At last, The New York Times gets in the game

May 29, 2015 · 1 comment

Apropos to my remarks in the previous “Best-Seller” post about the lack of baseball book reviews in the Times

For some reason, the paper posts to its website on Friday reviews that will appear in the book supplement a week hence. That is, the reviews below (at least according to the time stamp) will appear on June 7, not May 31. Go figure.

In amazing coincidence (?), the titles reviewed were written by the two authors who will appear at the May 31 Gelf Varsity Letters event (see previous entry), Charles Leerhsen and Jon Pessah.

Leerhsen’s Cobb biography was reviewed by John Williams, a senior staff editor at The Times; Pessah’s book was reviewed by Michael S. Schmidt, a Washington correspondent for The Times, who formerly covered performance-enhancing drugs and labor issues for the paper’s Sports section.

I think it’s fair to sum up that neither book is an unqualified success according to the Times‘ critics.

Williams comments,

https://i2.wp.com/d28hgpri8am2if.cloudfront.net/book_images/onix/cvr9781451645767/ty-cobb-9781451645767_hr.jpg?resize=146%2C218“[I]f Leerhsen is a mostly effective advocate for Cobb, he’s not always an elegant one. It might have behooved him to dispatch Stump’s integrity in the opening pages and then let his own case speak for itself throughout, rather than frequently and sometimes clumsily referring back to Stump and other previous writers when presenting his own version of events. The book is crowded with rhetorical furniture. He also occasionally goes on too long with his own conjectures, as when he tries to figure out where Cobb disappeared to for 44 days during the 1906 season. Conventional wisdom says he had a nervous breakdown and went to a psychiatric retreat; Leerhsen believes that’s possible, but sets the odds of it “at about 60-40.”

In several cases, Leerhsen absolves Cobb of a larger sin but leaves the underlying sin intact. In others, the biographer goes too far in sympathizing with his subject.

While Schmidt writes:

http://media.hdp.hbgusa.com/coverimages/9780316242219/It’s not clear who the intended audience for the book is. It is not nearly as absorbing as Michael Lewis’s “Moneyball,” with its little-engine-that-could story of how the Oakland Athletics, a small-­market team, managed to compete with juggernauts like the Yankees…  And “The Game” does not have as much new information as “Game of Shadows” … which exposed in incredible detail how sluggers like Barry Bonds and Jason Giambi, and a slew of track and football stars, doped their way into the record books.

What’s more, Pessah gives us far too much baseball minutiae….”

Since both Williams and Schmidt are ostensibly sportswriters, I think I have to give them more credence than a general-assignment reviewer who might not know so much about the subjects. On the other hand, maybe having that knowledge isn’t necessarily an advantage. I dunno; I keep going back and forth.

By the way, the Cobb book was named winner of the SABR’s Baseball Research Award, so there are some out there who judge this a quality work. But is that a general approval of the book as a whole or specifically the research aspects? (See here for the criteria). Can you have the one without the other?

Full disclosure: I have not finished either book yet. I hope to be able to plow through both by Sunday, but at a combined 1,100-plus pages, that might be a tall order.

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1 Charles Leerhsen May 29, 2015 at 5:30 pm

I was pleased with the full-page New York Times review of TY COBB: A TERRIBLE BEAUTY, which was largely positive and described the book as "noble," "convincing" and "full of whimsical detail."

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