Megdal writes with the easy fluency of a Jim Bouton, delivering a book that’s of value to students of business as well as...
Revealing look inside the locker room and front office of a storied baseball franchise.
What is the “Cardinals Way?” On one hand, writes seasoned sportswriter Megdal (Wilpon's Folly: The Story of a Man, His Fortune, and the New York Mets, 2011, etc.), it’s “a product of a hundred years of serendipity,” the result of the confluence of the ideas of numerous baseball pioneers and the realities of the playing field. On the other hand, it’s the outcome of a not-always-easy fit between the insistence on old-fashioned, people-based fundamentals and a devotion to metrics and analytics. Megdal digs deep into the business of how a player is picked. We can expect to see one, a young pitcher named Daniel Poncedeleon, in the 2016 season, and a fine choice he will be, capable of hurling hellacious heat and uttering menacing utterances like, “I like someone in there that wants to hit the ball so I can strike ’em out,” while also revealing himself to be a pretty nice guy. Having picked a player, the Cardinals coaches now have to groom and train, and therein lies a heavy program of enculturation. After grooming and training, they have to retain their best players, which means paying money, something skinflint owners don’t like to do but that does keep a player happy and loyal. Money pervades the game, always figuring in the calculus of who is signed and who is cut and, in the case of the Cardinals, involving “analytic firepower to confidently run an estimate for a player going forward.” By that calculus, writes the author, Poncedeleon carries an on-paper value of $1.75 million, cinched for a $5,000 signing bonus—not a bad deal at all and speaking to the shrewdness of the staff and the hunger of a kid eager to show his stuff on the field.
Megdal writes with the easy fluency of a Jim Bouton, delivering a book that’s of value to students of business as well as baseball fans.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-05831-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Effectively sobering. Suffice it to say that Pop Warner parents will want to armor their kids from head to toe upon reading...
A maddening, well-constructed tale of medical discovery and corporate coverup, set in morgues, laboratories, courtrooms, and football fields.
Nigeria-born Bennet Omalu is perhaps an unlikely hero, a medical doctor board-certified in four areas of pathology, “anatomic, clinical, forensic, and neuropathology,” and a well-rounded specialist in death. When his boss, celebrity examiner Cyril Wecht (“in the autopsy business, Wecht was a rock star”), got into trouble for various specimens of publicity-hound overreach, Omalu was there to offer patient, stoical support. The student did not surpass the teacher in flashiness, but Omalu was a rock star all his own in studying the brain to determine a cause of death. Laskas’ (Creative Writing/Univ. of Pittsburgh; Hidden America, 2012, etc.) main topic is the horrific injuries wrought to the brains and bodies of football players on the field. Omalu’s study of the unfortunate brain of Pittsburgh Steeler Mike Webster, who died in 2002 at 50 of a supposed heart attack, brought new attention to the trauma of concussion. Laskas trades in sportwriter-ese, all staccato delivery full of tough guy–isms and sports clichés: “He had played for fifteen seasons, a warrior’s warrior; he played in more games—two hundred twenty—than any other player in Steelers history. Undersized, tough, a big, burly white guy—a Pittsburgh kind of guy—the heart of the best team in history.” A little of that goes a long way, but Laskas, a Pittsburgher who first wrote of Omalu and his studies in a story in GQ, does sturdy work in keeping up with a grim story that the NFL most definitely did not want to see aired—not in Omalu’s professional publications in medical journals, nor, reportedly, on the big screen in the Will Smith vehicle based on this book.
Effectively sobering. Suffice it to say that Pop Warner parents will want to armor their kids from head to toe upon reading it.Pub Date: Nov. 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8757-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
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