Customer Reviews

The 1999 Big Bad Baseball Annual: The Book Baseball Deserves

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

While I agree with many of the critical comments, I like the book a lot. Considering the number of pages and the tiny font sizes, the book is enormous, so even if you don't like some of the material, there's plenty here to enjoy.

It's definitely pitched to a pretty narrow audience though. You've got to have patience to wade through pages of explanations of their unique statistics. If all you want to do is read comments on players because you're in a Rotisserie league, this isn't the book for you.

There's some really good material in this book, but you have to plow through an awful--and I mean awful--load of self-indulgent tripe to find the occasional gem. When the chief authors aren't patting each other on the back and trashing the competition, they're staging made-up interviews with each other or writing about their dreams or other nonsense. The Montreal team essay is a rarity in that it looks in depth at something that actually happened on the field,an incident where a player loafed and cost the Expos a game and then was probably wisely traded. But there is just way too little of that. What there is instead is way too many stats that are difficult to understand or to read and too much from some writers who aren't all that impressive. Tom Austin is truly lame and his comments on what he thinks are the game's worst pitching seasons are sometimes almost laughable.

A book that I was very much looking forward to, that ended up being a big letdown. Besides the near impossibility of the book to read(miniscule fonts, numerous typos, unmarked charts that are sometimes near the text they are supposed to illuminate), a great deal of the information was just plain not useful and/or not entertaining. "Crossing the Rubicon" and "The Old GM and the Sea" add absolutely nothing to the book. And come on... A whole section on a moderately funny r.s.b. poster? "Jeff Drummond's Greatest Hits" would have been snipped by any thinking editor. I did enjoy some of the historical studies in the first part of the book, especially "Empire Building...". The team essays weren't overly enlightening, though I always enjoy Sean Forman's work. The player comments were brief and didn't add much. I expect these comments to be mostly based on statistics, but the lack of any description of what was physically happening on the field to accumulate those statistics is a big weakness of the player comments. It is fine to know that pitcher X's "S" score improved tremendously in 1998, but could you give me some insight as to why? Lastly, the tone of this book was a bit curious. It seems the authors are very interested in tearing down others(James, BP, Neyer). This is also to the book's detriment, as it makes the authors look petty, and given the obvious weaknesses of their effort, not very credible.

I've given this annual two tries now, and I'm not sure it's getting another.I greatly enjoyed many of the team comments, but the player comments were greatly irritating. There's more to a player than predicting what he's going to do next, and the self-conscious adherence to some truly banal predictive measures makes even that aspect unsatisfactory reading. Brock Hanke's contributions are particularly irritating. His arrogance displays his obvious need to be considered a player in his field.

It's big all right and it comes out every year, so there's no argument there. Since even its own authors are willing to concede it's bad, the only point of contention is whether it should be allowed to use the name of our national pastime in its title. I think not. Precious few of this book's regular cast of writers seem even to have much caring for the game. What a couple of them do appear to like are bad film noir scripts. The Kansas City team essay is a prime example. You have to feel sorry for Royals fans who read it--especially any foolish enough to have bought the book before doing so.

If you like yours stats raw, undiluted, and irrelevant, this is your book. A horrible book, very hard to read without a magnifying glass. Egotistical reviewers. Bill James/STATS books are far superior.

Just shows how different people are, I guess. The reader from Indianapolis seems to overlook the depth of this book's look at a range of issues and subjects pertaining to baseball and its history, and that's a shame. I don't know if the previous reviews were "fake," but I agree more with them than someone who downplays the wealth of unique material (Tom Ruane's "Empire Building" excerpt, the statistical look at Jackie Robinson's career, a critical look at Stephen Jay Gould's evolutionary model of baseball, and much more) provided in BBBA. Regardless of what time in the baseball season it is, you'll find something unusual and interesting in this book, and that's a rarity in this field.

I ordered this book with high hopes, and the reviews here were good. But I just got the book, which means it just came out, and the other reviews were from as much as two months ago. The book's not bad, though. But you can get a lot of the same information for free all over usenet and the World Wide Web. Jay Walker should get to write more. Not great, but OK, and I feel misled by the obviously fake reviews from two months before the book was even released.

I agree with the last reviewer. This annual was promising a few years ago, but now it's barely adequate. The statheads appear to have taken over the store. Suggestion--look for writers who only have one piece in the book, Ruane, Art Martone, etc. But avoid like the plague the ones whose names are on the masthead. The one exception to this is Jay Walker. He's way too good for this crowd.

Every year, this is the most insightful sabremetric annual. Not only a lot of number crunching, but a fine read, as well.