A fun, mostly effective survey of the national pastime’s unusual customs and sustaining myths.
Uncanny events at the ballpark.
Baird, a journalist and “superstitious Mets fan,” pens an entertaining paean to baseball’s “illogical and un-algorithmizable” elements. She’s sharp on the relationship between players’ idiosyncratic rituals and demanding schedules. Her analysis of purportedly hexed teams is brisk and rational. And she’s infectiously enthusiastic about the sport’s quirky personalities and colorful superstitions. Players talk to and sleep with bats, take daily batting practice at precisely 17 minutes after the hour, and wear fancy undergarments to halt slumps. Baseball lifers tell Baird that these behaviors are efforts to establish “some form of routine” during a long season. Though her overview of “cursed” ballclubs—those that endured long spells without championships after terrible trades or fan-related controversies—inevitably covers familiar ground, it’s augmented by a wacky, little-known yarn about a Japanese team and a stolen statute of KFC’s Colonel Sanders. Scrutinizing the cursed clubs’ personnel moves, she shows that such longtime losers weren’t jinxed—they were poorly run. An expansive interpretation of baseball “as a vessel for touching the magic of life itself” informs Baird’s inclusion of entirely explicable events, among them a surprise home run and the work behind a TV broadcast. She conducts a delightful interview with a woman who worried it was unlucky to leave her seat during a no-hitter, ultimately wetting her pants. But there are missteps in Baird’s analysis, among them a hackneyed comparison of baseball and The Odyssey, and a suspect explanation of how a spitball works. Likewise, little is gained from her chat with an astrologer who “believes that some people are simply born lucky while others are not” and hypothesizes that teams might benefit from “the golden energy” of a player who distributes water to teammates.
A fun, mostly effective survey of the national pastime’s unusual customs and sustaining myths.Pub Date: June 2, 2026
ISBN: 9781250353467
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2026
Basketball fans will enjoy Pippen’s bird’s-eye view of some of the sport’s greatest contests.
The Chicago Bulls stalwart tells all—and then some.
Hall of Famer Pippen opens with a long complaint: Yes, he’s a legend, but he got short shrift in the ESPN documentary about Michael Jordan and the Bulls, The Last Dance. Given that Jordan emerges as someone not quite friend enough to qualify as a frenemy, even though teammates for many years, the maltreatment is understandable. This book, Pippen allows, is his retort to a man who “was determined to prove to the current generation of fans that he was larger-than-life during his day—and still larger than LeBron James, the player many consider his equal, if not superior.” Coming from a hardscrabble little town in Arkansas and playing for a small college, Pippen enjoyed an unlikely rise to NBA stardom. He played alongside and against some of the greats, of whom he writes appreciatively (even Jordan). Readers will gain insight into the lives of characters such as Dennis Rodman, who “possessed an unbelievable basketball IQ,” and into the behind-the-scenes work that led to the Bulls dynasty, which ended only because, Pippen charges, the team’s management was so inept. Looking back on his early years, Pippen advocates paying college athletes. “Don’t give me any of that holier-than-thou student-athlete nonsense,” he writes. “These young men—and women—are athletes first, not students, and make up the labor that generates fortunes for their schools. They are, for lack of a better term, slaves.” The author also writes evenhandedly of the world outside basketball: “No matter how many championships I have won, and millions I have earned, I never forget the color of my skin and that some people in this world hate me just because of that.” Overall, the memoir is closely observed and uncommonly modest, given Pippen’s many successes, and it moves as swiftly as a playoff game.
Basketball fans will enjoy Pippen’s bird’s-eye view of some of the sport’s greatest contests.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-982165-19-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
Smart, engaging sportswriting—good reading for organization builders as well as Pats fans.
Prolific writer Benedict has long blended two interests—sports and business—and the Patriots are emblematic of both. Founded in 1959 as the Boston Patriots, the team built a strategic home field between that city and Providence. When original owner Billy Sullivan sold the flailing team in 1988, it was $126 million in the hole, a condition so dire that “Sullivan had to beg the NFL to release emergency funds so he could pay his players.” Victor Kiam, the razor magnate, bought the long since renamed New England Patriots, but rival Robert Kraft bought first the parking lots and then the stadium—and “it rankled Kiam that he bore all the risk as the owner of the team but virtually all of the revenue that the team generated went to Kraft.” Check and mate. Kraft finally took over the team in 1994. Kraft inherited coach Bill Parcells, who in turn brought in star quarterback Drew Bledsoe, “the Patriots’ most prized player.” However, as the book’s nimbly constructed opening recounts, in 2001, Bledsoe got smeared in a hit “so violent that players along the Patriots sideline compared the sound of the collision to a car crash.” After that, it was backup Tom Brady’s team. Gridiron nerds will debate whether Brady is the greatest QB and Bill Belichick the greatest coach the game has ever known, but certainly they’ve had their share of controversy. The infamous “Deflategate” incident of 2015 takes up plenty of space in the late pages of the narrative, and depending on how you read between the lines, Brady was either an accomplice or an unwitting beneficiary. Still, as the author writes, by that point Brady “had started in 223 straight regular-season games,” an enviable record on a team that itself has racked up impressive stats.
Smart, engaging sportswriting—good reading for organization builders as well as Pats fans.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982134-10-5
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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