Thursday, July 19, 2007

BOOK REVIEW: Watching Baseball Smarter

I bought ”Watching Baseball Smarter: A Professional Fan’s Guide for Beginners, Semi-experts, and Deeply Serious Geeks” based on a recommendation from Deanna at Marinerds. At the time, I didn’t make the connection between the author of the book, and the guy with 2,389,087 baseballs and the MLB blog about said baseball collecting.  Because if I had, there is no way I would have ever bought this book. I only made the connection a few days later, watching Kids Clubhouse on SNY (hey. sometimes it’s MILES better than Mets Weekly. And they don’t have a dumb puppet.), when Zack Hample was on the show. TBF’s immediate reaction was, “Oh god, not THIS guy.” But you know what? His on-camera, in-person explanation of the various pitches was excellent and we both felt like we’d learned something. So I now had a different, but still open mind toward this book. He clearly knew his stuff and was able to explain it.

Until I started reading the book.

There is a lot of great information in the book, but the presentation and tone is a complete turnoff. It’s like the guy you’ve sat next to, or behind, at a baseball game, who makes the assumption that if you don’t know everything he does, you’re automatically an idiot, and he’s automatically a genius. He’ll never actually say that he thinks you’re stupid, but it’s clear from how he talks to you that he thinks you’re one level above moron.

The presentation of information is confusing primarily because it is not presented in an order that makes sense to anyone who doesn’t know anything about baseball. He makes the mistake that every guy I have ever gone to a baseball game with (pre-TBF) makes, which is backing up a dumptruck full of information that won’t matter to me or make any sense without taking the time to explain the most basic concepts first. I have arrived at the conclusion that this is just because guys like this are just so in love with the game and don’t remember a time when they didn’t understand baseball - they just don’t know *how* to teach it in levels. Part of the problem, I believe, is that Hampel was trying to cater to baseball newbies and people who already knew a lot about baseball - two audiences so completely divergent that it’s no wonder he wasn’t successful.

He makes things worse through the constant use of italics. The italics are meant to indicate a word that is defined in the glossary in the back of the book. Hample explains that these are words you need to know, because knowing baseball lingo is part of becoming a knowledgable baseball fan. No argument there, but this is a terrible, terrible way to teach anyone basic baseball vocabulary.  Instead of Hample explaining these basic terms in an introductory chapter, in context, you’re supposed to go to the back of the book every time there’s a word in italics. The italics make you feel stupid and condescended to, and having to turn to the glossary all the time disrupts the flow of the book - and I didn’t have to look up a lot of the terms because I know them by now. If I had picked up this book when I knew nothing, I would have given up 1/4 of the way through it.

When I finished the book, I handed it to TBF and gave him my review. I said, “Please tell me if you think I am wrong.” He plowed through it even faster than I did, and when he handed it back to me, I said, “What did you think?”
His response: “There’s really good information in there, but the italics thing makes him sound like a tool.”

This book comes close to being a “Baseball for Dummies,” but falls short from the mark, which is a shame, because nothing like that exists (trust me, I looked). The information in this book makes it extremely useful for a newbie, but if you buy a copy for someone, I would recommend telling them to ignore the delivery of the content and focus on the information. Otherwise they’re liable to throw the book at you within 15 minutes after they start reading it.