* Review: The Baseball Codes

Here’s a sneak preview of The New York Times Sunday Book Review:

(Grateful for the opportunity to reproduce the cool graphic that ran with the piece.)

Bruce Weber, author of As They See ‘Em: A Fan’s Travels in the Land of Umpires, gives his take on The Baseball Codes: Beanballs, Sign Stealing, and Bench-Clearing Brawls: The Unwritten Rules of America’s Pastime, by Jason Turbow with Michael Duca.

Upshot:

For true baseball-niks, the discussions of these issues won’t be especially enlightening. With so many former athletes now in the broadcast booth, the unwritten rules of the game get a pretty regular airing. (Disappointingly for a book that devotes a substantial section to cheating, there is no discussion at all of steroid use.) But the stories the authors have unearthed to illustrate ballpark justice and morality are often delicious.

Interesting what Weber writes about “baseball-niks” versus casual fans. I imagine in many cases — especially for the larger publishing houses who want as wide an audience as possible — the authors are faced with a “damned if you do and damned if you don’t” situation. If they write too generally — as Weber indicates they do — they risk alienating readers that are knowledgeable about the topic and impatient with such exposition. On the other hand, if they write too much for the “insider” reader, they’ll lose the general audience. What to do, what to do?

The review links to an excerpt of the book.

Here are a few other reviews:

• The New York Post
• NPR
• ESPN.Com
• The Huffington Post

Tagged as: baseball codes, Bruce Weber, Jason Turbow, New York Times