Review: Thrown by a Curve, Jaci Burton (2013)

I plan to start writing reviews of baseball romances here in anticipation of a future research project (in short, never let the literature and genre fiction nerd go to the SABR convention.) Here’s the first, which is the first primarily because the library wanted it back.

The good news: this mostly works as a romance novel. My problems with it as a romance are my problems with certain genre tropes, like the Big Misunderstanding–you know, there are a lot of problems in romance novels that are mostly created by an utter failure to communicate. To be honest, at this point, my tolerance for “works as a romance” involves the postulate of “If the plot was posted at Ask MetaFilter, would the majority of comments involve DTMFA?” If so, it’s not working. The ending, however, did not work because I couldn’t believe the baseball aspects of it. The ending did make sense in some terms of characterization, especially when reflecting on the sex scenes–the protagonists get a thrill out of risk–but there was too much fear out of Alicia outside of the sexual situations to not make that part of the characterization there and at the end ring true.

The bad news: It’s the baseball. It usually is. There at least was some, which puts it above a lot of novels with supposed baseball-playing heroes, but…really, pitcher rehab does not work that way with the sort of injury Garrett was supposed to have had. It’s a shoulder injury. The novel starts in the offseason and Garrett has been out with it since August. He didn’t have surgery but he didn’t start throwing until spring training and then isn’t depicted as getting into any game action. I think of Chris Narveson’s shoulder rehab and laugh. If a pitcher misses that much action, I’d think that extended spring training and a minor league rehab assignment would be in his future, but instead Garrett is throwing in live games out of the bullpen. Did I mention that he’s a starting pitcher? I really didn’t think that his unwillingness to do his physical therapy–the entire impetus for his and Alicia getting together, first as therapist and patient and later as a couple–rang true for what the reader was told was a competitive, hyper-successful pitcher. Frustration at progress, yes, but not refusal. The medical staff came off as kind of incompetent as well which isn’t so surprising considering what’s been revealed about other clownshoes medical operations in MLB.

What this book really brought to mind was the trend in romance novels to have extraordinary heroes. It’s even worse in a book like this where the supposedly successful heroine has a pretty severe case of Impostor Syndrome. As for the hero, sports romances are going just as over the top as their other contemporary fellows (the billionaire thing did not start with Fifty Shades of Grey; it’s only following the trend but since it sold so well, it caused it to flourish) with super-successful athletes with nearly unbelievable accomplishments.

A quote from the book on Garrett:

“Garrett has been the perfect specimen of a pitcher for five seasons,” Manny said. “We plucked him out of college ball, he spent six months in AAA before we brought him up, and he’s been in our starting rotation ever since, with one of the lowest ERAs of any pitcher in the league. He’s won the Cy Young Award twice, pitched a near perfect game last year, and held the strikeout record the past two seasons. He’s the golden boy.”

…well, perfect game aside–Philip Humber (who would look great on a romance novel cover, btw) threw one of those–that sounds pretty exceptional. Tim Lincecum, before the wheels came off, with even more extraordinary powers of pitching. That’s the sort of hero we’re dealing with now in single-title sports romance. Thrown by a Curve is the fifth book in a series, where all athlete heroes are successful and hot. (I tried reading book 2; it was a DNF, and I noted something re biphobia making me quit reading. I’ll probably go back to it for the project but not like it.) Apparently Athlete Hot, where the hotness comes mostly from the athleticism, is not a thing in Romancelandia. It’s not that I want the romance novel with Jeff Karstens as the hero, but maybe we could get AJ Griffin (or Philip Humber, heh) once in a while? (Yes, I have Issues with Generic Contemporary Romance Novel Hot. After writing the first draft of the review, I realized that Shelly Laurenston’s Pack series of shifter paranormal romance has plenty of guys who look like Griffin. OK, they’re lion shifters, so that’s probably not what I’m looking for in my non-sfnal romance.)

Review: The Summer of Beer and Whiskey, Edward Achorn (2013)

I had requested The Summer of Beer and Whiskey because I knew that the 19th century American Association did have a team in Milwaukee for a few seasons and had hoped that this book would touch on that enough to review it over on BCB. Unfortunately for that purpose, there wasn’t anything on that, but there was a lot about the American Association’s founding and the exciting season of 1883.

The primary focus here is on the St. Louis Browns, the team that would later become the National League’s Cardinals. There’s also a secondary focus on the Philadelphia Athletics and the pennant race between the Browns and Athletics. No matter what my set of readers think of the Cardinals and St. Louis today, there’s no doubt that the Browns and their owner Chris Von Der Ahe changed the face of professional baseball for both the players and most importantly, for the fans. The American Association’s cultural differences from the National League could only happen in cities like St. Louis or Cincinnati (ironically, the birthplace of professional baseball as we know it) because of their German immigrant populations. Germans had no cultural concept of blue laws against recreation and alcohol on Sundays. They enjoyed their beer gardens and fun on Sundays, the workingman’s only day off at this time. Von Der Ahe, an immigrant himself who started in the grocery business and gradually expanded his operations into baseball, bought and renovated St. Louis’ existing baseball grounds. All it needed was a team and a league, and in 1881 the American Association was born. Unlike the NL, it played on Sundays and allowed beer in the stands. The tickets were also cheaper. This was the working man’s league and they took to it in droves.

Not only did we get our Sunday baseball and beer-based fan culture from the AA, some of the promotions to increase the fanbase of the game like Ladies’ Day were born in the AA. We probably get the word “fan” from this league; Achorn makes the case for the Browns’ manager Ted Sullivan coining this word from the “fanatics” mailing him suggestions about the team.

Achorn does a great job capturing the feel of 1880s baseball: its rules, its personalities, its business, its climate, and its racial tensions. There was a lot in here that I did not know about this period. If 19th century baseball is new to you too, there will be a lot in here for you to enjoy and learn. I’m not fond of the “show a period in baseball and American history via a pennant race” structure, but this is far from the first book to use it and it’s a popular hook in narrative nonfiction for a lot of authors and has a wide appeal to readers who are not me and thus not bored by pennant races. I recommend this to all baseball fans with a general interest in the period.

(A review copy was provided by the publisher.)

review: The Might Have Been, Joseph Schuster

I read this book in 2012, and thus it’s not that fresh in memory. I did write plenty of notes which helped me to reconstruct this review. The book was about a minor league manager in the Cardinals organization and supposedly set in 2009.

If you have a problem with unsympathetic protagonists, this book isn’t for you–especially if you’re female. The entirety of the book is about the protagonist’s bad decisions and many of the ones he makes are not to the benefit of the women in his life.

The feel of the baseball really didn’t fit the realities of the sport as played in 2012. 2009 was only slightly different, but the problem with a lot of writers of contemporary fiction is that they want to make 2009 feel like 1949. The affiliated minor leagues aren’t exactly the best place to work if you’re looking for A+ facilities or good pay but there are things that the parent club won’t tolerate. One of those indeed is poor field playing conditions: the Washington Nationals had issues with one of their affiliates’ fields in 2010-11 and I know the Milwaukee Brewers complain about the state of their AAA affiliate’s stadium (the field in that case is not a problem; the players can still work fine, but the place doesn’t draw much of a crowd.) When so much of the book involves the protagonist complaining about stuff that I know the Cardinals management, for one, won’t tolerate if they know it’s going on my disbelief fails to be suspended. If suspended disbelief is so important to the success of science fiction and fantasy, imagine how important it is to mimetic fiction! The 1949 feel extends to depictions of the players. Due to my writing gig covering the minor leagues, I follow a lot of these players on Twitter and on their other blogging endeavors, and the attitudes and activities depicted don’t correspond to the sort of thing I know Midwest League players were doing in 2011-12. There’s also a lot of anti-stat nerd nonsense that isn’t just coming off as a character viewpoint, it’s coming off in the way Schuster depicted characters, particularly a player development executive that seems like a thinly veiled version of Jeff Luhnow (now the Houston Astros general manager.)

Anyway, if I can’t believe the baseball, how can I believe anything else about the book?

(first published in A Fool’s Errand #5 for Stipple-APA #276, 2013-03-02: slightly edited for this blog)

books, reviewed

I’m bringing the book reviews back here as I’ve read quite a bit where the reviews of such wouldn’t fit under the Brew Crew Ball books section.

In the meantime, here are some books I’ve reviewed over at BCB in 2012-13:
Root for the Home Team, Tim Hagerty
Imperfect, Jim Abbott and Tim Brown
It’s Just a Game, Brian Carriveau

The real problems with Tsuyoshi Nishioka

I don’t normally respond angrily to ill-informed opinions on talk radio, but the tone of the criticism of Tsuyoshi Nishioka from the local media and the fan blogs is getting close to the sort of passive aggressive racism that Minnesotans are unfortunately known for. “Can’t make it playing against Americans” can be better explained by the actual events shaping his career than writing him off completely as being unfit for MLB.

On his offensive dropoff: He broke his leg at the beginning of the season. Some players do come back from that injury. Even shortstops. On the other hand, the worst-case modern scenario for broken shortstop is probably Dale Sveum. Nobody could say that Sveum wasn’t ready for MLB competition. You could say that his injury wrecked him for it.

On his defensive dropoff: Nishioka was posted two seasons too late. Let me explain. Nishioka played 8 seasons for the Chiba Lotte Marines. The Marines’ home park, like most stadiums both indoor and outdoor in NPB, features artificial turf. I recall many Twins fans in the good old days of the Metrodome explaining that the Dome was special, because only Twins players had the experience of both playing inside and playing on turf. Chiba Marines Stadium isn’t indoors, but it’s definitely carpeted in Japan’s finest fake grass. In fact, of the six-team Pacific League in which the Marines play, four of the teams play in domes. All the teams in the PL play on turf. (Only the Hiroshima Carp and Hanshin Tigers of the Central League play on grass.) 2011 was obviously Nishioka’s first wide experience with grass fields since high school. There’s interleague competition in Japan, too, but it’s not enough to give a player a good experience with the real green stuff. He’s had to learn an entirely new way of fielding.

(Hint to all US teams looking for Japanese defensive players: Unless the player is coming from the Carp or Tigers, or if it’s Toronto or Tampa Bay looking for players, it probably shouldn’t be done.)

review: The Baseball Economist, J.C. Bradbury

Economics is good for many things; what it’s not particularly suited for is answering purely statistical questions. What’s needed in a popular economics text are easy explanations of economic concepts, especially relating to a subject of interest. Unfortunately Bradbury’s writing isn’t adequate for this task. If I thought that economics was a dry subject I wouldn’t have studied it voluntarily. I was fortunate throughout my college career to have instructors who brought the subject to life even given the standard dry textbooks. Bradbury killed the subject again to the point where I wished I had kept the notes from a labor econ class I took in 1997 where we discussed various players’ unions.

What he is good at, like a lot of other popular business-oriented nonfiction writers, is raising questions and thinking about the answers in nonstandard ways. (However, many someones of my Internet acquaintance mentioned that Bill James had already covered the issue of left-handed catchers in the Historical Baseball Abstract; the only thing added here is some documentation from George Lindsey’s 1960s research.) The problem is that his nonstandard answers are extremely nonstandard in the case of his formulas for player evaluation. From what I’ve seen online they’re great for starting arguments but not at all good for resolving them.

The best question asked in the book (but not resolved to my satisfaction:) How do pitching coaches affect pitchers? Is it measurable? He uses Leo Mazzone as his example. It’s a very interesting question but if economics can answer it, it will be as a study of systems. Pitching coaches don’t work in isolation.

The baseball economics book I’d love to see is a game theory book. (None of the intro game theory books I’ve found have been particularly readable….) I’d also like to see some studies of decision-making behavior. I hope that a more skilled author than Bradbury tackles them.

Weekend Link Special

The Red Sox have Jed Lowrie playing games at first base in preparation for his becoming Adrian Gonzalez’s primary backup.

Jeff Samardzija will be in the Cubs bullpen if he makes the team. His minor league starts were apparently just to develop him further as a pitcher and weren’t his intended role.

Barry Enright is working on his changeup.

Yet another ST story about Loek van Mil…the Angels appear to be thinking a lot more highly of him than the Twins did, even with his original placement on the 40-man roster before the 2010 season.

Duke Snider’s arm injury is pretty much the ultimate story on why there shouldn’t be clowning during batting practice. Even though, as a fan, I enjoy it….

I don’t normally link to Deadspin, but these leaked AOL FanHouse emails give me a lot of respect for some of the guys who wrote at FanHouse. A policy not to gate off female bloggers into their own section…well, that’s exactly what I like to see. Maybe that’s also one of the reasons there are so many female contributors at SBNation sites…you get one woman posting, then you get more women, and then even more. (Although some of the blogs are still epically sexist. I’m sure we can name those for ourselves.)