into a ligament.  Over time, players go through immense physical and mental challenges to return to the mound.  Over time, MLB continues to make, at best, half-hearted attempts to address what may have always been happening: throwing a ball destroys arms and crushes dreams.

Passan pays particular attention to the youth game in the United States and the one in Japan.  In the United States, he paints the sports medicine culture progressive, yet reactionary.  He describes youth baseball organizations in the throes of grabbing as much money as possible.  Passan uses Japan as foil.  The country is characterized as medically regressive.  The sport hampered with an obligation to follow a historical bushido-influenced baseball code which legitimizes practices like nagekomi.  This approach to pitching utlizes daily marathon throwing sessions to establish "perfect" throwing mechanics.  Of course, children in both countries though find themselves broken and in pain.  Neither appears to be addressing the situation well.

Interlaced between the 30,000 foot narrative are the two personal stories of Daniel Hudson and Todd Coffey.  Both are going through difficulties recovering from ligament revisions (second surgeries).  The long, slow, inch-by-inch rehabilitation process toys with the competitive mind and invites depression.  Individuals must practice extreme self-discipline and benefit greatly with a strong family support structure.  Throughout the book, Passan returns to them to give gravity, and sometimes levity, to this issue.

The fourth prong is Passan trying to wade through the swamp that is the field of arm injury prevention.  He tries to consolidate the efforts used to prevent arm injuries from happening in the first place.  He meanders through the sideshows of pitching gurus and snake oil salesmen to fall upon the work of Kyle Boddy and James Buffi.  To varying extends, both use scientific tools and foundations to develop applications to improve preventative approaches to avoid arm injuries as well as increase velocity.  The section is perhaps a bit too brief.  Passan familiarizes that there are many approaches currently trying to address this issue and that none will likely produce sound results beyond logical inference and case study success.

While reading, I did have three major contentions with the narrative presented and I will address them below.

On Youth Baseball
Major League Baseball drives baseball in this country, often indirectly.  MLB is notoriously reactionary and tends to be more concerned with optics than impact.  For example, the league's concern with steroids was limited to a bargaining chip against the union until congress became irrationally involved.  This resulted in a PED program that is focused on punishment as opposed to player health.  The arm injury issue is fairly similar.  Injuries have always been an issue, but with cries of "Think of the children!" increasing in volume MLB might decide to wield its clumsy hammer.

The playbook is simple.  The first thing MLB does is to lay blame elsewhere.  That target is Perfect Game and it is pretty clear in this book that the league's message has found its way into the pages.  Perfect Game came into being because MLB ignored amateur baseball and its members were not interested in joining forces to make scouting easier.  Perhaps, the clubs with better scouting departments did not want to make things easier for others.  Anyway, Perfect Game filled that hole by organizing showcases and tournaments to make it easier for amateurs to be seen by scouts.  In turn, scouts are thankful that Perfect Game streamlines the process to see the big named amateurs.

Of course, this service costs money to run.  Owners and employees like to support families as well as have nice things, so additional money will need to exchange hands.  Likewise, the customer base has to find all these services worth the money.  Once Perfect Game found the sweet spot for success, competitors came in.  Perfect Game then engages families of children as young as four and five in order to pipeline them into teen tournaments when they get older.  The problems inherent in the industry magnify with Perfect Game as a convenient target.

This too is how The Arm treats Perfect Game, as a target.  Parents and MLB are upset over arm injuries, but placing blame on the infrastructure that all parties desired is misguided.  The infrastructure is not the problem.  It merely highlights it while it tries to implement heralded approaches to keep arms safe.  Those heralded approaches are akin to alchemy, but implementing the best ideas around is the most one can expect of companies like Perfect Game.

This not to say that Perfect Game is a flawless moral actor in youth baseball.  The Arm notes that they present to parents of seven year olds reports that indicate whether their kid is on the same path as Mike Trout.  That is some vicious exploitation of parents and children.  There is no reason for them to publicly communicate that to parents because it is so misleading.  I would understand if they did that for internal records in order to figure out who to keep tabs on and provide invitations, but it is not something that parents are likely able to comprehend.  Then again, people like bells and whistles, so maybe the customer desires to be willingly misled.

The Arm also discusses how baseball in Japan is grueling.  It presents the Japanese style as a practice in recreational bushido.  Coaches demand total allegiance, unending repetition, and suffering.  Arm injuries are treated with throwing, which is a concept that American medicine abandoned 50 years ago.  While American medical counterparts are composed of individuals well-trained in tendon and ligament injuries, Japanese sports medicine appears to be dominated by bone specialists with passing knowledge of ligament replacement.  The Arm suggests that by ignoring ligament injuries, the Japanese way is regressive, but that might be more damning in relation to adult pitchers as opposed to children.  Of course, the demanding nature of Koshien (i.e., a pitcher throwing over 500 pitches is normal over the short length of the tournament) and daily practices appear to be absurd, but maybe they are not.

The Arm tends to make a Gonzo style narrative conclusion and then later dismantles that conclusion without much contemplation.  For instance, Passan is appalled at how the Japanese game tears up its youth.  That conclusion is later challenged with an adoring description of supposedly how Trevor Bauer turned himself into a wunderkind by throwing 360 days a year.  For the well-disciplined reader, this communicates how the industry is unsure how to solve this issue and acts almost completely on what simply sounds like a good idea.  Again, this is what alchemy is and a lot of smart people like Newton logically thought lead could be turned to gold.  Logic is quite important, but it can lead you down some errant rabbit holes.

Convoluted Section on Avoiding Injury
The Arm aggressively notes problems and then languidly searches for answers.  The whole thesis leads up to a brief section infatuated with the efforts of Kyle Boddy and, to a lesser extent, James Buffi.  Passan presents two individuals who many consider the most forward thinking arm researchers in the game.  Largely ignored are established researchers like Glen Flesig and his group at ASMI.  In that way, the book frames Boddy and Buffi as the future.

Personally, I know several smart baseball folks who believe in Boddy.  I also do not consider what Boddy does as science.  His work is more on an applied engineering scale or perhaps similar to a doctor using a medicine off label and publishing a case study.  Yes, there may be something there and it relies on established science, but Boddy is not carrying the scientific method forward.  Instead, his work relies on lottery tickets to establish the perception of success.  Without the amazing success of Casey Weathers, Boddy would not have much to point toward.  One could just as easily focus on Nick Hagadone who did not reap benefits by working with Boddy.  As with most pitching success mantras, people forget the failure and provide a narrative for the success.

Boddy can implement a wide range of peer-reviewed mechanics papers into his approaches.  While the foundation of his work is connected with science, his work and his evaluation of his work is not science.  Again, this does not mean Boddy is wrong.  Instead, he likely gets some things right similar to other pitching specialists.  There are probably many ways to skin a baseball as opposed to one Way.  Maybe there is a single way at this elite level, but that has not been firmly established.

Boddy certainly is a rarity amongst pitching gurus.  He does publicize his errors in reasoning when he takes a turn in his approach.  His manner comes across more cleanly than that of someone like Chris O'Leary with his defensive obsession with letter shaped arm angles inverted-W (as seemingly described in the Arm).  Most everyone has a gimmick and if you take in a cynical perspective, Boddy's gimmick is "Science!" in a suit filled with alchemy.  In essence though, this field is still an applied mish mash of what sounds like good ideas.  Practitioners are often snake oil salesmen and I am unsure if this book effectively communicates that.

Pointless Vulgarity
I struggled with whether I would include this section in the review.  However, Passan emphasized that this work is intended to be read by anyone involve in youth baseball, so I should write to how he misses that mark.  In one way he missed was his infrequent, yet noticeable, use of vulgarity throughout the work.  While players or wives cussing in quotes provides a closer intimation of who they are as real people, I am at a loss why Passan chooses for him as a narrator to indulge in ways that do not meaningfully improve how he communicates his message.  Instead, his profanity appears to communicate a desire of the author to be one with the players in the training room and in the dugout.

For instance, Passan writes vaguely about Todd Coffey doing everything right as a model AAA relief pitcher on and off the field as he believes he was promised to be the first player called up to Seattle.  Instead, he is passed over for younger arms. Passan states Coffey is being blue-balled.  For those offended, I apologize for writing that term, but for some in the audience it may be unfamiliar.  The term is slang for a sexually frustrated man who thinks a women strongly led him on and then rejects him.  It is a term that blames a woman for reconsidering consent.  While aptly empathizing the situation Coffey experiences, I find it quite strange for this to be written and pass by the eyes of editors when the intent for this work to serve as a public outreach tool.

While many families will read these words and wind up unfazed, we all can imagine that a significant portion would hesitate handing over language like this to their kid.  Whether or not you think parents should be more open to language use like this, the fact remains that these words consequentially may bring exclusivity to the message.  One wonders if the author is so moved by the suffering of pitchers the world over, why would he think of using a few words here or there to challenge them to reject his writing.  At best, this is obtuse or, maybe, spreading the word was a last minute idea to drive sales.  Perhaps, that is unfairly cynical.  To be clear, language like this is infrequent in this 300 some page book.  With that in mind, maybe more sensitive readers will be inclined to gloss over those passages. However, I am wholly nonplussed by its inclusion.  The language does not contribute to the overall message and potentially works against his message that he has self-ordained to be so important and so consequential in the production of this work.

Conclusion
Everyone should read the Arm.  Everyone.  The book has warts, most books do.  The author often paints himself in a corner only to fleetingly admit that he is contradicting previous conclusions.  Passan can oversell what he deems as a success, but is so soft in his final vague suggestion of a solution that I think it is passable.  It passes unlike another break-the-mold book like Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World has Never Seen.  That book wrongly inspired many people to think that minimalist shoes, chia-lime water, and 80 mile runs were good for everyone.  Passan's soft shrug of a sale puts the Arm in a better context.

However, by lacking cohesive in his final statement, Passan ultimately fails if we hold him to his stated intent of impacting youth baseball.  If a reader comes into this book, like me, with a strong understanding of what is occurring, then a disciplined and balanced reading may prove thought provoking.  If the reader is a concerned local coach or parent, then they have very little in their hands at the end of the book beyond concern and confusion.  While the book notes the toll on youth pitchers, it provides no solution or path for them.  The only solution suggested is in a few beams of light being swallowed up by individual MLB teams that will keep that information proprietary.  Instead, Passan leaves the adults on the lowest rung lost in the swamp.  One might suggest that the book lets these individuals become aware of the swamp, but what good is that when it provides nothing instructive and no real place to turn.

To reiterate, a reader must pay attention and be critical when reading this book.  The narrative jumps around, which keeps a reader interested but will often leave the message disjointed.  There is also one-sidedness to the discussion as Passan inserts himself in discussions and begins to paint himself as a reluctantly competent on the issue.  This may be a product of access or cutting things out to improve narrative flow.  Chris O'Leary, one of Passan's punching bags, has complained publicly that his interview consisted of sitting with Passan at a Cardinals game for two innings and that he was never offered a full interview to explain his thoughts.  Sometimes, that happens in research with pressing deadlines or simply moving narratives.  However, one should not consider this book to be a comprehensive look at all the near science being sermonized in baseball.  The work is simply Passan's sometimes chosen and sometimes permitted journey through this swamp of an issue.

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The Arm: Inside the Billion-Dollar Mystery of the Most Valuable Commodity in Sports
by Jeff Passan
Harper
368 pp.