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I picked it up from the library this weekend and haven't gotten a chance to crack into it because of finals n poo poo. I think my version is the pre-strike version. I don't have it on me right this instant.
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Dec 11, 2014 18:02
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I'm on Chapter 8, but I figure I can burn through the rest by the end of the week. Christmas this year was really hectic for some reason. Plus I got a late start. For reference, this is the lead-in to really testing the reserve clause. Lots of contract holdouts, the first (short) strike. I'm just amazed by how obstinate so many of the owners and GMs were, even on things like marketing. "Giving out caps for FREE? What the hell?!" And what's clear is they still, decades later, don't grasp that the blackout restrictions on TV are actually hurting their visibility. Even on MLB.tv I'm stuck missing something like half of the Twins season because I'm equidistant from Chicago and Detroit. (Thank god I don't live in Canada.) Or at least, I would if not for proxy workarounds. Anyway, I'm ranting. So far the only complaint that I have, especially at the beginning, is how nonlinear the narrative can be. He'll hop decades in the span of a couple paragraphs and I'll get a little shaky on the timeline of things. Anecdotes about stupid poo poo some owner did to some player 30 years ago that provided a somewhat tenuous precedent for what some other owner is doing to some other player, or backgrounds on a new owner that seem only tangentially related to the current narrative. For example, I just read about Howsam rebuilt the Reds organization, which was interesting and I enjoyed the story, but so much if it seemed almost completely unnecessary at that point in the overall story. Even though I know it really wasn't. I guess what I'm saying is that the chapters and sections within them seem arbitrary, like a series of articles or term papers printed out of order. The information in them is still important, if not hard to follow. This is probably a lovely remark when a fifth of the way through, but I'm reading because of the subject matter at this point, not because I think it's a "good" book. Yes I'm aware of the irony of the blackout tangent.
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Dec 31, 2014 06:07
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Finally finished the pre-strike version. Can anyone fill me in, because it ends sort of hanging, without any sort of resolution. Beyond that, my thoughts are essentially the same as my previous post: there are some serious gaps in timelines, especially considering how narrative-heavy the book is. But it's worth reading for the 70s labor relations alone.
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Jan 5, 2015 22:58
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Timby posted:The best resource about the strike and its resolution is probably Ken Burns' The Tenth Inning. Probably the next thing I tackle, since I have a boatload of schoolwork starting in a week and a half.
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Jan 6, 2015 18:59
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