Now that we’re fully into the fall and the postseason is going, let’s look at yet more baseball for this month’s reading list! For this month, I’m pairing the baseball with some politics and a TV show.
Hope you enjoy, and let me know what you’re reading!
Russell Carleton – The Shift
Just in time for the World Series, we have this book from a clinical psychologist and baseball statistician! Carleton focuses on some of the things about baseball very difficult to measure. Along the way, he tells the story of his personal journey from psychology grad student to baseball expert.
Carleton writes sensibly about everything from how stats work to how managers make decisions to whether teams should employ defensive shifts. I appreciated what he has to say about how the numbers fail to capture many interpersonal aspects of the game. Numbers don’t tell you how to handle egos or how to prepare young men for the ‘adult’ aspects of baseball. He brings numbers to bear on these issues where we can, but he looks beyond the numbers where we can’t.
I think it’s a great book for any baseball fan.
Malcolm Devlin – And Then I Woke Up
And so, we have another pandemic book. Devlin writes about a virus that infects much of humanity. But unlike COVID, this virus doesn’t really do the work on its own. Rather, it makes people susceptible to social narratives that tell them everyone else is a monster.
If nothing else, it’s a new take on the pandemic fiction theme. As soon as people are infected and see those around them as monsters, they go on a murderous frenzy and set up survival camps. The story follows one infected person who ‘recovers,’ in a sense.
Devlin obviously intends the book as a metaphor for something, though it’s not always clear what. Does the ‘narrative’ refer to the 2020 U.S. presidential election? Does it refer to the little worlds we create on social media? It’s hard to say.
Keith Law – Smart Baseball
Law lays down the law on what works and what doesn’t work in baseball. And he says many of the same things the other experts say. Bunting doesn’t work, stealing bases is usually a bad idea, pitcher wins and saves don’t matter, and so on. If Law adds anything here, it’s that he provides a very helpful description of some of the more detailed and useful stats taking over the game.
For any reader who wants to learn about advanced hitter and pitcher metrics without learning all the math involved, that makes the book worth a read.
Jane McAlevey – A Collective Bargain
I think McAlevey wrote this book as a follow up to No Shortcuts. And I take it she did so to expand her audience beyond the ‘left and labor’ crowd and into more mainstream audiences. Toward that end, the book works pretty well. McAlevey offers a brief history of the union movement. She focuses on how unions lost their power and how they might regain it. And she includes some more recent case studies, focusing especially on teachers and nurses.
The case studies make the book worthwhile. And hopefully she reaches a broader audience not previously introduced to labor issues. But the book doesn’t really do more than that. It’s a quick read, and not a key source for organizing. In that sense, I think McAlevey falls prey to many of the problems that tend to come with a book written and released quickly after an unexpectedly successful book like No Shortcuts.
Francis Spufford – Red Plenty
Spufford gives us here what he describes as a fairy tale. I’d call it a series of short essays – grounded in a vision of the Soviet Union – about a rotating cast of characters that includes everyone from Nikita Khrushchev to ordinary Soviet scientists and youth leaders. In that way, Spufford tries to break down the barriers between fiction and non-fiction.
He takes as his theme the Khrushchev years in the Soviet Union – the sense that the Stalinist era has ended and that the Soviet Union might become what its defenders wanted it to become. Perhaps all those purges, five year plans, and industrialization might lead to the land of ‘red plenty’ after all. Of course, it didn’t come to pass. And Spufford never pretends it did.
Ben Burgis digs in to the details effectively in an article in Current Affairs. But the book offers many lessons about what to hope for and what to avoid. There are still plenty of reasons to flirt with a planned economy. And in reading this book, we can feel the sense of loss felt by the characters as the whole operation fails.
Bonus TV Show – Obi-Wan Kenobi
This short series looks at the life of Obi-Wan Kenobi in the years between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope. Though lots of people complained about it, I enjoyed the series. I think it tells a sensible story and that Ewan McGregor plays the role of Kenobi very well.
If there’s a risk to this series, it’s that it might overuse the Darth Vader character. This would especially become risky if they decide to renew it for a second season (a bad idea, in my opinion).
