Category Archives: Bookworm Alley

I majored in History. Of course I read. A lot. Sometimes I write about reading.

Most of these reviews are duplicates of notes I’ve posted on LibraryThing.

Baseball Research Journal 1980 edited by Bob Davids: a review

The 1980 BRJ, like most editions, is now available on SABR’s website.

This is the strongest Baseball Research Journal edition yet. It features one of the classic works of sabermetric analysis, some excellent biographical portraits, a look at minor league umpiring practice in 1900, a glimpse at the 1880 opening of the original Polo Grounds, some analysis of why Fulton County Stadium was a launching pad, and an interview with Joe Oeschger about the longest major league game and other memories. Authors included Stew Thornley, Seymour Siwoff(!), David Smith, Ted DiTullio, and Richard Cramer. This issue has, of course, some variations in quality, but there’s really nothing you could fairly characterize as filler in this edition.

The classic sabermetric piece is Dick Cramer’s “Average Batting Skill Through Major League History,” which uses a moving average based on Cramer’s Batter Win Average (BWA) statistic (discussed in the 1977 BRJ) in an attempt to discover whether player performance has increased or decreased over time. I’d read this piece before, and been concerned about Cramer’s treatment of outliers, but this re-read has convinced me that he handled my concerns adequately. There is room for some quibbling, of course, but his basic point–that the talent level of major league players has increased substantially over the years, and that it continues to increase–is well argued and well supported by his data. This article is often cited as an important early analytical effort, which it is; someone should apply modern methodologies to the question and see how things hold up.

The early chapters of the 1980 edition are devoted to the post-playing careers of Billy Sunday (by Robert Muhlbach), Alfred W. Lawson (Lyell Henry), and Frank W. Olin (Tom Hufford). Henry’s Lawson piece is particularly interesting.

A number of events are commemorated in this journal, including The Last Tripleheader (A.D. Suehsdorf), a 1880 night game between two department store teams (Oscar Eddleton), and the Polo Grounds opening mentioned above (John J. O’Malley). Seasons considered include Joe Bauman’s 72 HR campaign (Bart Ripp) and the 1884 St. Paul Unions (Stew Thornley–I think his first SABR publication). Biographical treatments, besides those mentioned above, included Negro Leaguer Cannonball Dick Redding (John Holway) and nineteenth century star Jim Sheckard (Gregg Dubbs). There’s also a cute little piece on Rube Waddell playing college ball, writen by Harold Esch.

More or less sabermertic pieces, besides Cramer’s effort, included Seymour Siwoff’s accounting of some previously-undiscovered RBI records, David Smith on stolen bases (using Maury Wills data–and evidently Smith’s first SABR pub), and John Schwartz’ look at Intentional Walks.

Robert Kingsley’s look at Atlanta home run rates and Richard Burtt’s similar look at Pittsburgh triple rates both seem inadequat, as both explicitly discount what seem to be obvious causes (altitude in the Atlanta case, field dimensions in the Pittsburgh case). I think this is partly a case of we better understand these dynamics nowadays, and partly willful blindness on the authors’ parts.

There are, of course, the usual array of lists-with-explanatory-paragraphs; I shan’t list them here. Al Kermisch’s Researchers Notebook looked, among other things, at a postponed game in the 1918 World Series, Silver King’s no hitter, the 1889 Louisville player’s strike, and a recording error in Harry Schafer’s fielding records. Along the same lines was Arthur Ahrens attempt to pin down a story about an oft-misreported Bill Lange catch–Lange supposedly went through the outfield fence. Ahrens offers a plausible reconstruction which suggests that a couple odd incidents in a single game got garbled as folks retold the story.

So there’s some biography, some excellent historical work, a couple minor league pieces, and a key analytical piece. Something for every SABR audience.









This review was originally published on LibraryThing.

Revision History:

Pioneer History of Eaton County by Daniel Strange: a review

This book’s subtitle begins “OR the story of the last to lead the simple life…” and goes on for several lines demonstrating that pioneer life was, well, different, if not simple. The subtitle ends: “…Who gave us, their coming sons, their lives, their loves, their labors.” (I rather like that.)

Everyone should read a county history sometime. This one’s structured around identifying the first settlers in each Eaton County (Michigan) township, and how they arrived in the county; he also discusses early township leaders, school beginnings, and suchlike. There are also stories, digressions, and the occasional poem. A few of the stories are repeated, but in each case the perspective’s changed and the tale with it. All in all, an interesting diversion, especially if you’ve Eaton County connections. The potentially dry material is relieved by the author’s wry humor–he’s particularly amused by conflicting claims about the meaning of “first settler.”

The book’s impeccably researched; Strange clearly consulted land office records, county and township archives, memoirs authored by the early settlers, and news accounts. He spent his life teaching in local institutions, and seems to have known most of the county’s early residents.

This ebook, retrieved from the Internet Archive, is based on a Google Scan and has the usual spelling and formatting errors. I’ve seen worse.

A certainly-unimportant note: I notice Strange calls Mulliken’s founder T. Edgar Potter, which supports my impression that folks called Mr. Potter “Ed.”









This review was originally published on LibraryThing.

Revision History:

Northern Michigan Asylum by William A Decker: a review

This is Dr. Decker’s followup to Asylum for the Insane, his book about the Kalamazoo State Hospital. This book examines the history of the Traverse City asylum, and makes some effort to put it into context.

This book’s better than the Kalamazoo book. There’s less emphasis on buildings, for one thing, and the author does a far better job of identifying and describing the political context which led to the construction of Michigan’s state hospitals and in which their staff members worked. The improvements seem to stem largely from two circumstances–Decker had learned not to repeat some of his first book’s mistakes, and he didn’t know this material nearly as well as he knew the Kalamazoo history.

That lack of familiarity cuts both ways, of course. Because his sources for this book are heavily concentrated in the early twentieth century and the 1970s, those periods get more attention than they probably deserve. Moreover, the research-material gaps occasionally result in speculative reconstruction of matters one might have preferred to see documented. On the other hand, his inability to fill in all the missing details freed up room for discussion of the changing political environment, something he handles surprisingly deftly and objectively. All in all, this book has a better arrangement than the earlier volume.

As with the original volume, this book’s chapters devoted to treatment are surprisingly interesting, and justify the book’s existence. This is clearly material the author’s known and pondered upon for his entire adult life.

Despite the improvements, this effort shares many of the Kalamazoo book’s weaknesses. There’s an annoying amount of repetition. There are unexplained issues just taken for granted–for instance, the apparently-inexplicable numbering system imposed on the campus buildings is not adequately discussed. And two late chapters are just unstructured fragments which add little or no value.

This book ends with an argument that the decisions behind the 1970s restructuring of the state’s mental health programs–in particular, the near-total deinstitutionalization of those efforts–was a poorly-considered mistake. There’s a similar chapter at the end of his first book, but this effort is more explicit.

I’m hoping his third volume–on the Newberry facility–discusses the strengths and weaknesses, and successes and failures, of Michigan’s state hospitals. Decker’s clearly got the data–and the knowledge–to present that information. I’d really like to see it.









This review was originally published on LibraryThing.




Revision History:

Enemies, a Love Story by Josh Schollmeyer: a short review

This is a skinny little book consisting entirely of quotations from other people about Gene Siskel, Roger Ebert, or (most commonly) the both of them. It begins by describing their newspaper rivalry, then their show’s tentative beginnings and subsequent history. Siskel’s illness and death are considered, as is Ebert’s cancer.

This is nicely done, as Schollmeyer’s got a good sense of how to assemble a story from what seem to be interview responses. It’s not really a history of the show, but more a portrait of the relationship, and how that affected the show.

Be sure to read the footnotes.









This review was originally published on LibraryThing.

Revision History:

Bill James Presents The Great American Baseball Stat Book (1988) edited by Don Zminda and Project Scoresheet

My review of the first book in this series set attracted a note from Geoff Beckman, who helped edit both editions. It would likely be worth your while to read Geoff’s comments before reading on….

Geoff considers this the weaker volume, and on the whole he’s right, as it lacks the zing of the initial edition. There were 338 player essays (up from 240), but on the whole they’re less interesting. Too many read like spring training player profiles, emphasizing the player’s tools and potentials while downplaying his demonstrated weaknesses. This is not meant to imply that the essays are all bad. For instance, principal editor Zminda portrayed a stubborn and still-valuable Carlton Fisk on a Chicago team that didn’t much like him. Craig Wright’s commentary on Bret Saberhagen gives clues about the value Wright provided the Rangers as an early professional sabermetrician. Beckman’s own Mel Hall essay used six methods to frame Hall’s value and is absolutely delightful. Mike Kopf made an effort to get into Bo Jackson’s head. And Susan Nelson offered a fine look at Dennis Eckersley in transition from starter to reliever.

Nelson’s Eck portrait, in fact, illustrates the book’s unplanned theme: In 1987 baseball’s pitcher usage was in transition as most managers had largely abandoned the four man rotation and were retreating from their long-held preference that starting pitchers finish ballgames. In retrospect it’s pretty clear that the late eighties were a turning point, formalizing long-developing pitcher usage patterns in ways that few would have anticipated.

The second edition of the book added team essays, which were uniformly forgettable. These were followed by a set of truly interesting, but unsystematic, manager essays. For this reader, these justify the book’s existence.

There’s some worthwhile stuff in the back of the book. Gary Gillette–or perhaps the scoresheet project in general–offered some interesting measures of defensive ability, reworking range factor to measure opportunities more precisely. I’m not sure whether anyone followed up on this effort, but it’s certainly interesting. I’d like to see more work along these lines.

Gillette and Dave Nichols did something similar with base runners, measuring steals in terms of opportunities rather than attempts. This, too, seems to be a one-off effort, and again it would be interesting to see further work in this vein. The same authors also took a brief look at baserunner advancement on hits, not offering much analysis but presenting a few tables.

Mark Pankin followed up on his discussion, in the previous edition, on Markov Chain Analysis, mostly presenting better data but not really extending the earlier essay. Matthew Lieff and Gary Skoog considered a similar, but less calculation-intensive, approach to using the same data to examine the effectiveness of in-game strategies.

In other end-of-book essays, David Gordon looked at Quality Starts and found them meaningful. In contrast, Merrianna McCully offered scads of data about the weakness of contemporary pitching–a piece that I’d characterize as more entertaining than informative. And Brock Hanke described Whitey Herzog’s playing career, and pondered how it shaped the Cardinals organization when he became the team’s GM. The Hanke essay was a good preview of the work he’d later do elsewhere. It was also the book’s only piece I still remembered when re-reading 25 years later.

This was the first time I saw Hanke’s name in print. The same is true of several of the book’s other contributors: John Benson, Sherri Nichols, Stuart Shea, and Sean Lahman come quickly to mind. (Tom Tippett was there, too, as one of the project’s programmers.) Just bringing these folks (and Pankin, in the previous edition) to my attention is plenty of justification for the effort.

This was the last GABSB produced in this guise, though Gary Gillette would resurrect the title for another project a few years later. It was certainly a worthwhile experiment, but apparently wasn’t sustainable.









This review was originally published on LibraryThing.




Revision History:

JD by Jamey Newberg: a review

“JD” is Texas Rangers general manager Jon Daniels. This short ebook’s subtitle is Building the team that built a winner, and it’s available from Newberg’s website for a mere $2.99. If you’re even slightly interested in how baseball’s front offices work, you want to read this.

While this work necessarily has some biographical content, it’s largely about how Daniels runs the Ranger’s organization–the things he emphasizes, the people he hires, the objectives he sets, the ways he communicates, the methods he uses to collect information, and the reasons behind those practices. Newberg, who’s been writing about the Rangers organization since the late 1990s, clearly knows the material. While I see some room for disagreement about causes and effects, the author’s basic argument seems to be sound.

I need to qualify the recommendation a bit. This book really could have used an editor. Newberg tends to assume we know who the Rangers’ senior staff members are; an editor would have insisted on more explanation. An early chapter is cluttered with lists telling where staff members worked before joining the Rangers; this could have been better handled with tables, or even summaries. There’s far too much repetition in this text–the author sometimes repeats a point on consecutive pages. And there are a couple sentences which just beg for blue pencils.

JD is heavy with quotations, most of which seem to have been drawn from other websites and publications. In-text references–or even a list of works & websites cited–would have helped, even though I’m familiar with most of the author’s sources.

Despite the qualifications, this is an excellent case study. It covers much the same territory as Jonah Keri’s The Extra 2%–but is shorter, and more interesting. Highly recommended.









This review was originally published on LibraryThing.

Revision History:

Sparky and Me by Daniel Ewald: a short review

I didn’t know a lot about Dan Ewald before reading this book, except that he was one of the folks Ernie Harwell always credited at the end of a broadcast. It turns out Dan was Sparky Anderson’s gatekeeper, and this book is a memoir of their relationship. It’s cast as a long conversation occurring a few days before Anderson’s death. There are a bunch of stories about, and often told by, Sparky. The last fifty or so pages are a real tear-jerker. Ewald likely intends this as an inspirational book, and it can certainly be read that way.

Besides the Life Lessons, the book contains a quite a bit of biographical material, and a surprising amount of information and commentary about Sparky’s managerial methods. Sparky was more a motivator and molder than a tactician, as anyone who followed his teams knows. Ewald witnessed Anderson’s methods during his Tiger years, and heard yarns about his work with the Cincinnati team’s already-established egos. Also potentially valuable is the author’s discussion about the differences and commonalities between Anderson’s two personas–Sparky, the always-on-stage manager, and the homebody known to his friends as George. I’d long been aware of the Sparky/George division, but hadn’t previously seen it directly considered.

This book’s been the stand-in-line book on my smartphone for the past few months. It’s been a worthwhile companion. Recommended, particularly to Tigers and Reds fans, and to anyone who wants some clue about how baseball’s managers do their work.









This review was originally published on LibraryThing.




The Autobiography of Theodore Edgar Potter: a review

In 1890 I sold my Vermontville farm and bought another in the same county, located on the new line of railroad being built by the Pere Marquette Railroad where I laid out the present village of Mulliken, Michigan, and continued a few years longer as a farmer with an incidental lumber business. My Mulliken farm I soon sold to my eldest son and purchased a quarter interest in the Potter Furniture Manufacturing Company at Lansing, Michigan, which city has been my home for the past thirteen years.

I live on Potter Street in Mulliken, and that quotation explains why I read this book. I’m pretty sure that 1890 date is wrong, as the railroad line and settlement both date from 1888, but we’ll allow an old man that error. I stumbled across this while looking for something else, so I snagged an electronic copy of the book. It’s far better than I expected, though potential readers should be cautioned that it describes many brutal events.

Potter was a competent writer and a gifted story-teller. His memoir is largely concerned with the years from 1852 to 1865, during which the author joined the California gold rush, took part (after a fashion) in William Walker’s Nicaraguan filibuster, visited New York, New Orleans, and Saint Louis, and took up residence in southern Minnesota. He was a captain in the militia which defended New Ulm during the Dakota War of 1862; later he was a Union officer whose troops participated at the fringe of the Battle of Nashville–mostly they chased, and sometimes caught, partisan guerillas. Some years later he was involved in the apprehension of the Younger brothers gang, again in southern Minnesota.

Theodore Potter–it’s pretty clear his friends called him Ed–was born in Saline, Michigan, in 1832. His family moved to Eaton County (at or near what became Potterville) in 1845 and Potter spent his teen years in the area. The first chapter largely tells of his teenage escapades; these tales have a delightful grasp of the local geography. About half the book recounts his California adventure; in tone and in substance it’s much like Twain’s Roughing It, and enjoyable for pretty much the same reasons. The Minnesota portion of the book is largely devoted to describing the Dakota War and the Army’s subsequent efforts to quell the rebellion, and is an exceptional rendering of what folks call “the fog of war.” While the last chapter describes his encounter with the Youngers, it also provides a sketchy overview of his subsequent life (through, apparently, 1904; the book was published in 1913, three years after Potter’s death.)

A few notes: It’s fair to say that Potter was sympathetic to the plight of the plains Indians, except when they were threatening his family and neighbors. He had far less sympathy for the rebel cause. The author’s wife gets surprisingly little mention, though their marriage lasted over fifty years. And the book describes a surprising number of truly gruesome events.

In 1916 the Minnesota Historical Society published a version of Potter’s account of the Indian war, which is available here. (A casual check seems to show it to be nearly identical to the account in this book, with some changes.) The footnotes published with the MNHS account make it clear that while Potter’s memory of details cannot be fully trusted, his account is essentially true. One would reasonably suppose that to hold true for the rest of his story.

Ed Potter’s life wasn’t particularly remarkable, as he notes on the last page of his book. It was, however, not an untypical life for a man born on the American frontier before the Civil War, and he recounted it well. The book deserves more attention than it’s received.

This ebook is a 254-page Google scan, though my copy’s via the Internet Archive. The scan deserves a couple comments. The first 180 pages are excellent, with only the minor punctuation and capitalization errors which plague most OCR scans. These are followed by a half-dozen pages of often-garbled text, with usual result that the reader’s obliged to guess occasional words and to sometimes puzzle out the meaning of entire sentences. After this rocky stretch, the scan returns to the previous excellent rendering. Then from pages 244 through the end the scan remains excellent but the text retains the page headers that had evidently been edited out of the rest of the book. It is, all in all, an odd rendering that defies obvious explanation. Overall, though, it’s unusually readable for a Google scan.









This review was originally published on LibraryThing.

Revision History:

Appalachian Passage by Helen Hiscoe: a review

While I’ve an interest in the history of West Virginia’s mining industry, the main reason I purchased this book is that I worked for many years in the orbit of the author’s daughter. I also had some interest in Dr. Bonta Hiscoe, whom I met many years ago in his leadership role as the original director of medical affairs for Lansing’s first HMO, Health Central.

Appalachian Passage is a fascinating book. Dr. Hiscoe, recently released from the Navy and looking for a temporary position while waiting for a residency opportunity, was hired as a company/community doctor in Coal Mountain, West Virginia in mid-1949. While he was hired and paid by the Red Jacket Coal Corporation, his relationship with the United Mine Workers was covered by a separate contract. Although most of his income apparently came from the coal mine’s monthly deductions from its employees’ paychecks, his patients included company officers and local folks without mining affiliations. Moreover, not all medical services were covered by the UMW payroll checkoff, which seems to have occasionally led to difficulties. Dr. Hiscoe’s time in Coal Mountain lasted less than a year, and was ended mostly by his peculiar and deteriorating relationship with the UMW. The causes of this rift are a major theme of the book, but seem not to have been fully clear to any of the participants.

Helen Hiscoe–herself a Ph.D., though it seems that the Coal Mountain community didn’t realize it–draws interesting portraits of several patients, of the mine’s manager, and of some of the key UMW activists. Much of Dr. Hiscoe’s non-routine medical practice revolved around child births, all of which seem to have occurred in homes. These were family events, of course. Every family behaved differently, and those differences are compelling. The author tells these stories well.

The Hiscoe family’s relationship with the local Mine Workers leadership was odd. In most cases the personal relationships were quite friendly, but it’s pretty clear that some of these friends were working against the Doc behind the scenes. The hows and whys were never satisfactorily explained, and in the end the family decided it would be better to leave than to sort out the problems. It would be interesting to see a similar account of the year from a mining family’s perspective, as it’s clear that the author wasn’t privy to pertinent discussions.

Barbara Ellen Smith’s Foreword provides valuable historical context for the UMW difficulties, pointing out that one source of strain was the national union’s post-WW II push to professionalize medical coverage for its members by establishing regional hospitals. That may (or may not) have contributed to Dr. Hiscoe’s problems, some of which seem to have been purely cultural. All in all, it likely doesn’t matter, as the Hiscoe family always imagined this as a temporary gig.

I’ve left a lot out in this summary. There’s quite a bit about daily medical practice, and the doctor’s relationships with his patients. The doctor, and the community, were keenly aware of the activities of the national UMW during this period, which had considerable impact on the lives of everyone in Coal Mountain during 1949 and 1950. The international situation–Soviet bomb development, especially–was of some concern to Dr. Hiscoe, a recently-released Naval officer still potentially subject to the military for his Navy-sponsored training. Two members of the Coal Mountain community proved to be lifelong family friends. The author also provides delightful descriptions of the local scenery. And of the colorful local roads.

The book is mainly about people, though, and the community those people made in Coal Mountain. On the whole, the memoir’s quite sympathetic to nearly everyone it portrays. While the book’s a portrait of a particular place at a particular time, it’s valuable both as a portrait of a mining town under stress and as a more general portrait of life in mining towns at all times.









This review was originally published on LibraryThing.

Revision History:

Baseball Research Journal 1979 edited by Bob Davids: a review

The 1979 BRJ (which is available online) contains one fairly famous sabermetric essay, a great biography of Fred Pfeffer, a fairly long Larry Gerlach essay exploring indicators of umpire greatness, the usual handful of game accounts, a look at Cy Young’s last few major league games, and maps of a couple notable rivalries. This isn’t an exceptionally strong issue, but there are articles to interest most any baseball fan.

The rivalries are described in Emil Rothe’s “History of the Chicago City Series,” which covers nearly fifty years, and George Wiley’s fairly detailed retelling of the contests between the excellent Yankee and Athletics teams from 1927 to 1932. These are necessarily quite different treatments.

There’s quite a bit of minor league material. Bill Weiss presented a few pages about Jimmy Claxton, a negro who played for the Oakland PCL team in 1916. Joseph Overfield offered a commentary on Buffalo’s hitter-friendly Offermann Stadium. Bob Hoie traced the brief and interesting history of the all-negro Southwest International League team that called Riverside, Ensenada, and Porterville home over the course of the 1952 season; the team (and the league) failed on August 1. Robert Cole had fun researching the now-abandoned practice of players advertising for positions in TSN, and the related practice of teams recruiting players by the same method. Harry Jebsen contributed a delightful piece on the 1888 Dallas Hams, who won titles in two less-than-stable leagues. The issue ends with Vern Luse’s look at the 1903 Hudson River League.

Larry Gerlach’s piece used three methods–length of career, number of post-season series (and games) worked, and number of all-star game appearances–as indicators of the abilities and reputations of big league umpires. While he didn’t draw any firm conclusions, he did make some effort to put his lists into a useful context. This was a good, and necessary, preliminary project supporting Larry’s later work.

This issue contains three essays which might be called sabermetric. The famous article is Barry Codell’s “The Base-Out Percentage: Baseball’s Newest Yardstick” which seems to have been the first published essay to argue that TB/Outs is a useful indicator of offensive effectiveness. Every history of baseball analysis mentions Codell. His calculation is enough like the stat Thomas Boswell later popularized as Total Average that they can be used interchangeably. Two points: Although most people who care recognize that BOP (TA) has value, few use it as their primary analytical tool. And so many people have independently devised BOP-like methods that Codell’s primacy claim is certainly publication, not discovery.

The other more-or-less sabermetric articles are Bill Schroeder’s “Baseball’s Leading Outfielders,” which didn’t quite discover Total Chances (or TC/Game). And John Schwartz, who helped Schroeder with his research, looked at “New Measures for Pitchers”–he normalized all the usual pitching counter statistics by Batters Faced by Pitcher. Like BOP, this method yields useful information, but baseball research practice has largely gone elsewhere.

As usual, a substantial number of essays in this BRJ can be characterized as a list with explanatory paragraphs. These include Bob McConnell on switch hitters, Ronald Liebman on hitting streaks, Stan Grosshandler on no-hit catchers, Ted DiTullio on long-service performers as players-umps-managers-coaches, Eddie Gold on Wrigley homers, Tom Joswick on players who lead their league in a “major category” while playing for a cellar dweller, Ray Gonzalez on players who homered off Walter Johnson, and Larry Amman & Bob Davids on brothers who played major league baseball.

Paul Doherty’s look at Cy Young’s last few games with the Boston NL team after Cleveland released him was very good, as was John Holway’s look at Louis Santop and Pete Palmer’s piece on Rube Waddell’s rookie season. Arthur Ahrens’ portrait of Fred Pfeffer (Cap Anson’s second baseman) was perhaps the finest piece in this edition of the journal. Al Kermish’s always-interesting Researcher’s Notebook included a piece about how he and Tom Hufford identified 1912 Senator player Lefty Schegg (actually Gilbert Eugene Price), and Harold Dellinger gave his account of tracking down the identity of 1884 Kansas City UA player Matthew Porter (rather than Henry Porter, as he’d previously been mis-identified).

All in all a decent issue, but not a compelling one.









This review was originally published on LibraryThing.

Revision History: