Rob Neyer

This is a kind of update to two influential baseball books — Moneyball (the 2003 Michael Lewis book focusing on Billy Beane and the Oakland A’s’ organizational strategies) and Nine Innings (Daniel Okrent’s 1985 dissection of baseball as viewed through the lens of a single game played in 1982).

Since Moneyball was written, there has been an explosion of data and data analysis. We thought that the Moneyball era was heavy with emphases on things like On Base Percentage, Games Won Above show more Replacement, etc. But now we are in what Neyer calls the “Statcast Era,” after the Statcast technology. As Neyer says, “. . . if it’s on the field and it moves, Statcast is watching. And recording.” Statcast churns out terabytes of data for every game, from the mundane (e.g., speed of pitches) to whole new levels of detail on player performance — pitchers’ spin rates on each of the pitches they throw, those exit velocities and launch angles we see now on baseball telecasts. Old traditional stats like ERA, Batting Average, and RBIs are on the junk pile.

What the explosion of data allows is not only judging a player’s actual performance in new ways, but projecting their potential performance. Just as the A’s were the flag-bearers for Moneyball, the Houston Astros are for the Statcast Era. Neyer tells how the Astros recognized unrealized potential in the spin rate on pitcher Collin McHugh’s curveball (2000 rpm as opposed to typical curveballs at 1500 rpm). McHugh was on the verge of disappearing after a couple of high ERA seasons with the Mets and Rockies, but the Astros saw something the other teams weren’t looking at and got themselves a successful starting pitcher.

A second big change accompanies the explosion of data -- a single-minded focus on home runs and strikeouts. I don’t know, and Neyer doesn’t tell us, if any data analysis supports that focus — e.g., whether teams score more runs by focusing on home runs, or whether teams prevent more runs by focusing on striking out the opposing hitters. But gone are “small ball” and “pitching to contact.” Teams used to manufacture runs with singles, sacrifices, stolen bases, hitting behind the runner, etc. And pitchers used to try to force hitters to hit “their pitch," reaching for outside and low fastballs or taking weak swings at change-ups. Now it’s power vs. power.

Now batters learn to take uppercut swings, to increase the launch angle of batted balls so that they can hit more home runs and fewer ground balls. And pitchers respond with high fastballs that escape the paths of those uppercut swings. And they can both measure it all in fine detail and work to improve the numbers.

Maybe a third big change is infield shifts, now used in radically increased frequency. Neyer points out that shifts are not entirely new — they were prominently used against Ted Williams (even called the “Ted Williams Shift”) during his playing days, but they even go back to the 1800s, the beginning of professional baseball.

But the frequency of shifting is certainly unprecedented. Neyer gives the percentage increases in shift frequency starting in 2012 — 95, 50, 93, 34, 57. In other words, in 2012 teams shifted their infields, putting three infielders on one side of the infield (right or left, depending on whether the batter is left or right handed), by almost double, and THEN the frequency just kept increasing every year by huge amounts. In 2011, there were 2,350 shifts; in 2016, there were 28,130, an overall increase of over 1000%. And the batters haven’t responded by hitting away from the shifts, even in run=scoring situations. That would be “small ball.”

I said that Neyer’s book is also a sequel to Daniel Okrent’s 1985 book, Nine Innings. Actually I was disappointed at the time with Okrent’s book. I expected a book that focused tightly on a single game would dissect that game, each decision, each pitch, with the what and why at that micro-level. It didn’t really, and neither does Neyer’s book. The game (in Neyer’s case a 2017 game between the Houston Astros and the Oakland A’s) serves as a backdrop, a conversational prop, for talking about baseball strategy and the evolution of the game.

For the kind of micro-analysis I had wanted, my recommendation would be Bob Gibson’s book, Pitch by Pitch, which takes us through his day on the mound in the opening game of the 1968 World Series, truly pitch by pitch. I would love to see a similar book written by a team’s manager, or maybe a catcher.

That’s just not what Neyer is doing (nor Okrent before him).

I got a lot from reading Neyer’s book. I admit to being kind of a baseball curmudgeon — I love low-scoring, well-pitched games in which everything counts — a walk, a sacrifice, . . . all the “small ball” stuff. Because every run and every potential run has huge significance — there won’t be many so every one counts.

Home runs are exciting, and so are strikeouts. But when they become routine, to me anyway, they lose their edge. When teams trade home runs throughout the game, I always think, well don’t get too excited — there will be more. It’s true that no lead is safe, but no lead even really seems like much of a lead. The dramatic tension lapses (again, for me, anyway).

Neyer himself raises the question:

“So ultimately the owners and the players will need to answer this question: Do baseball fans really want to spend most of their time waiting for strikeouts and home runs? Or do they still want to see runners stealing bases, hitters hustling for doubles and triples, and fielders making great plays? Do baseball fans still want to see baseball?”

We’ll see. show less

The early part of the book almost made me quit reading. For some reason, it felt like a collection of meaningless analytics that were immediately forgettable. But I held out longer, and started to appreciate the themes that emerged. Still not a top-shelf book for me, but not the dregs, either.

The best thing about baseball for me has always been the stories. I like the games as well, but it's all the lore and reputations and legends that really round it out and make it real. None of the other sports have this sense of diverse and odd history, as far as I know.

I've owned a number of baseball anecdote collections of various sorts over my life, mostly when I was a kid, but I never really stopped to think about how many of them were really true, if all the events and people and scores show more were as described in the stories I was reading or hearing. That's the sort of info I find interesting, so when one of my favorites (he might well be my favorite, really) baseball writers released a book of that sort, I had to pick it up.

The best thing about this book is that, while it purports to check through all these old stories (and does), it revives a lot of them that I myself have never heard. Lots of the ones from early in the twentieth century, about people that I had only heard of in passing, make their way into the book, and getting to read more baseball stories is fun in itself.

The format, though, makes it even better: you get the story, and then Neyer's research of the details of the story to see if it matches up in reality. In most cases, it's not quite right or outright wrong, but some of the stories turn out to be true, and that's the nicest of all; legends don't have to be true, certainly, but it's even better when they are.

There are also sidebars with shorter stories and quick checks, and some longer essays about specific topics (the editing of the Glory of Their Times being the best of the bunch, I think). The writing style is the light, conversational one Neyer uses in his columns, and it makes for easy reading. I suppose if you want to take your baseball stories with no context and no way of knowing if they're true, this isn't the book for you, but if you want to know more about your baseball stories, and want more of these tales of the pastime to boot, this is a very good way to go. show less

Baseball history is full of stories. The baseball yarn, usually told by an aging ex-player that begins with some variation of "there I was . . .", is a familiar and time-honored event. Every baseball fan can probably recount at least a half-dozen such stories from memory, if not more. Some of these stories have become treasured lore, woven into the mythology of the game. If you are a person who loves these sorts of stories unconditionally, then you should avoid this book at all costs. If, on show more the other hand, you are curious about the origin and veracity of these tall tales of the diamond, then this is the book for you.

Modern technology, by placing information at the fingertips of everyone from news reporters to your brother, has become the bane of faulty memories, puffery, and the tall tale. The availability of information can catch people in lies that change their careers, as Tim Johnson, former manger of the Toronto Blue Jays discovered when he was fired after it was revealed that he had lied about his service as a Marine in the Vietnam War. In Rob Neyer's Big Book of Baseball Legends: The Truth, the Lies, and Everything Else, Neyer turns modern technology (mostly databases of boxscores and newspaper records) to a less serious purpose: checking up on a number of colorful yarns told through the years about baseball and figuring out if they can actually be confirmed as true, or were just made up as entertaining anecdotes.

The format of the book is pretty straightforward. In some ways, the book is sort of like a Mythbusters for the baseball yarn. A baseball story is presented, usually with attribution to one or more sources. The potentially verifiable facts of the story are then identified. Then Neyer sets to work, combing through team rosters, boxscores, and contemporaneous newspaper accounts to determine if the story is potentially true, or if it simply doesn't match the concrete data. Each story gets the treatment, and most are examined to see if you slightly change the facts that they could match. If there are similar stories involving different players, different teams, or a different time and place, they are usually examined as well. The stories range from the obscure, like the first one in the book concerning a shower of boiling beans, or whether a Chinese player was in organized baseball in the 1920s, to more notable ones like Lou Gehrig's supposed impostor, to the most famous of baseball legends Babe Ruth's called shot. Each story is presented with quotes and anecdotes from players, managers, umpires, and reporters while Neyer tries to match all the often varying accounts of events against the known facts.

At first blush one might think a book devoted to using boxscores from 1956 to fact check some story told by umpire Tom Gorman would be dry and uninteresting, but Neyer keeps the writing light and conversational, making the pages roll by. The stories are drawn from a wide range of baseball eras, from the early 1900s all the way up to the 1980s. Some of the stories will no doubt be familiar to most baseball fans, while some will probably be completely unknown, and some of the fun of the book is reading these obscure baseball stories which are often quite entertaining, even if they stretch the truth a little (or, as often seems to be the case, quite a bit). So, for a baseball fan who doesn't mind if the legendary exploits of his boyhood heroes turn out to have been a little exaggerated, this is highly recommended.

This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds. show less