The Road to Cooperstown: A Critical History of Baseball's Hall of Fame Selection Process

A bit much.
Stats nerds may love this book, but anyone else might want to wade in carefully because from page 1 of the introduction to the conclusion 270 pages later it spits out statistics like a pitching machine gone haywire. Unless you're a computer, your eyes may glaze over long before it's done. If you read on, hoping for a respite in a succeeding chapter, be warned, the breaks are rare and brief. Now the author does have some good points, particularly regarding the 7 shortstops, some of whom are in the hall and some who are not. Another is his idea regarding the number of times candidates have led the league in various categories. On the other hand it is hard to understand why he puts so much emphasis on fielding and ensuring that show more the hall's population is proportional by position when everyone knows that good hitting is the majority of what wins baseball games. The complaints about certain players being eliminated from consideration by the Veteran's Committee seem overblown, more based on principle than reality, as those players would in all likelihood never be approved anyway. Many reading this review will probably wonder at his views on the number one hot button issue facing the hall for the past decade: his brief on Pete Rose suggests that the hall is being inconsistent on him and on Shoeless Joe Jackson as it appears that two of the game's greatest stars, Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker, are similarly tainted. Overall, what might have been a quaint and somewhat satirical history of the hall's induction process is instead turned into a relentlessly hard hitting position paper which lacks any charm for the average reader. Apart from actual hall of fame electors, who should read it but won't, I don't really see a general audience for this book. In the end the lingering question is "why does the author care so much?" and to wonder how much stress he is causing himself by being so passionate over such tiny matters as no doubt the millionaire ballplayers he's writing about haven't lost a wink of sleep over it, or shouldn't. show less