A delight for baseball lovers but also a useful parable about the power of habit and tradition, barriers to accepting...
From his many years at ESPN and his current perch at the MLB Network, the TV face of the “Baseball Age of Enlightenment” reflects on the rise of analytics and the torpedoing of decadeslong conventional baseball wisdom.
Today, virtually every team’s front office features an analytics department dedicated to evaluating player performance along lines promulgated as far back as the 1970s by the game’s original sabermetrician, “The Godfather,” Bill James. With a powerful assist from Michael Lewis’ Moneyball (and the subsequent Brad Pitt movie), James’ potent rethinking of the game—Kenny rates him among the seven most influential figures in baseball history—has penetrated a popular audience beyond baseball’s boundaries. It’s fair to ask, then, do we really need another book explaining why batting average, runs batted in, or errors mean less than we have previously supposed? Or why it’s pointless to assign a “win” or a “save” to a pitcher’s outing? If you answer “no,” then you’ve woefully underestimated the continued resistance of the old guard, particularly managers, narrative-driven baseball writers, and most fans, to see and properly analyze the game. In a casually friendly tone that occasionally turns marvelously cranky, Kenny deconstructs the gauzy nostalgia surrounding the Triple Crown, warns against mistaking appearance for reality—Jack Morris just looks like a better pitcher than Mickey Lolich—explains how MVP voting has gone awry, makes the numbers-based case for admitting Keith Hernandez, Dwight Evans, Alan Trammell, and Tim Raines to the Hall of Fame, and forecasts an even more radical, numbers-based baseball future. (Will we someday see an IT coach in the dugout?) A helpful glossary defines most of the new metrics applied to today’s game, and Kenny supplies plenty of flesh and blood anecdotes about players, baseball executives, and media colleagues to satisfy even the oldest, most computer-averse fan.
A delight for baseball lovers but also a useful parable about the power of habit and tradition, barriers to accepting answers hiding in plain sight for years.Pub Date: July 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-0633-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
While the author may attempt to mirror this ideal, the result is less than satisfying and more than a little irritating.
A disjointed debut memoir about how competitive swimming shaped the personal and artistic sensibilities of a respected illustrator.
Through a series of vignettes, paintings and photographs that often have no sequential relationship to each other, Shapton (The Native Trees of Canada, 2010, etc.) depicts her intense relationship to all aspects of swimming: pools, water, races and even bathing suits. The author trained competitively throughout her adolescence, yet however much she loved racing, “the idea of fastest, of number one, of the Olympics, didn’t motivate me.” In 1988 and again in 1992, she qualified for the Olympic trials but never went further. Soon afterward, Shapton gave up competition, but she never quite ended her relationship to swimming. Almost 20 years later, she writes, “I dream about swimming at least three nights a week.” Her recollections are equally saturated with stories that somehow involve the act of swimming. When she speaks of her family, it is less in terms of who they are as individuals and more in context of how they were involved in her life as a competitive swimmer. When she describes her adult life—which she often reveals in disconnected fragments—it is in ways that sometimes seem totally random. If she remembers the day before her wedding, for example, it is because she couldn't find a bathing suit to wear in her hotel pool. Her watery obsession also defines her view of her chosen profession, art. At one point, Shapton recalls a documentary about Olympian Michael Phelps and draws the parallel that art, like great athleticism, is as “serene in aspect” as it is “incomprehensible.”
While the author may attempt to mirror this ideal, the result is less than satisfying and more than a little irritating.Pub Date: July 5, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-399-15817-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2012
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