New Books In Sports

This week’s episode features Sam Miller and Jason Wojciechowski, editors of the Baseball Prospectus’ 2014 (Wiley, 2014), a yearbook that both previews the upcoming baseball season and provides readers a look into the state of the art in baseball analysis, both in terms of advanced statistical metrics and, increasingly, subjective...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One of the great dynasties of American sports are the UCLA men’s basketball teams of the 1960s-70s.  In a twelve-year span, the Bruins won ten national collegiate championships.  They had four undefeated seasons, and in one stretch, from 1971-1974, the teams won 88 straight games.  UCLA’s teams featured some of...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you’re younger than 45 or so, you probably don’t remember the “Battle of the Sexes.” This tennis match, between Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King, is one of the iconic moments in American history of the 1970s. It represented a breakthrough moment for women in sports, a symbol of...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It’s that time of year when the panels of experts on sports call-in shows shout opinions on the best and worst of the past twelve months. To finish the year, New Books in Sports offers its own panels of experts. But rather than arguing over the biggest matches and plays...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kevin Kerrane‘s Dollar Sign on the Muscle: The World of Baseball Scouting (CreateSpace, 2013) represents the first major study of the history and practice of professional baseball scouting.  Based on Kerrane’s ethnographic research with the Philadelphia Phillies during the 1981 season, the book provides an inside look at one of sports’ least understood...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Atlantic magazine recently asked its readers to name the greatest athlete of all time. The usual suspects were present among the nominees: Jesse Owens, Pele, Wayne Gretzky, Don Bradman. Given that these were readers of The Atlantic, there were some more thoughtful answers as well: Canadian athlete and cancer-research...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1967, an official of the French basketball federation lamented the team’s poor finish at that year’s European Championships in Finland. The French team finished sixth in their group of eight, and then lost in the first game of the knockout stage. The official noted that Europe’s top teams, such...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One of the most crowded sections of the sports library is the one devoted to autobiographies and memoirs. The shelves here are constantly adding new titles, by both legends and bit players. For instance, the past week has brought the release of new memoirs by Manchester United midfielder Paul Scholes...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Many fans store a vast collection of sports images in their brains. With just a moment’s glance at a picture, even a slice of the picture, they can recognize the athletes, the season, the game, the particular play that the photographer captured. I experienced this recently when one of my...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 2010, for the first time, an African nation hosted the FIFA World Cup. The advertisements surrounding the tournament used graphics and sounds intended to conjure the image of a vibrant, exotic land. In fact, though, the African-ness of the South African World Cup was pretty thin, when not wholly...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Throughout the centuries, in cultures around the world, people have played games. But it has only been in the modern age, in the last 250 years or so, that people have competed in and watched sports. Modern sports are distinct in practice and purpose from the ball games of Mayan...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Two guys are watching Premier League highlights, when onto the TV screen comes Rory Delap, then with Stoke City, doing one of his renowned throw-ins from the touchline directly into the box. One guy, a native of the American Midwest who’d been raised on baseball, basketball, and hockey, is amazed...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In October 2007, journalist Eric Simons sat in the stands of Memorial Stadium in Berkeley, Calif., to watch his beloved University of California Bears take on Oregon State University in football. If Cal won, it almost certainly would be ranked No. 1 in the country. Instead, Simons agonized as Cal’s quarterback struggled...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Scholars have pointed to various historical ingredients they see as necessary for the development of modern sport: political changes that allowed people to form associations, the rise of competitive capitalism, an emphasis on calculation and measurement, the advance of secularization. But this attention to economic, social, and political factors has...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The sixth season of the Indian Premier League recently concluded, and once again off-field problems cast light on the league’s growing pains. For the fifth year in a row, no Pakistani players were selected for the league’s teams, while other foreign cricketers were withdrawn by their national boards at various...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What did you read as a young sports fan? Maybe the sports pages in the local newspaper, or a glossy illustrated magazine? Did your school’s library carry biographies of famous athletes written for children, or did you go straight to the books for adults to satisfy the desire for more...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

WorldCat is the largest online catalog in the world, accessing the collections of more than 72,000 libraries in 170 countries and territories. Using the catalog, a subject search of particular sports turns up the following tally of book titles in the world’s libraries: Boxing: 5164, Hockey: 7083, Cricket: 10,881, Horse...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I have never been to the Super Bowl, and I will probably never will. I’ve never been to a World Cup match or an Olympic event. I’ve never been to the Final Four or the Rose Bowl. I’ve never been to the Stanley Cup playoffs or the Champions League, the...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Azzurri, cyclists, boxers, Berlusconi, Balotelli, strapping Fascist men preparing to bear arms, strapping Fascist women preparing to bear children, the shirtless Duce, Ferraris, Vespas, doping scandals, World Cup celebrations, Serie A officials on the take, Il Grande Torino, and the barefoot marathoner Abebe Bikila. You find all this and more...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 2008, when entertainment magnate Lalit Modi launched the Indian Premier League, he took a title that was new to the world of cricket: Commissioner. Modi’s idea for the structure of the IPL had American origins. He had studied in the United States in the mid-1980s, where he encountered the...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices