For a while now I've been threatening the other Box writers that I was going to do this, and now I'm going to do this. Every month I'll pick out a different book from the library of Toronto-Blue-Jays-related literature, and write about it. The '...In a Box' concept is totally stolen from Bill James.
To kick things off, here's a book I had never read before.
Title: Paul Molitor: Good Timing
Published: ECW Press, 1994, or the year after
Molitor won World Series MVP
# Pages: 205
Availability: indigo.com seems to have it in
stock
Author: Stuart Broomer
Who Is: the 'About the Author' part says
that he was a college-and-university-level English teacher in the Toronto area. He's written
other stuff too, magazine articles and things, but I couldn't tell you what.
There seems to be a jazz musician and writer of the same name; I'm assuming
it's not the same guy
What It's About: It's about how great Paul Molitor
is
Secret Hero: This book doesn’t have enough
moving parts to have a secret anything. It’s all Molitor.
How's The Writing? It'll do. The big problem is with
what's being written. This is not the typical baseball 'as told to'
"auto"biography; it seems to be strictly Broomer's project. After
having read the book, I couldn't tell you if Molitor even knew Broomer was
writing it, or, for that matter, if anyone else did. It seems to have been
compiled almost entirely from newspaper articles, and if Broomer spoke to
another human being to gather material for the book, I missed it.
As a
result, there's not a lot of insight in the book. How could there be? It's a
competent chronicle of facts.
It's also
an example of a book about an athlete written before that athlete's career
ended. Molitor still had five major league seasons to go, in which he played
for the team he was a fan of when he was a kid, and his three-thousandth hit
and Hall of Fame induction were also still ahead of him. 'Good timing', indeed.
I won't
be rereading it.
Sabremetric Corner: the summary of Molitor's seasonal
and lifetime stats at the end of the book lists batting average, games, at
bats, runs, hits, doubles, triples, home runs, RBI and stolen bases. No walks,
no caught-stealing, no OBP, no slugging.
Anecdote: when Molitor's big hitting streak
was stopped, he was on-deck when teammate Rick Manning hit a game-winning and
game-ending single. For his pains, Manning got booed by his own hometown crowd.
Also.
Remember the '93 Jays? The best organization in baseball? Highest payroll (at
50 million)? Team Briefcase? Had more cellular phones than the Phillies did?
Professional, businesslike? Man, times have changed. When did the Jays *stop*
being considered the best organization in baseball? Was it when Gillick
retired?
--
I wonder
what book I'll do next month. I guarantee I've got one or two here you've never
heard of. I hope I'll be able to come up with more material about them. I suspect it's proportional to how interesting the book is...
