The Futility Infielder

I'm doing a bit of housekeeping around FI.com, promoting The Juice on the home page (and I'd appreciate it if you use that link to purchase a copy, as I get a small referral fee that helps pay the bills around here), and contemplating even bigger design changes to the site. From the traffic stats, it seems that an increasing share of my audience is viewing this site on monitors that will accommodate a wider page size (and therefore less scrolling), so that's at the top of the list. Should I happen to kick up any dust in the process that renders this site missing in action or askew in its presentation, rest assured that it's merely a temporary glitch that will be ironed out.

I also wanted to follow up the The Juice-related link with a couple of other pertinent book mentions. First off, my pal Steven Goldman's book on Casey Stengel, Forging Genius, is now headed for a May 6 ship date, It's been receiving some very positive reviews lately. Allen Barra has written glowingly of it here, here, and here. Says Barra, a fine author in his own right:

"Forging Genius" isn't so much a biography as a study of how three-quarters of a century of baseball wisdom came to be encapsulated in one of the game's classic eccentrics. "Is this serious? Are they really going to put a clown in to run the Yankee operation?" asked a New York sportswriter when told that Stengel had been chosen to manage the Yankees in 1948. That's how Stengel was regarded by those who had not studied his minor-league record carefully or who hadn't paid sufficient attention to how he got the most out of a ragtag collection of misfits with the Brooklyn Dodgers.

The combination of Stengel's unorthodox behavior -- on a tour of England, Casey, dressed in full baseball uniform, stepped right up to shake hands with King George V -- and bold tactics took even veteran baseball writers by surprise. Taking his leave from McGraw, he perfected "platooning" -- pitting right-handed hitters against left-handed pitchers and vice versa, employing relief specialists and using veteran role players to supplement young starters.

"Because I can make people laugh," he once said, "some of them think I'm a damn fool. ... But as a player, coach and manager, I have been around baseball for some thirty-five years ... I've learned a lot and picked up a few ideas of my own." And along the way, he did more than any other manager to create the modern game.

Steven Goldman has looked over a well-traveled road and found in it new directions. "Forging Genius" is that rarest of baseball books: respectful toward tradition and irreverent to perceived wisdom. The greatest of American sportswriters, Red Smith, once wrote that it was necessary to reintroduce Stengel to readers "at least once a decade." Goldman's "Forging Genius" ought to do for at least a century.

Meanwhile, Salon's King Kaufman had some kind words as well, calling it "Best book about a baseball manager this year," not that there's much competition besides Buzz Bissinger's Tony LaRussa book, Three Nights in August, which frames itself as an anti-Moneyball screed while hailing the "genius" responsible for twelve-man pitching staffs and third LOOGYs. Not exactly coming soon to a bookshelf near me, at least on my dollar.

Back to Goldman, a recent Pinstriped Blog entry (scroll to Thursday, April 21) amusingly describes his travails editing the forthcoming Baseball Prospectus book on the Red Sox, Mind Game, to which I contributed two chapters:

"Mind Game" ... started out last winter as a quick six- or eight-week project with eight chapters and just a few writers, then mushroomed into a magnum opus of more than 25 chapters and a cast of thousands. It has had the gestation period of a blue whale without the second trimester euphoria. I have watched suckling babes age and wither during the construction of this intended bauble. Mighty trees have fallen. Epochs of fashion and morals have passed. I was young and sprightly when I began, now I am stooped and mumble.

....With a month of convalescence somewhere like Baden-Baden (Who am I kidding? I'll never go to Germany) I might even live to see it published later this summer. I even think that it just might turn out to be a swell book about a team that took a rational approach to team building, even if it did reach out of its mother's womb and try to strangle Daddy on the way to the delivery room. It certainly reads faster than we put it together, and that's a good thing. We've crammed it full of tasty goodness, like literary foie gras.

As much as the next man, I wish Mind Game was already on the shelves, but its delays have been caused by the need to keep BP's customers happy with the timely delivery of the annual book as well as regular web content, not to mention keeping the staff, and particularly cleanup hitter Goldman, sane. Additionally, the virtue of its late publication is that it aspires to be a measured, nonpartisan, timeless evaluation of Sox history and the arc of the Henry/Epstein regime rather than a quick reaction to the marketplace such as the slew of King/Shaughnessy/Montville tomes -- not that those don't hold their virtues for diehard Sox fans, I'm sure.

I've got review copies of a couple of Yankee-related baseball books in my pile. Continuing with the book theme, I'll hit those sometime in the next several days, and continue to discuss the Carroll and Goldman books as I lay hands on my own copies.