Hope springs eternal, Martin Levin says, for books as well as for teams

As I was walking down New York's Fifth Avenue last week, I noticed (couldn't help but) the Mitchell Report walking toward me. You know the Mitchell Report, the scandal-refracting U.S. congressional listing of major league ballplayers who ingested illegal drugs. Okay, it wasn't the actual report, but its human personification and impetus - one Jose Canseco, the oversized former slugger who has admitted to taking steroids, to seeing teammates take them, even to hooking them up with willing trainers. It was Topic One in all hot-stove leagues this winter.

Canseco was already a pariah, variously lambasted for telling tales out of school or dismissed as an embittered liar for claims he made in his 2005 Juiced, a tell-all exposé of drug use among players. Now he's back with a new book, which he was in New York to promote - while stirring the sex pot by accusing Yankees mega-star Alex Rodriguez of, er, having alienated the affections of his bodacious ex, whom Jose - romantically - met while she worked at a Hooters.

The title screams it all. Vindicated: Big Names, Big Liars, and the Battle to Save Baseball (Simon Spotlight, 259 pages, $20.99) is essentially an in-your-face postscript, padded with excerpts from testimony, speeches and big chunks of the Mitchell Report. A triumphant-but-angry Canseco names even more names and opines that baseball will survive this crisis. But will it be thanks to him, or no thanks to him?

Baseball Cassandras will also be interested in Roger I. Abrams's The Dark Side of the Diamond: Gambling, Violence, Drugs and Alcoholism in the National Pastime (Rounder, 216 pages, $24.95). This, at least the third recent entry in the Baseball Babylon pennant race, is a well-researched work that reminds us that scandal in the summer game hardly began with steroids. Think immediately of the eight members of 1919 Black Sox (i.e. White Sox), who stuck a steroid-free needle into their parsimonious owner, Charlie Comiskey, by throwing the World Series. Many of the stories told by Abrams, a law professor and major-league salary arbitrator, will be familiar to serious fans, but those encountering them afresh will be variously titillated and repulsed.

I don't know why people should be surprised by ballplayers' bad behaviour. We treat athletes like gods and, like gods, they frequently run amok. But we may preserve the purity through fantasy, in the form of fantasy baseball leagues. These, combined with the rise of statistical analysis and the ubiquity of the Internet, have produced a new breed of fan, one who may still root root root for the home team, but that home team is just as likely to be his (and, increasingly, her) fantasy-league roster as it is the Blue Jays or Cubs.

No one has been more responsible for that change than Bill James, the most influential baseball mind of the last quarter-century. In the 1970s, James began producing his annual Baseball Abstract, a series of bold and exciting new ways of looking at the game, on mimeographed and stapled sheets. By the early 1980s, it was in book form and its influence was vast.

James no longer writes his Abstract (sorely missed here), but he is still creating new stats (ask someone to explain runs created to you) and refining old ones, and produces a couple of books a year. The Bill James Handbook 2008 (Acta Sports, 412 pages, $21.50) offers a complete analysis of the previous season, plus much more information and opinion. But I prefer The Bill James Gold Mine 2008 (Acta Sports, 317 pages, $22.50), a trove of thousands of nuggets such as this: Disappointing Blue Jays prospect Adam Lind hit 59 ground balls toward right field in 2007; only one made it through the infield. In addition, James offers his patented opinionated essays, such as how to measure which players are most consistent over time. These books will be much dog-eared.

James's most prominent acolyte is Rob Neyer, who has established a niche with a series of very entertaining books on baseball line-ups and baseball dynasties. His latest is Rob Neyer's Big Book of Baseball Legends (Fireside, 330 pages, $18.99). In his usual conversational tone, Neyer examines 90 or so baseball legends, stories that have come down to us, often from self-aggrandizing players (perhaps Jose Canseco will figure in a future edition). Using previously unavailable sources, Neyer examines such culturally crucial questions as: Did Babe Ruth nearly pummel the obnoxious Leo Durocher to death for stealing his watch? Some of these stories, it turns out, are actually true.

Speaking of the Internet, it's now the best source of interesting, if sometimes nerdy, baseball info. Out of hundreds of websites, two I turn to regularly are Baseball Prospectus (Baseball Prospectus) and Hardball Times (The Hardball Times). Each is now producing books as well, proving that print is not quite dead yet. Baseball Prospectus 2008, edited by Steven Goldman and ******ine Kahrl (604 pages, $24) offers analytical essays on the immediate past and prospects of all 30 teams and detailed looks at all their players. It includes great insights and creative use of stats, though I am no fan of PECOTA, their self-vaunted method of predicting performance.

Hardball Times has two books out. Looking backward, Hardball Times Baseball Annual 2008 (Acta Sports, 368 pages, $19.95) examines the previous season. Full of charts, graphs and sometimes heavy-duty analysis, it's not for the casual fan, though the accompanying essays can be both penetrating and entertaining. Looking forward, Hardball Times Season Preview 2008 (Acta Sports, 238 pages, $17.95) offers projections and commentary on every player for the season now just under way. It's really geared to the fantasy crowd.

Yankees fans on your gift list (should there be any) will be enthralled by David Fischer's lively and lavish A Yankee Stadium Scrapbook (Running Press, 125 pages, $30), a celebration of sport's most successful franchise and the final season of the House that [Babe] Ruth built. And 12-year-olds will relish Baseball Now (Firefly, $24.95), Don Bortolotti's full-colour paean to the best contemporary players. From Ripley's Believe It or Not comes Baseball Oddities & Trivia by Tim O'Brien (no, not that one), illustrated by John Graziano (119 pages, $11.65), while Fran Zimniuch examines the fascinating history of player trades, the good the bad and the ugly, in Going, Going, Gone (Taylor Trade, 203 pages, $16.95).

Of all sports, rivalled perhaps only by boxing, baseball has the strongest links with literature. Philip Roth, Mark Harris, Bernard Malamud and W. P. Kinsella are among the game's literati. They're joined by Peter Schilling Jr. in The End of Baseball (Ivan R. Dee, 337 pages, $25), set in the war year of 1944, as Bill Veeck (a real and important figure), in the face of opposition from the likes of commie-in-every-closet FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, raids the Negro Leagues for stars like JoshGibson and Satchell Paige.

Last, and a favourite, is Dingers: Contemporary Baseball Writing, edited by Montreal poet and ball fan David McGimpsey (DC Books, 150 pages, $18.95). This anthology, which explores the relationship between writer and game in poetry and prose, features writers both well known - George Bowering, Dave Bidini, Steven Hayward - and those well worth discovery - Mary Milgram, Greg Santos, Anastasia Jones.

MARTIN LEVIN
April 12, 2008
The Globe & Mail