Book Review: The Stark Truth by Jayson Stark

Who’s the best first baseman ever? Who’s the worst second baseman of all time? What pitcher has a big name, but doesn’t live up to it? Which outfielder is unheralded, but always delivers in the clutch? 

These are the questions Jayson Stark attempts to answer in his book, The Stark Truth: The Most Overrated and Underrated Players in Baseball History (Let the Debate Begin!).

This isn’t just bar room talk—this is a definitive ranking of the most over and undervalued players at each position and don’t for a second think this list is ‘click bait’. 

As any lover of baseball will soon realize as they read through the first section of the book, Stark took his time and assignment of compiling this list seriously. There aren’t any hap-hazard choices. 

For each person, whether they be over or under-rated, Stark provides compelling reasoning as to his logic and guidance as to why a player ended up on either side of the leger.

As if reading through the top and bottom ranked players at each position isn’t enough, Stark also compiled a list of the three overrated and underrated players all time for each team at the back of the book. 

These lists are relatively brief, but each mention of a player does come with a short comment of Stark’s thoughts.

For each position category, Stark chose to go five deep on both sides of the scale. Here are the positions he rated:

• Right-Handed Starting Pitchers
• Left-Handed Starting Pitchers
• Relief Pitchers
• Designated Hitters
• Catchers
• First Basemen
• Second Basemen
• Third Basemen
• Shortstops
• Left Fielders
• Center Fielders
• Right Fielders

This reviewer found it particularly interesting that Stark chose to rate each outfield position and also divided starting pitchers up by which arm they used.

For an idea of how Stark went about picking these players, here are a few of the rules he came up with to help him decide (details for the rules will have to be found in the book):

• Book A Cruise Every October
• Beg for a Pay Cut
• Spend Your Career in the Central or Mountain Time Zones
• Take Boredom Lessons
• Demand to be Traded to the Royals
• Whatever You Do, Don’t Get Elected to the 
  Hall
   of Fame

This was one of the most enjoyable baseball books this reviewer has had the pleasure of reading. 

Read  cover to cover in one sitting, it is a page turner, unlike many non-fiction baseball books that are informative but tedious. 

Stark does a great job adding his perspective, yet relying on concrete statistic and real world situations to back his ratings. 

Each page that went by, I became more intrigued by whose name I would see pop up next on either side of the line. 

Add to this that I was pleasantly surprised to see my favorite player of all time, Omar Vizquel, listed as one of the most underrated shortstops of all time. This work is highly recommended for anyone who considers themselves a baseball guru or just even just a casual fan of the game.

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Original review on: http://baseballreflections.com

Book Review - The Big Chair by Ned Colletti

I have a confession to make: I’m not much of a reader. While I enjoy reading, I often find myself too strapped for time to commit to a book, especially during the daily grind of the baseball season.

I have quite a backlog of books I’ve been meaning to get to, and hopefully will at some point. But I made a point to read former Dodgers general manager Ned Colletti’s new book, ‘The Big Chair,’ written with Joseph A. Reaves. and I’m glad I did.

Colletti has been in baseball for 35 years in a variety of roles, starting out in media relations and publications with the Cubs in the early 1980s. He also worked for the Giants before coming to Los Angeles, and has basically seen it all in baseball.

This book does a good job at telling many of those stories, with Colletti sharing several behind-the-scenes details of various points in his career. I read the book just before Thanksgiving and found myself loving the tales so much that I finished it in two days.

Without giving anything away, a few stories I particularly enjoyed included in the book are Colletti’s exhaustive interview with Frank McCourt for the Dodgers general manager position, how Colletti convinced Cubs general manager Dallas Green to hire him, and Colletti’s daughter’s reaction to the Angelsbeating the Giants in 2002 World Series.

There are details of a few colorful disagreements between Yasiel Puig and former Dodgers manager Don Mattingly, plus Odalis Perez and Brad Penny each leaving the Dodgers on not the best of terms. 

There was Colletti with the Cubs watching Greg Maddux leave as a free agent for the Braves, then nearly 14 years later bringing him to the Dodgers in trade.

Also included in the book is the time in 2011 a Dodgers intern posted a Fan Post on True Blue LA that laid out Colletti’s organizational report, including confidential information on several players, heading into the MLB Draft. That post was eventually deleted, and the author lost his internship.

I was surprised that the signing of Jason Schmidt wasn’t mentioned, but Colletti was otherwise pretty thorough discussing his tenure as Dodgers general manager, hitting nearly all the key points that have been discussed ad nauseum over the years.

Where this book shines is in the storytelling, and with 35 years in baseball Colletti has a lot of stories to tell. That makes ‘The Big Chair’ well worth your time.

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Original review on: www.truebluela.com

Book Review - The Impostor by Javier Cercas

Enric Marco was one of the most famous men in Spain. As President of the “Amical de Mauthausen”, an association of Spanish survivors of the Nazi camps, he spoke eloquently about the evils of Fascism. 

In a speech given to the Spanish Parliament in 2005 his account of his experiences in a concentration camp had the children of deportees in the gallery in tears. This wasn’t all. 

He had fought on the Republican side in the Civil War, been persecuted by the Franco regime and then, as Secretary-general of the CNT (the Anarchist trade union) been influential in the transition of Spain from dictatorship to democracy. Quite a life! What a hero!

But then came exposure; he was unmasked. He had never been in a concentration camp, though he had been in Germany during the war as a volunteer worker. His anti-Fascist credentials were soon questioned. 

If he had lied about the concentration camp, why should he be believed about anything? Yes, he had been a magnificent and compelling speaker about the horrors of Nazi Germany and Franco’s Spain, but he was still an impostor, mocked and reviled.

Anyone who has read Javier Cercas’ novels – especially Soldiers of Salamis and Outlaws – will recognise that Marco’s is a story made for him. These books explored the unreliability of memory and personal testimony and of what may have been generally accepted as historical truth. 

Nevertheless, he was reluctant to write about Marco, despite the urging of friends, among them the great Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa. He had met Marco and found him even in his nineties to be unstoppably loquacious and fertile in denial, self-justification, and self-pity.

Happily he went ahead. The book is written as a”novel without fiction,” with Cercas’ own feelings and reflections always to the fore. This was the method of his remarkable account of the failed military coup of 1981, Anatomy of a Moment. It worked then; it works now.

Cercas has immersed himself in the archives, talked with historians and journalists who have covered the Marco story, interviewed his acquaintances, friends, former admirers, and spent hours, days, weeks listening to the old man – well over 90 by now – and trying to make sense of his life. 

In some of his memories or claims, those relating to the Civil War, there would appear to have been an element of truth amidst exaggerations and even impossible assertions. There were puzzles not easy to resolve. 

Why for instance did he have a civil servant’s pension? Was this, as some said, because he had perhaps been a police informer in at least the early Franco years? Or was there some other not discreditable explanation?

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Original review on: http://www.scotsman.com

REVOLUTION SONG A Story of American Freedom By Russell Shorto - Book Review

“There is properly no history, only biography,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote. Russell Shorto, in his new book “Revolution Song,” seems to be of similar mind. He writes about six people, all of whom lived in the Revolutionary era, but he does not roll them up into a single narrative or use their lives to bolster an overarching thesis.

Instead, he artfully weaves their stories together and leaves it to the reader to draw conclusions. “I have tried not to preach or even teach,” Shorto writes in the preface — and it proves a decidedly refreshing approach.

Shorto has an eye for intriguing subjects (his previous books include “Amsterdam,” “Descartes’ Bones” and “The Island at the Center of the World”), and this book is no exception.

The Seneca chief Cornplanter (or Kayethwahkeh in Seneca) was a fine looking, philosophically minded man who was also, in Shorto’s words, “something of a killing machine.”

Allied with England during the Revolution, Cornplanter and his warriors slaughtered patriot soldiers and civilians, even children. In retaliation, George Washington sent an invasion force that destroyed crops and leveled village upon village, killing and scalping along the way.

The war devastated the Senecas, and afterward Cornplanter counseled accommodation, urging his people to learn English and know something of white ways. But as the Senecas lost more territory, they grew increasingly hostile to white culture.

A message came to Cornplanter from the Creator, telling him to “remove from his house and sight every article of the workmanship or invention of the white man.” He destroyed mementos, including a sword that had been a gift from Washington, and gradually withdrew from the wider world.

Shorto concludes with the optimistic side of the Creator’s message, describing ancestral lands and ancient ways that Cornplanter, having thrown off white culture, could dream of once more. But the conclusion to Cornplanter’s story is actually very sad.

Although the United States government guaranteed in 1794 that the Seneca grant where Cornplanter was buried would never be taken, in 1964 it was. The Army Corps of Engineers moved his remains and those of hundreds of Senecas buried near him in order to construct a dam on the Allegheny River.

Another of Shorto’s subjects is Margaret Moncrieffe Coghlan, a dark-haired beauty who wrote a delightfully scandalous memoir. Some scholars have thought it a forgery, but Shorto argues that it is not, and without doubt it is a good read.

Coghlan’s father, a British officer assigned to the United States during the Revolution, forced her at age 14 to marry the British lieutenant John Coghlan, probably to put an end to her dalliance with Aaron Burr. She detested her husband, ran away and availed herself of an English lord, whereupon her father sent her to a nunnery. After she escaped, he disowned her.

Read the original book review on: www.nytimes.com