Flip Flop Fly Ball: An Infographic Baseball Adventure [Hardcover]

Craig Robinson (Author), Rob Neyer (Introduction)

Book Description

Release date: July 5, 2011 | Age Range: 8 and up | Lexile Measure: 1120L (What's this?)

How many miles does a baseball team travel in one season?

How tall would A-Rod's annual salary be in pennies?

What does Nolan Ryan have to do with the Supremes and Mariah Carey?

You might never have asked yourself any of these questions, but Craig Robinson's Flip Flop Fly Ball will make you glad to know the answers.

Baseball, almost from the first moment Robinson saw it, was more than a sport. It was history, a nearly infinite ocean of information that begged to be organized. He realized that understanding the game, which he fell in love with as an adult, would never be possible just through watching games and reading articles. He turned his obsession into a dizzyingly entertaining collection of graphics that turned into an Internet sensation.

Out of Robinson's Web site, www.flipflopflyball.com, grew this book, full of all-new, never-before-seen graphics. Flip Flop Fly Ball dives into the game's history, its rivalries and absurdities, its cities and ballparks, and brings them to life through 120 full-color graphics. Statistics-the sport's lingua franca-have never been more fun.

(By the way, the answers: about 26,000 miles, at least if the team in question is the 2008 Kansas City Royals; 3,178 miles; they were the artists atop the Billboard Hot 100 when Ryan first and last appeared in MLB games.)

Craig Robinson is, among other things, an Englishman and a New York Yankees fan with a soft spot for the Colorado Rockies and a man-crush on Ichiro. Last season he played outfield for the Prenzlauer Berg Piranhas in the Berlin Mixed Softball League (.452/.548/.575). His previous books include Atlas, Schmatlas: A Superior Atlas of the World and Fun Fun Fun.

Editorial Reviews

Review

One of Baseball America’s Best Baseball Books of 2011

“Beautiful, number-crunched combination of statistical and graphic-design geekery”—New York Times Magazine

 

“The greatest baseball infographics ever.”—Slate

 

“Often wacky and always engaging”—Sports Illustrated

 

“Infographics much more stunning than those you'd find in USA Today”—Deadspin

 

"Contains a lifetime of baseball knowledge."—Toronto Star

"Irreverent and entertaining"—Baseball America

“The combination of [Robinson’s] precisely created charts and the offbeat things they chart reflects a brain firmly, winningly divided between the game’s childlike, imaginative pull and the over-thought technocracy of its sabermetrics era.”—The Second Pass

 

“Casual fans will definitely appreciate the trivia and visual aesthetics of Robinson's infographics. It's also a book that packs a ton of information for real fans—I find myself looking at the graphics over and over because I know I will find more value each time I pick up the book up.”—Kevin Lai, Hardball Times

 

“Do yourself a favor and buy this book. It provides insight into the game of baseball you won’t find anywhere else. You’ll also have the coolest book on your coffee table for when you throw one of those dinner parties you keep having.”—Mop Up Duty

About the Author

Craig Robinson is, among other things, an Englishman and a New York Yankees fan with a soft spot for the Colorado Rockies and a man-crush on Ichiro. Last season he played outfield for the Prenzlauer Berg Piranhas in the Berlin Mixed Softball League (AVG .452 SLG .548 OBP .575). His previous book, Atlas, Schmatlas: A Superior Atlas of the World, was deemed "highly inappropriate" by the director of the Forsyth County Public Library. His Web site is www.flipflopflyball.com.

Product Details

• Age Range: 8 and up
  
• Hardcover: 160 pages
• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA (July 5, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1608192695
• ISBN-13: 978-1608192694
• Product Dimensions: 11.8 x 9.7 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (40 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #127,873 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #39 in Books > Humor & Entertainment > Humor > Sports

More About the Author

Born in Lincoln, UK in 1970. Currently living in Mexico City, Mexico. Very short-sighted. Beard. Large collection of baseball caps. Fan of procrastination, drawing, Mariano Rivera, the Beach Boys, Yves Klein, Peanuts, peanuts, the Shangri-Las, Ichiro Suzuki, Lolita (the book and the Kubrick movie), Diego Maradona, Seinfeld, mezcal, Kenny Dalgish, and poutine.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A great look at baseball from a unique perspective. June 26, 2011

By Grant Beaudette VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

With its leisurely pace and summertime schedule, baseball is well suited to inane statistics, wild speculation and other flights of fancy. Flip Flop Fly Ball delves deep into baseball's trivia fringe with sharp infographics and a special point of view.

Robinson's experience is quite an interesting one. Not just being a baseball fan from England, but also as someone who didn't come to baseball until well into adulthood. That gives his impressions of the game a unique flavor. While partaking in the multi-ballpark roadtrip has almost become a cliche, it takes on a different tone from Robinson's perspective. His talk of meeting weird people at the bus station and finding a place to smoke plays a fun contrast to the usual Americana and father/son warm fuzzies.

While the writings takes up a fair chunk of the book the majority of pages are dedicated to Robinson's paintings and most importantly his infographics, illustrating anything and everything having to do with baseball; from which numbers have been retired the most to which teams give out the most bobbleheads.

Rather than waxing philosophical like many baseball books, Robinson waxes almost nonsensical from graphics on stadiums with the most aesthetically pleasing parking lots to an "interview" with that dove Randy Johnson obliterated with a fastball in 2001. Just to better point out the book irreverent nature, the final graphic is the box score of a fantasy game between the E Street Band and the Wu-Tang Clan. (I won't spoil who won)

Flip Flop Fly Ball is well worth the purchase; both as a unique and humorous look at the American pastime, and as a fine coffee table diversion for long, plodding, walk-filled August gamedays.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Funny, informative, irreverant, but.......... June 9, 2012

By M. Hearing

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

This book could easily have gotten 5 stars from me. It should have. First, the good. It is a wildly fun book to read with all kinds of delightful insights, kooky and entertaining graphs, and information you would never find anywhere else. It is shared with obvious love by the author who has a brain that seems to think in ways that baseball lovers can truly appreciate. So why 3 stars rather than 4 or 5? He loses a point because although the graphs and charts are fabulous, they are also frequently nearly impossible to decipher. Tiny lines interweaving with other tiny lines with print that would require at times a magnifying glass to figure out. And worse, and completely bewildering, much of the very small font text is in colors that virtually disappear in the background colors. Who edited this? It is as if one guy sent in the charts and another guy totally apart from the first guy picked deep, rich page colors. Two fine ideas that when mixed together left an unreadable mess at times. He also loses a point for immaturity. He writes delightful prose about the game and the beauty around it, then without warning drops in a stupid comment referencing body parts or bodily functions that are not funny nor relevant. Was I offended? No. But those comments are shoved into the writing the way a 14 year old would talk and then giggle afterwards at being "naughty." It came across as juvenile and idiotic.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars WAY COOL book full of fun trivia (in the nicest way). This will keep me winning bar bets for years. July 1, 2011

By Esther Schindler TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

If you are any kind of a baseball fan, even the most casual one, I expect you will love this book as much as I do. It is lightweight and funny... and also chock full of baseball trivia. And not the dumb trivia that's simply collections of statistics that make you say, "Who cares?" These are answers to the questions that we genuinely ask during baseball games, or would be proud to ask: "Have there been any gay baseball players?" "What town in the continental U.S. is furthest from a major league stadium?" "If you added up all of Barry Bonds' walks, how many miles would he have walked?" (43.6 miles -- farther than from the Giants' ballpark than to San Jose, as the crow flies) "Which teams have the highest and lowest ticket prices?" (How 'bout that. For the price of the most expensive seat at Yankee statium, $1250, for what the author calls "so close you're sniffing the umpire's ass crack," you could buy 312.5 tickets in the cheapest seats, $4, in the bleachers at Coor's Field.) And... well, lots and lots and lots of these. Each of the 100+ items gets an infographic of its own: a chart, graph, Venn diagram or whatever. So you can really SEE the difference in ballpark elevations, for instance, not read a number.

There's another category of reader who will enjoy this book: People who make presentations for a living. Everyone tells you how important it is to communicate information in a visual way, and Craig Robinson demonstrates that he is a master of the art. Even if you don't care about baseball in the least, contemplate the difficulty of creating an infographic that shows (not tells but SHOWS) the relationship of baseball player salary to the team's yearly standings (including who was in the playoffs and who won the World Series) for the last 20 years. That's a LOT of data... and yet I can see at a glance how every team stacks up. If you make infographics, this will be inspiring.

If that's all the book was, it'd be worth five stars. But it gets a *polished* five stars because this book is really, really, funny. You see, the author is an Englishman living in Germany who just-so-happened to fall in love with baseball, and he is incredibly funny, about baseball and a lot of other things. Laugh-out-loud, poke-your-husband and say, "Honey I have to read you this" funny. Robinson spent two months touring the U.S. to visit as many ballparks as he could, and his travelogue would be worth the price of the book on its own. On his way to the Twin Cities from Milwaukee, for instance, he took an empty seat in the Greyhound station next to a hipster looking guy. "Sometimes it can be difficult to tell whether someone's the bass player in an ironically named band and really into Terry Richardson or a work-release parolee with deep-seated racist tendencies," he writes. "This guy was the latter. Joy." He never got to Phoenix (for shame!) but "visited" from Google Earth; he describes the outside of Chase Field as seen from East Buchanan Street: "[It] kinda looks like some sort of discount warehouse." (Which is true. It's much nicer inside, Craig.)

If people are stumped for what to give you as a birthday present... I suggest putting this on your Amazon wishlist. Or, heck, why wait? I recommend you get a copy for yourself right now. This is fun. Did I mention it's fun? Really. It is.