Power Ball audiobook

Very much in the tradition of Daniel Okrent's excellent Nine Innings, Rob Neyer uses the framework of a meaningless late September game between the eventual World Champion Houston Astros and the cellar dwelling Oakland A's, to examine the state of the National Pastime in 2017. He manages to give solid analysis of subjects such as the prevalence of home runs and strikeouts, and the length and pace of ballgames (amongst many other topics) while keeping the pace of his own writing both breezy and humorous. Now I very much want to dig up a copy of Okrent's book, and see if it's as great as I remember it being (and I'm pretty sure I will not be disappointed).

An utterly joyful read. Neyer has been one of my favorite baseball writers for a long time, and in this book he explores the contemporary game through following a late season Astros-A’s matchup. Reading it is like listening to one of the great commentators, who animate the action and fill the quiet moments in the game with stories. Highly recommend to baseball fans. For casual fans, this book will be a great primer on how the game has changed in recent years.

Power Ball reads like a trip to the ball park with a cool baseball sage. The one who has an appreciation for the history of the game, and at the same time, has the brains to easily crunch the numbers of the present. You can see him point to Altuve and say, “You see that guy? Well, there’s only been a few other players of his stature who have been able to play the game like that…” His conversational style thoroughly sustains the narrative of the 2017 game and the analysis of Post Modern topics that come up as each batter reaches the plate. From the defensive shift, to the change in how bullpens are now used, to the issues over pace of play, the strike zone, and video reviews. For my full review: https://paulspicks.blog/2018/09/26/po...For all my reviews: https://paulspicks.blog

#4 Best Book I Read in 2019Excellent baseball book. We’ve reached a new era in the game and Neyer explains what it is and how we got here, but the book is so much more than that. He uses a seemingly random Astros/A’s game as a jumping off point to lead into mini-essays on several aspects of the modern game - stadium architecture, Statcast, instant replay, tanking, race, defensive shifts, and many more. Nice to read a modern baseball book that isn’t a bunch of advanced stats and numbers.

Rob Neyer had a nice idea for a book. It's not an original idea - as he admits at the outset - but it's still a nice idea. Take a game - just a seemingly random regular season game with no importance beyond what happened on the field that day - and use it as a jumping off point to discuss the state of baseball in the modern day. Arnold Hano did for a book back in the 1950. Dan Okrent did it 30 years later. And, some three decades hence, no one else has piggybacked on this notion, so Neyer calls dibs. The game is a September 2017 contest between the championship-bound Astros and the second-division residing A's. It's a good game (walk-off win for Oakland - /spoiler), but Neyer doesn't spend much of the 280-some pages discussing the action on the field. Instead, each half-inning, he finds some event or player to focus on in order to go off on a tangent about modern baseball in general. As you'd expect from a veteran sabermetric writer, he handles launch angle, and spin rate, and all sorts of other contemporary sabermetric ideas from this age of statcast. But he also digs into other matters, ranging from the rise of Ivy Leagurs in the front office, modern baseball stadiums, social media, race & current baseball, and all that. He generally does a nice job. I might give it five stars, but I already knew a lot of the ground he covered here. A more casual fan might get more out of it.Any complaints? Well, I read this right after going through AstroBall, and comparing the two - Neyer has a more dismissive attitude toward team chemistry here. Your sabermetric front offices (like the Astros) are coming around more to the importance of it. (That book noted that the Astros though Carlos Beltran was worth the money they gave him based on how he helped out his players, while Neyer's book just notes his lack of production). Beyond that, one omission I found odd: while Neyer mentions race relations and baseball, and gets into politics (while talking about twitter), but he never mentioned players kneeling for the National Anthem. True, that's much more a basketball and football thing, but it was going on the same month this game was played - and the only MLBr to kneel (Bruce Maxwell) played in this game. Seems like a natural jumping off point to at least mention.Those are fairly minor criticisms. The biggest concern I'd have is how Neyer treats the current relationship between MLB and the Union. We're at a time when MLB has, for the first time in decades, clearly gotten the better of the relationship. That largely glances off Neyer. He gets into barely in the very last chapter, but his handling of it was wanting. He says that owners prioritize making their millionaire players happy instead of the fans happy, and notes in passing that the 2017-18 free agent season saw players getting less money than they expected. I mean, writers like Craig Calcaterra (who Neyer mentions in this last bit) and others have noted how the last few rounds have gone much better for owners than for players, but you wouldn't get that from this book. To be fair, the very end of this last chapter notes one interesting thing: attendance is down notably from the previous year. Overall, it's a very good overview of the current state of MLB.

Fascinating read. I felt as though I were at the game. I also felt like a fly on the wall when Rob was telling about the front office, players, and managers. I look forward to Rob's next book. Thanks to Goodreads First Reads for a copy of Power Ball: Anatomy of a Modern Baseball Game.

A solid 4-star book. Love the format, which goes through a 9-inning game, half-inning by half-inning, doing a deep dive on a specific skill, issue, or strategy. Other books have done that and this is a more modern version thereof. I think the baseball-interest level I'd recommend this to would be modestly hardcore. If you're a super hardcore, you're going to know a lot of the things in here. But Rob's takes make for interesting reading regardless.

Insightful reflections into the game at large through an in-depth look at one normal, regular-season game. That's probably its strongest feature in that it makes it easy to read when organized this way. Interesting to learn more about the defensive shift, tanking in baseball, and a lot more. Got a little more political than I expected? But overall, an enjoyable read.

Sports books are usually not a captivating read. But this book is! And that's not only because it is about my team, the Oakland Athletics. But also because each chapter delves, in a fascinating way, into an aspect of the modern game of baseball. Funny, amusing and a bit snarky at times, I found this to be a very enjoyable read.

At the beginning of Rob Neyer's new book, Power Ball, the author pays homage to earlier baseball books, and in particular several that used the device of one game as the setting for a narrative about baseball in general. Mr. Neyer borrows the convention lovingly as he uses a single September 2017 game between the Astros and the A's to discuss the current state of baseball, including sabermetrics, Statcast, defensive shifts, Exit Velocity, Launch Angle, player salaries and free agency, and the question of whether the baseball is slightly smaller and bouncier than several years ago. Along the way the author gives us narratives and information about the specific players who appear in this particular game as well as the teams, their coaches and GMs, and an assortment of random thoughts and stories, all of which are delivered in a fun, sometimes funny, and very accessible text.If you're looking for a coherent story, you'll be disappointed. There is the somewhat dramatic outcome of the specific game in question, but it was (as the author himself states early on) a meaningless game in September between one of the worst teams in the league and one of the best. The stories and discussions are more or less linked to the action on the field (sometimes the segues are obtuse) and the author rambles at times rather than tying the stories and discussions together into any recognizable narrative. But, the stories themselves are mostly interesting and filled with quotes and attributed comments that provide fodder for a baseball fan bonfire. It's warm, it's fun, and it's best shared with other people.Mr. Neyer sometimes waxes philosophical about the state of the game and a few times drifts into quasi-rants about his pet issues (no, Mr. Neyer, pitchers are not going to start wearing face protection any time soon), but for the most part the book is a fairly objective and evenly discussed presentation of the issues. The author clearly loves to harken back to the good old days of baseball, but he also loves the current game and wants everyone to appreciate the modern use of analytics as a positive development. The mound is still 60 feet six inches away from the plate, and the bases are still 90 feet apart. Some things never change, while many things evolve over time. That's the point, and it's well made.Hard core baseball fans will love the details and the depth of the discussions of the same issues we all argue about in bars and stadiums around the country. Casual fans will probably be overwhelmed by this book, and this is definitely not a book to get for a child or someone just learning the game. It has a definite place, however, in the baseball lexicon.

Rob Neyer has written a classic!Neyer has been a great baseball writer for many years, blessed with both a nimble and adaptable feel for the ongoing evolution of the game, as well as a fine sense of the game's rich history and abundant traditions. He is both a raconteur and an analyst - the perfect person to interpret the modern game to readers who want to know not only what is happening, but why.In Power Ball, Neyer explores the ebbs and flows of a single Major League Baseball game from the 2017 season. He zooms in to describe the game's many interesting events in chronological order, while periodically zooming out to provide context and history for many modern trends in baseball, such as the rise in home runs, defensive shifting, bullpen usage and more. As a lifelong baseball fan, I can attest that I found Power Ball to be very entertaining. As a person who has worked in the baseball industry for more than a decade, I can say that I found Power Ball to be remarkably accurate in its depiction of the modern game, and the thought processes within the game. For anyone planning to write about baseball, or to gain employment in the industry, Power Ball is an absolute must-read!

Fun! I only didn't give it 5 stars because I think that it could be a little more organized around certain themes, rather than bouncing from point to point, often even within chapters. But Neyer does have an overall point (the surge of "power" in baseball, seen in the increase in HRs and strikeouts and all things related to power, is evident and a detriment to the entertainment value of the game) and he makes it in a way that doesn't come across as simply complaining about "the game today." And along the way he says a whole lot of other interesting, insightful, and entertaining things about a game that is a little less entertaining than it used to be. Baseball is no longer my favorite professional game to watch, but there's still nothing like a really good baseball book. Neyer scores here, as he pretty much always does.

One of the best books on baseball I’ve read, particularly one that deals with the numbers, sabermetrics, social issues, strategy, and history. The author takes an inconsequential September game between the last place A’s and first place Astros and proceeds to tell a story for almost every batter or pitcher. He discusses the nuisances of the game that stats people crave but the average fan can’t always pick up while watching like pitcher’s spin rate or exit velocity from a batted ball. He uses the diminutive Astros star Jose Altuve to discuss short guys in the game. He often compares what he calls Post Modern baseball of today to yesterday such as the increase pitching speed or size of the players. I highly recommend this book to any baseball fan interested in various aspects of the game.

Rob Neyer has a challenge: To take pages from Arnold Hano and Daniel Okrent and discourse on the state of baseball using one game as his launching point. For Hano, it was Game 1 of the 1954 World Series. Okrent used a June 1982 Brewers-Orioles game. And Neyer uses a September 2017 A’s-Astros game. Hano had the World Series as his backdrop. Okrent and Neyer coincidentally wrote about teams that ended up in the World Series that year. And, just as the game in 1982 was vastly different than the game in 1954, the game in 2017 is different from the game in 1982. Neyer, one of the better writers on the current state of the game, does a masterful job of weaving in how he focus on analytics has changed the game, on issues as diverse as homosexuality in the game (or not in the game, to be more accurate), PEDs, tanking, social protests, equitable pay for minor league players and – most importantly – what it takes to build a great team, as they game is played today. This is a well-told tale. Well-written, concise, informative and intriguing. I gave the book four stars as there is one tic I found challenging. The book is filled with asides in the form of asterisks. There is at least one page where the asterisks take up more of the page than does the narrative. An occasional aside is fine but the asides in Powerball are excessive, to the point where they become disruptive to the narrative.

A must for all baseball fansProbably not breaking news but any content that Rob Neyer creates is essential to digest if you're a fan of baseball. In "Power Ball" we get his master work, a wonderfully written survey of the game today.