The Worst Team Money Could Buy
by Bob Klapisch, John Harper
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Book Summary Information
Author: Bob Klapisch, John HarperEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2005-03-01
ISBN: 0803278225
Number of pages: 285
Publisher: Bison Books
Book Reviews of The Worst Team Money Could Buy
Book Review: It ain't easy being a beat reporter
Summary: 3 Stars
Bobby Valentine once said something like, "They play 162 seasons a year in New York," and that statement pretty much sums up a baseball man's attitude toward the press. One morning--in April, yet--the season's blown and the reporters are offering up postmortems. The next day, after a victory, the team's back on the right track. Having read New York sportswriting for the past thirty years I can pretty much understand why a ballplayer might want to strangle reporters. They frustrate _me_ with their insistence on answers to questions like, "Why'd you groove that fastball?" or "What made you drop that ball?" Who knows. Who cares. It's that sort of "hard-nosed" reporting that's bred the current generation of colorless and introspective ballplayers who talk in platitudes about "getting the job done." And as authors Klapisch and Harper inadvertantly show, much of the reporters' antagonistic attitude stems from the huge salaries players earn. You can fall on one side of this issue or the other. I've always thought the players should earn whatever the market will bear, whether they're schmucks or not. I've met a lot of people in my life, and many of them have turned out to be successful and even famous and have excelled in many various occupations, but I've never met a single soul who could play baseball at the major league level. It's that rare. Only 750 men can do it. In writing about, shall we say, underachieving ballplayers at the dawn of this big-money era (Bobby Bonilla [here all Mets fans groan] had just signed with the team for a then-insane salary of $29 million over five years) Klapisch and Harper reveal hard hearts and a lot of hostility toward established stars.
Generally, the book's mainly a litany of complaints about the difficulty of the job: the travel, the deadlines, the demands of the editors, the refusal of players, management, and the front office to speak openly to the press, etc. The fourth or fifth iteration of this--the two authors take turns writing "sidebars" that appear adjacent to the main text in which they bitch about how hard it is to navigate the rocky shoals of a clubhouse occupied by "spoiled millionaires" (BOY these guys have a problem with that)--makes the reader want to toss the book across the room. Klapisch and Harper actually try to make the case that not delivering a juicy headline-worthy story drives their respective tabloids "one day closer to extinction." Reminds me of the old Abbott and Costello routine where Abbott berates Costello for not eating mustard. "The man who makes that mustard--he'll be out of a job! How about his family, Costello? How're they gonna pay the rent if you won't eat mustard on your frankfurter?" The ballplayers should have eaten the mustard, I guess, and spilled their guts.
If you're a Mets fan, this is a depressing book, because it simply highlights a cyclical aspect of Metsdom: years of promise the mostly remain unfulfilled interspersed with dismal, last-place years in which the ownership first runs the team off the rails and then makes a series of ill-considered moves to restore it. Mo Vaughn, meet Bobby Bonilla. Guys, here's George Foster. Somehow, just a few years after winning, the Mets always seem to be fielding a triple A team, and in capturing that--by the end of the '92 season, which this book focuses on, most of the starting lineup was on the DL--the writers do a good job. They also succeed in capturing the malaise of a losing team's clubhouse, and in analyzing some of the piss-poor decisions of front office management, such as in hiring Jeff Torborg to take over the team. Art Howe, anyone? George Bamberger? Wes Westrum?
I can imagine that this book would appeal to a broader audience than merely Mets fans. It's a good study of pathology, of sports psychology, and of the peculiar symbiosis between the media and their subjects--because, as this book demonstrates, the actual reporting of the events of the game are secondary to the reporting the intrigue backstage.
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