For baseball fans, Law offers a smooth combination of erudition and his obvious love of the sport.
A former Major League Baseball statistical analyst who now writes for ESPN shatters myths about how to accurately measure a baseball player’s ability and then explains modern criteria that offer better results.
Law—who served as a special assistant to the general manager of the Toronto Blue Jays and now is a senior baseball writer for ESPN Insider and an analyst for the network’s show Baseball Tonight—provides a spirited exploration of statistics sure to start arguments among devoted baseball fans. Not all the explanations of statistical measurements, computer programming, and sophisticated technology developments are easily understandable, but the author’s detailed explanations are as jargon-free as possible; readers need not comprehend everything to enjoy the book. In the chapter likely to cause the most passionate debate, Law relies on extensive statistical analysis to examine the Baseball Hall of Fame. The author names worthy players who were never voted in and calls out less-worthy players who achieved entrance. Law clearly explains the reasons for the poor decision-making by eligible voters. For position players, there is an overreliance on outmoded metrics such as batting average, runs batted in, and stolen bases as well as the lack of an effective method for measuring defensive prowess. For starting pitchers, voters focus too much on games won and earned run averages; for relief pitchers, it’s games saved. For all pitchers, the author stresses the lack of criteria regarding the nature of the stadiums when they enter games and the quality of their team’s defense. Law also shatters the conventional wisdom regarding “clutch hitters.” Rather than leaving readers with utter negativity, the author explains persuasively how and why the new analytics are likely to improve the performances of individual players and entire teams.
For baseball fans, Law offers a smooth combination of erudition and his obvious love of the sport.Pub Date: April 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-249022-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
At this rate, Tyson may write a multivolume memoir as he continues to struggle and survive.
An exhaustive—and exhausting—chronicle of the champ's boxing career and disastrous life.
Tyson was dealt an unforgiving hand as a child, raised in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn in a "horrific, tough and gruesome" environment populated by "loud, aggressive" people who "smelled like raw sewage.” A first-grade dropout with several break-ins under his belt by age 7, his formal education resumed when he was placed in juvenile detention at age 11, but the lesson he learned at home was to do absolutely anything to survive. Two years later, his career path was set when he met legendary boxing trainer Cus D'Amato. However, Tyson’s temperament never changed; if anything, it hardened when he took on the persona of Iron Mike, a merciless and savage fighter who became undisputed heavyweight champion of the world. By his own admission, he was an "arrogant sociopath" in and out of the ring, and he never reconciled his thuggish childhood with his adult self—nor did he try. He still partied with pimps, drug addicts and hustlers, and he was determined to feed all of his vices and fuel several drug addictions at the cost of his freedom (he recounts his well-documented incarcerations), sanity and children. Yet throughout this time, he remained a voracious reader, and he compares himself to Clovis and Charlemagne and references Camus, Sartre, Mao Zedong and Nietzsche's "Overman" in casual conversation. Tyson is a slumdog philosopher whose insatiable appetites have ruined his life many times over. He remains self-loathing and pitiable, and his tone throughout the book is sardonic, exasperated and indignant, his language consistently crude. The book, co-authored by Sloman (co-author: Makeup to Breakup: My Life In and Out of Kiss, 2012, etc.), reads like his journal; he updated it after reading the galleys and added "A Postscript to the Epilogue" as well.
At this rate, Tyson may write a multivolume memoir as he continues to struggle and survive.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-399-16128-5
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
In these insightfully droll essays, Gierach shows us how fishing offers plenty of time to think things over.
The latest collection of interrelated essays by the veteran fishing writer.
As in his previous books—from The View From Rat Lake through All Fishermen Are Liars—Gierach hones in on the ups and downs of fishing, and those looking for how-to tips will find plenty here on rods, flies, guides, streams, and pretty much everything else that informs the fishing life. It is the everything else that has earned Gierach the following of fellow writers and legions of readers who may not even fish but are drawn to his musings on community, culture, the natural world, and the seasons of life. In one representatively poetic passage, he writes, “it was a chilly fall afternoon with the leaves changing, the current whispering, and a pale moon in a daytime sky. The river seemed inscrutable, but alive with possibility.” Gierach writes about both patience and process, and he describes the long spells between catches as the fisherman’s equivalent of writer’s block. Even when catching fish is the point, it almost seems beside the point (anglers will understand that sentiment): At the end of one essay, he writes, “I was cold, bored, hungry, and fishless, but there was still nowhere else I’d have rather been—something anyone who fishes will understand.” Most readers will be profoundly moved by the meditation on mortality within the blandly titled “Up in Michigan,” a character study of a man dying of cancer. Though the author had known and been fishing with him for three decades, his reticence kept anyone from knowing him too well. Still, writes Gierach, “I came to think of [his] glancing pronouncements as Michigan haiku: brief, no more than obliquely revealing, and oddly beautiful.” Ultimately, the man was focused on settling accounts, getting in one last fishing trip, and then planning to “sit in the sun and think things over until it’s time for hospice.”
In these insightfully droll essays, Gierach shows us how fishing offers plenty of time to think things over.Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6858-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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