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michaelnlibrarian's review
2.0
I found this title when I looked through the "top 100 books of 2018" according to the Washington Post - as an adult convert to an interest in baseball, I was curious what I might find here.
"Why X Matter" (where X is various different things) is a series of books from Yale University Press. Whether they sought Susan Jacoby out to write this about baseball or it was other way round is not clear. Jacoby has written on various historical topics - her best known work is "The Age of American Unreason." She is not someone from the baseball "industry," that is, a former player or coach, or a sports writer or other person with a financial connection of any kind to the sport. She does profess a significant person interest in baseball as a fan of the Mets in particular and watching and studying (as a fan) baseball for much of her life in general.
I wanted to like this book. For one thing, lately I am particularly attracted to books I can get into that are less than 200 pages - enjoy, complete, move on to the next one. I finished this (about 175 pages) in relatively short order but more or less forced myself through the last chapter, not wanting to call it quits without completing the thing at that point.
But . . . I wasn't that thrilled with this. The book has five chapters. The introduction and first two (of five) chapters set out some background, but after that the next three chapters seem to go round and round in circles making much the same points over and over with slight variations and anecdotes. This seemed like it could have been easily reduced to an article in The New Yorker, making the same points more succinctly (even if at some length!).
A lot of what Jacoby thinks is problematic has to do with the shrinking attention span of the rising generation(s) with their smartphone in hand in contrast to the (in her view - probably right) mostly misguided efforts of Major League Baseball to shorten the average length of games as the antidote. But some of her commentary and examples don't fit in with my own observations attending about 30 games a year - I don't agree that by default you can assume anyone engaging periodically with a smartphone while at a baseball game is in effect a lost cause in terms of sustainability as a successful future engaged fan of the game. She mentions the At Bat app, but doesn't note that it allows a fan to check up on the umpire's calls of balls and strikes more or less in real time. And Jacoby seems to have a fixed idea of what successful engagement with a baseball game should be, or small number of variants - my own experience is that there can be many different versions of enjoying baseball (at the ball park) that are all good in that they reflect long term commitment to repetition (ie, going to more games).
Of course perhaps it is just that Jacoby is a Mets fan that is my problem. Could be . . .
"Why X Matter" (where X is various different things) is a series of books from Yale University Press. Whether they sought Susan Jacoby out to write this about baseball or it was other way round is not clear. Jacoby has written on various historical topics - her best known work is "The Age of American Unreason." She is not someone from the baseball "industry," that is, a former player or coach, or a sports writer or other person with a financial connection of any kind to the sport. She does profess a significant person interest in baseball as a fan of the Mets in particular and watching and studying (as a fan) baseball for much of her life in general.
I wanted to like this book. For one thing, lately I am particularly attracted to books I can get into that are less than 200 pages - enjoy, complete, move on to the next one. I finished this (about 175 pages) in relatively short order but more or less forced myself through the last chapter, not wanting to call it quits without completing the thing at that point.
But . . . I wasn't that thrilled with this. The book has five chapters. The introduction and first two (of five) chapters set out some background, but after that the next three chapters seem to go round and round in circles making much the same points over and over with slight variations and anecdotes. This seemed like it could have been easily reduced to an article in The New Yorker, making the same points more succinctly (even if at some length!).
A lot of what Jacoby thinks is problematic has to do with the shrinking attention span of the rising generation(s) with their smartphone in hand in contrast to the (in her view - probably right) mostly misguided efforts of Major League Baseball to shorten the average length of games as the antidote. But some of her commentary and examples don't fit in with my own observations attending about 30 games a year - I don't agree that by default you can assume anyone engaging periodically with a smartphone while at a baseball game is in effect a lost cause in terms of sustainability as a successful future engaged fan of the game. She mentions the At Bat app, but doesn't note that it allows a fan to check up on the umpire's calls of balls and strikes more or less in real time. And Jacoby seems to have a fixed idea of what successful engagement with a baseball game should be, or small number of variants - my own experience is that there can be many different versions of enjoying baseball (at the ball park) that are all good in that they reflect long term commitment to repetition (ie, going to more games).
Of course perhaps it is just that Jacoby is a Mets fan that is my problem. Could be . . .
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