Readin' Baseball

Lonnie Wheeler has excellent baseball writer credentials, collaborating on several biographies (including Hank Aaron) and some extended essay collections. His 2015 Intangiball draws on a lot of that history to examine how unmeasurable qualities influence the play of baseball players and teams. Players, managers and writers throw around words like "character" and "grit," but what do they mean when they say those things? How do they influence play and game outcomes? Can they be developed, or does a player have to start out with them? If so, can they be nurtured and passed on?

Wheeler loosely relies on the Cincinnati Reds' history and player development since roughly 2010 as the main framework for his exploration, but he also brings in stories of other well-known players who were said to embody the kinds of qualities he's talking about: The two mentioned above, as well as professionalism and chemistry.

He explains how these qualities are not necessarily as unmeasurable as people might think, and that when you start digging into them you might find they are labels for other things that are more easily quantified -- but not entirely. "Professionalism," for example, may be a way of referring to a player who shows up for practice and games on time, plays hard during the game, looks for ways to improve his skills, play and other abilities, and hopes, by example, to bring others to his level. That last bit is the key, because while time on task and efforts to improve can be clearly observed, "inspiration" is a lot harder to pin down. Some hard workers inspire other players to emulate them, but some do not.

Wheeler does offer some interesting things to think about among those "subtle things that win baseball games," as his subtitle calls them. That Intangiball falls short of being a full exploration of the qualities under consideration speaks more towards their inability to be pinned down than to Wheeler's inability to corral them.

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Dayton Moore went from being a member of one of the top front offices in baseball to running one of the worst when he left Atlanta for Kansas City in 2006. Written after Kansas City's Game 7 loss in the 2014 series but before the successful 2015 campaign, More Than a Season is a quick run-though of his own life in baseball and some of the decisions and mindset he brought to his new team, and how that helped them build their successful program.

Season's subtitle is "Building a Championship Culture," and Moore's book reads more like an exploration of leadership principals with baseball examples than a straight baseball memoir. He describes how he learned things along the way about what kind of things build organizations and what kinds of things tear them down. He also talks about how the Kansas City Royals did not turn around overnight and how their dedication to the process he outlined did not answer all of the objections and questions right away.

While Moore does discuss some baseball-specific matters, such as the decision to build from the farm system up instead of buying big-name talent and hoping it could be melded into a cohesive team, much of the meat of the book could translate to many different kinds of companies, organizations or operations. That aspect is probably Season's top selling-point, as its 200 or so pages don't have room for nuts-and-bolts-level examinations of how the Royals found Lorenzo Cain or tracked down Eric Hosmer. But on that level -- and to some degree on a personal application level as well -- More Than a Season can be worth the brief time it takes to read.

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Roger Kahn, along with Thomas Boswell, is probably one of the top living baseball writers working today. His The Boys of Summer stands next to Boswell's Why Time Begins on Opening Day as one of the best explorations of baseball's appeal, its uniquely American identity and the kind of philosophical speculation that it can inspire among its fans given to thinking about such things.

In 2000, a couple of years after Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa chased down Roger Maris' single-season home run record but before steroid use and doping marred their achievements and brought many others into question, Kahn explored the history and some of the thinking behind the sport's primary competitive relationship: That between pitcher and hitter. His The Head Game takes a look at that relationship and its effect on the game from the pitcher's point of view, since it is his throw towards home plate that drives the subsequent actions.

Kahn takes a look at what the game's top pitchers said about their work, digging all the way back to its earliest days as a national-level sport at the hinge of the 19th and 20th centuries. For those men, he relies on published interviews or biographies, but he conducted his own interviews among those still living who date from later eras.

Although Head Game could be summed up as a "what's the pitcher thinking?" book, the diverse personalities, understandings and strategic visions of the different men involved give it a much greater depth. It suffers from the exclusion of Negro League giants such as Wilbur "Bullet" Rogan and Satchel Paige, but since Kahn is focusing on the American and National League's top pitchers, the fault for that exclusion lies mostly with the owners, players and managers who supported the segregated system from the 1880s to 1947.