02/22/25
April 25, 2005
Like Steroid Talk?: Michael Lewis gives you 9 pages of it in Sunday's NYT Magazine (registration required)
No, it's not about steroids, is it? I like it a lot, especially the way Lewis develops his theme of players staying true to their talents. The long excerpt below was a wonderfully unexpected bit of insight:
Baseball players make their livings doing something they have done since they were small children; every player has a physical history, a source for the reflexes that get him through a game. Mark Teahen is no exception. This odd swing of his -- the reason he's a good hitter but not a power hitter -- has a rich provenance. There was nothing to do in Yucaipa except play baseball -- or, at any rate, nothing else he wanted to do. Every afternoon he and his two brothers would go out into the backyard for a game of Wiffle ball. Right field -- the natural power zone for a left hander like Teahen -- ended at the back of the house. If you hit the ball on the roof, it got stuck in the gutter, so the boys declared what would have normally been a home run an out. It was left field, a low brick wall, that tempted the hitter. Reach out over the plate and serve the ball into left field, and you had yourself a home run. Mark and his older brother Matt, both lefties, developed an extreme tendency to go the other way, to try to hit the ball over the left-field wall. Only his younger brother, Mick, the lone righty, learned to pull the ball and hit with power.
posted by Uncle Toby at 03:30 PM on April 25, 2005
Yes Uncle, that excerpt is probably the best part of the article. I liked it a lot too. It's a sneak preview of Lewis' sequel to Moneyball, which he discusses a little over here.
posted by qbert72 at 03:41 PM on April 25, 2005
And without spoiling the article, but with a nod towards what an accomplished, professional writer Lewis is, the fact that he saves that passage for the denouement was brilliant. This was a great article, well worth the read, and serves as a nice counter to this Bill James piece also in the Sunday NY Times...
posted by vito90 at 12:45 AM on April 26, 2005
Well it's not really steroid talk. Steroids just serve as a lead-in for the stories of Steve Stanley and Mark Teahen, two members of the 2002 A's draft, who have not "grown into power", as they were expected to.