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Erez Schatz

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Pure Baseball

by Keith Hernandez

bookshelves: currently-reading, non-fiction, sports

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Erez Schatz said: " Do a search about "baseball books" or even "best baseball books". You'll get a lot of good books. Ball Four. The Boys of Summer. Eight Men Out. The Glory of their Time. The Soul of Baseball (a personal favourite or mine). Those are fine books. They a Do a search about "baseball books" or even "best baseball books". You'll get a lot of good books. Ball Four. The Boys of Summer. Eight Men Out. The Glory of their Time. The Soul of Baseball (a personal favourite or mine). Those are fine books. They are not baseball books. They are biographies. They tell personal or historical stories. They share the lives and actions of those who played, or promoted, or watched the game of baseball. But they are not about baseball.
There are exceptions. Occasionally you'll get someone to share a detail about the game itself, like how it felt standing in front of this or that player, but it's always in order to tell the story, and the story isn't baseball.

Sometimes you'll get a book like Moneyball, which isn't a "baseball book" but an economic/business story written by an economy/business writer that actually details integral parts of the game like taking pitches, or the way statistics translate to on-field performance. However, those still do it for a reason outside of the game itself, like detailing why a certain player was better, or why batting averages doesn't matter when trading for players.
And then there are the books about baseball, how to hit, how to pitch, etc. Those usually lack anything that makes the non-baseball books entertaining as they tend to be dry, laconic and full of technical stuff. I would've loved to sit with Ted Williams and have him talk hitting, but his "Science of Hitting" is way too much "science" and not enough "hitting", as in the batter and pitcher duel of physics and psychology.
"K" by Tyler Kepner is another good example. It's supposed to be about pitches, but really it's not about them at all, but about pitchers and their stories and how they won or lost games with a pitch and who learned from who. If in Williams' book you learn nothing about the hitter and a lot about hitting, in K you learn a lot about pitchers but nothing about pitching. And neither book talks about how those two interweave and develop throughout the game.

Pure Baseball, by Keith Hernandez, is, therefore, the best "pure baseball" book. It doesn't talk about the life story of the players, or about the business of running a club or how did that player feel when his error caused the pitcher to lose the game. It talks about nothing but the actual game of baseball itself. It talks balls and strikes, fast balls and sliders, swings, misses, hits and runs. It talks base running and umpire calls. It talks about fielding positions and signs. Lefties and righties, slumps and rallies. It talks about baseball. Nothing but baseball. In this sense, even if it was a bad book, it would still be the best Baseball book out there. Fortunately it's anything but a bad book.

Keith Hernandez is one of the greatest who ever played the game. Just ask any Mets or Cardinals fan. Or Astros, Red Sox, Brewers or Braves fan, for that matter. He was NL co-MVP, NL batting champion and 11 times gold glover. He was always known as a great hitter and a "tough out", and was always praised for his "baseball brain" and strike-zone awareness. He is considered the best 1st baseman ever. He was field leader and team captain. So he has the credentials.
He knows how to deliver this knowledge as well, as he's been doing for the past decade as a part of the announce team at SNY, commenting on Mets games. In this way, he's perfect for this job of narrating through two ball games, pitch by pitch, having been both cerebral as a player and entertaining as an analyst.

This book does nothing less, or more, than talk baseball. It details two games, one between the Phillies and the Braves, the other between the Tigers and Yankees. He details the game, pitch by pitch, by not only calling the plays or analysing them, but by explaining how, from 1st pitch to last, the game in front of us evolve. Why would the batter with 2 men on bases swing on that particular pitch? Why did the pitcher select that pitch? How does each of these affect the field position and how did the outcome of that play affect everything that happened afterwards?
Bob Costas used to say how talking about a single hit, or catch, or pitch was always the bad discussion because there were so many elements involved in that specific play (and he would then go into describing them). This book takes the other approach, and talks about each pitch and play in context and as they take shape. The same way that a three-pointer with the buzzer is not the play that won or lost the game, but the 170 shots that were taken before that which got the game to a 2-point lead with 0.25 seconds left on the clock.

For a fan, there are many levels of enjoying baseball, at home or at the stands. There is the casual outing, or the rooting for your team aspect. There's the excitement of seeing a team rally or shut the opposition. Some like to keep score, or argue and debate the game with their friends. This takes the game one level deeper. It presents baseball as it truly is, a game of consequences, played pitch-by-pitch, where every move is being based on what came before and influences what will come after. It's chess played with dice. It's a physical non-physical game. It's a game like no other, and deserves a book that describe it perfectly and minutely, because it's the only sport about which such a book can be written. This is this book. ...more "

Sep 06, 2020 04:39AM · see review