Essential reading for students of the game and aspiring leaders.
The shifting view from baseball’s hottest seat.
Seasoned baseball reporter Miller takes readers inside front offices, locker rooms, dugouts, and the living rooms of living legends in this intimate and definitive look at where managers now fit in a game transformed. “Managing always has been the industry’s loneliest job,” Miller writes. “It’s just lonely today for different reasons.” The rise—and perhaps tyranny—of analytics, which Miller says “caps a player’s ability by identifying what he doesn’t do well and, instead of teaching and developing those areas, finds a second puzzle piece that simply plugs in to overcome the first player’s shortcomings,” has taken decision-making out of managers’ hands and distributed it across organizations. Little in today’s game escapes the influence of front office economic models and stat-happy baseball ops functions. But winning the numbers game doesn’t always mean winning ballgames, and it’s the manager alone who must step to the plate when collective calls swing and miss. This takes a toll. Like U.S. presidents, Miller points out, baseball managers also “usually look shockingly older at the end of their terms than at the beginning.” Survival demands certain qualities: an ability to flex, a willingness to collaborate with pointy-headed suits, strong leadership, and the kind of knowledge that can help players believe in a mission—and in themselves. This is a book filled with warmth and soul, a credit to the trust Miller has built across years of clubhouse reporting. He spends time in future Hall of Famer Dusty Baker’s vineyard; watches Aaron Boone’s Yankees from the home of Phillies legend Bob Boone, Aaron’s father; and devotes a chapter to four days spent alongside the Dodgers’ Dave Roberts for an “an unprecedented peek inside the day-to-day life of a modern manager.” Miller deploys a light editorial hand and often lets skippers speak seemingly unfiltered for paragraphs at a time. The result is plainspoken, colorful, and deeply insightful—much like this book.
Essential reading for students of the game and aspiring leaders.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780306832703
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
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
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