Watching Baseball Smarter: A Professional Fan's Guide for Beginners, Semi-Experts, and Deeply Serious Geeks by Zack HampleMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
This book meanders through the world of baseball, dropping short anecdotes, statistics, opinions, and other items meant to make you say 'Gee whiz, I didn't know that". This is told with a light touch, mildly humorous throughout. It seems quite similar to a book on baseball I previously read that had been sold at a Hallmark card store. As a baseball fan, I knew or at least was passingly familiar with a large majority of the stories, like why stadiums are different, and why rules are the way they are. I was very surprised, given my audiobook source says that this book was from 2017, that the book dissed the concept of video call reviews, saying that will never happen, and waxed eloquently on the strategic use of multiple trips to the pitcher to waste time, etc. that have become part of pro baseball rules over the past few years. Ends up this book was first released in 2007, and some of the things that it says to make you a smarter baseball watcher are now totally incorrect. If you are a beginner, you won't know what is still correct and what isn't, and if you are a more casual but up-to-date fan, these just look like mistakes. It is a shame these new versions of the audiobook were released without updating the changes in baseball, or at least without a notice about the actual age of the content. I took stars off because of this, and because it wasn't really written for the "deeply serious geeks". Had this book been about a sport I know less about, like women's gymnastics, with the same odd details and snarky opinions, I probably would have ranked it higher as I liked the voice of the author.
View all my reviews
No comments:
Post a Comment