Beaneball

I've finally managed to finish Weaver on Strategy, mainly because I decided to just sit down and finish it before I started the next magazine. The book was as good as advertised, and I can heartily recommend it to any baseball fan anywhere, anytime. You can see a lot of parallels between the things that Weaver was doing and saying at the time (the book was written in 1984) and the modern analytical movement. I think Earl Weaver is at least as influential as Bill James in the game, at least in terms of changing the game from the inside. Who knows how long the information revolution would have taken to reach baseball had it only been the geeks on the outside who were doing the analysis. Having a Weaver show that using data inside the game could really have a strong effect has probably made a world of difference in the rapidity of acceptance of these ideas in front offices and clubhouses around the major leagues. The book ends with a 2002 update, based on an interview done by Chris Kahrl, from Baseball Prospectus (this version of the book was published by Brassey, BP's publisher up until the 2004 version of the annual), but it's fairly short and far from comprehensive. I think I'm going to end up doing a series of posts about the book, particularly its relevance to the modern game. I'll probably go chapter-by-chapter, or something that approximates that. It should be a fun little exercise.

Posted by jason in Baseball, Reading at 10:53 | |

My 200th entry in this blog is unfortunately to be a sad one: Ralph Wiley, one of the best, most interesting, most provocative, most original sportswriters around, passed on at home on Sunday. He was just 52, and his age and sudden death are eerily similar to Doug Pappas's passing. Like Pappas, Wiley often wrote things contrary to the accepted stream of thought of the American public, and like Pappas, he did it well enough that reading his work was an aesthetic pleasure as well as an intellectual one. I'm not familiar enough with Wiley's career body of work, but I read a number of his columns from his time at ESPN's Page 2, and they were always engaging, always creative, and always aggressive. Aggressiveness can be a distraction or an annoyance if it isn't done well, but this never seemed true of Wiley's work; rather, it was just all the more obvious that he felt true passion about his subject. Wiley's passion was not simply that of an admirer of sports and athletes, either. He wrote, more than any other sportswriter I know, about free speech, politics, and, most of all, about race. Wiley realized that the country still has a lot to work out in the field of race relations, and he never backed off from saying so loudly. As many said when the news of Doug Pappas's death was heard, we can only hope that writers absorb the lessons Wiley was trying to teach and continue down the path he blazed. UPDATE: Chris Lehmann has written a little something about Wiley as well. It's weird that of all the sports blogs I read, no one has really mentioned this. On the other hand, Wiley wasn't really known as a baseball writer, so I guess he was not really on the baseball blogosphere's radar.

Posted by jason in Reading at 18:39 | |