Watching Baseball Smarter: A Professional Fan’s Guide for Beginners, Semi-Experts, and Deeply Serious Geeks by Zach Hample
I had fun reading this book. Hample writes in a lighthearted, accessible style and does a good job of explaining the basics of baseball. It is not, however, for the “deeply serious geeks” as the subtitle claims. Anyone who follows baseball even halfway closely will already know 95% of what he talks about. Still, as I said it is a fun read, and there are a few tidbits here for more serious fans.
This is a very good book for anyone who doesn’t know much about or understand baseball. If you are a baseball fans and know someone in that unfortunate predicament, this little book would make a great gift. It is not as good the more erudite classic 1950s book, How to Watch a Baseball Game by Fred Schwed, to which it is very similar. It is a worthy successor to it, though, and the more contemporary treatment Hample gives the topic makes it more appropriate for most current-generation readers.
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