The New Thinking Fan’s Guide To Baseball – Leonard Koppett, 1991 ★½

Change for the Worse

When someone creates something widely regarded as a classic of its kind, the impulse to go back and touch it up should be stubbornly resisted. Even if you are its creator, there is something in the way your work engaged the public that no longer belongs to you alone. Whatever that is, it should be respected.

Back in 1967, a beat reporter named Leonard Koppett put out a book about baseball that crystalized the way many people thought about the game. The Thinking Man’s Guide To Baseball took in a range of topics, analyzed them in depth, explained why managers and players did what they did, detailed the roles of owners, umpires, media, scorers, and more. It was thoughtful, original, and highly praised.

I wish I had gotten to read that, but I didn’t. Instead I had this 1991 revision, a grab bag of sententious truisms with zero flow and an occasional 1990s player sprinkled amid heaps of anecdotes spotlighting players from much older times.

At least he left the opening alone; widely admired in baseball circles. The first chapter begins with a single word, “Fear,” then explains how fear of a hard-thrown baseball is the vital factor when considering the batter:

Fear is the fundamental factor in hitting, and hitting the ball with the bat is the fundamental act of baseball… The process of becoming a capable batter begins with learning to overcome this specific fear – but it is never eliminated; it is mastered.

This is great stuff, simple and elementary yet profound in the way Koppett springboards off the idea to explore many other aspects of successful hitting, which he dubs “mind over physics.” This is laid out in such a way it is a pleasure to read, even if the best ideas from it have filtered into the mainstream long ago.

After fear, the next principle Koppett makes on hitting is its roundness: Striking a spherical ball with a cylindrical bat. "To hit a baseball into fair territory, hard enough to have any reasonable chance of the ball falling safe, one must connect almost perfectly," he notes.
Image from https://gamesensesports.com/learning-how-focus-as-a-hitter-in-baseball/

This may have been a problem for me reading the book; Koppett’s ideas, once pioneering, has been mainstreamed in many ways that matter. But there is also a tiredness to his narrative that grates.

In the 1960s, Koppett was fresh from the trenches, having covered the Mets daily for The New York Times. By the early 1990s, he was still writing about baseball, though as a weekly columnist. His level of engagement had admittedly waned.

In one of several autobiographical asides, Koppett writes about how he went from worrying whether he’d get a good seat at the press box to whether he’d get one near a rest room to finally wondering: “If I doze off, (1) will anybody notice? And (2) do I care if they do?”

I used to work for a former New York Times reporter. He had a dignified, creased face, narrow seen-it-all eyes, and a mop of thick white hair. He also had such an enervating personality he made it hard to be excited about anything when you were in his presence. Something about working in that august journal seemed to have burned him out, leaving nothing but ashes. Reading Koppett gave me flashbacks.

When it comes to baseball managers, Koppett is typically wish-washy about whether they make much of an impact on team performance. He quotes Yogi Berra, above: "It ain't like football. You can't make up no trick plays."
Image from https://www.today.com/news/its-deja-vu-all-over-again-27-yogi-berras-most-t45781

Put simply, Koppett is a relentless downer:

Most players feel they must be always on guard in talking to the press, because they are sure to be misquoted – or, much worse, accurately quoted...

Socializing with players and coaches was always a very limited part of life on the road for writers; now their own in-group is reduced, and they don’t seem to like each other as much anyhow...

The World Series, for all its climactic significance, means more to the public than to its actual participants.

When he isn’t downplaying something others might regard as exciting, he’s shrugging his shoulders at the point of offering an opinion. He spends several pages on the impact of the designated hitter on baseball’s offense just to conclude there’s nothing much to say on it.

On whether the baseball itself had been tinkered with in 1987, when several parks saw higher home-run totals, he comes to this conclusion:

If you hold a gun to my head and force me to give an opinion, I’d have to say I suspect there might have been a bit of tinkering; but I wouldn’t be surprised if there wasn’t.

Author Leonard Koppett. He produced several editions of Thinking Man's Guide To Baseball over the years, as well as other books on the sport. Elected to the writers' wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1992, he died in 2003.
Image from https://baseballhall.org/node/20417

Koppett’s overall conclusion is baseball is always changing, usually for the better but inevitably regardless. But he adds that the sport “has changed much less than most other facets of life, and that what has remained constant has been the central source of its appeal.”

I guess that is why he keeps bringing up players of the 1930s and 1940s, though he does mention 1960s players some, too. There is an amusing anecdote, no doubt held over from the 1967 edition, when Koppett explains the importance of scouting opposing players. He asks Mets manager Wes Westrum why he had his first baseman play Hank Aaron a way counter to how the slugger had been defended in the past.

Westrum explains that Aaron’s recent spate of home runs have made him more eager to pull the ball, and thus not as likely to find the gap on the first base side (Aaron was a righty and faced third base) like when he was hitting more for average. It is a fascinating glimpse of inside baseball, not likely to have been shared by a more cagey manager on a winning ballclub. It also must have worked so much better in the 1967 edition, when more people knew who Westrum was or had seen Aaron get those opposite-field doubles.

In 1966, Hank Aaron led the National League in home runs (and the majors in RBI), but his typically stellar .300-plus batting average dropped to a unAaronian .279. A sign of pressing, perhaps? Mets manager Wes Westrum thought so.
Image from https://www.blackcatholicmessenger.com/hank-aaron-passes-at-86/

The New Thinking Fan’s Guide To Baseball is even more of a time capsule for the way it attempts to seem up to date, including present-day stars of the time of this edition, like Jose Canseco and Will Clark, alongside Babe Ruth, Walter Johnson, and Ted Williams. This awkward shoehorning only accentuates its out-of-date-ness.

That is why I think the book would have been better had it been left alone, allowed to stand as a marker for a period of time when baseball still dominated so much of what was good in American life. Koppett’s book was just the thing to capture it, with its sardonic asides and dry quips from a man who knew the game well and still lived it day by day.

He does have some interesting things to say about free agency and the end of the reserve clause in 1977, which kept players on teams until the owners saw no use in keeping them. He believes the new way is better, and from an ethical point of view, he is of course right. But then he goes on to explain that the game is also better off because now players can leave teams that won’t pay top dollar for their services:

Has this wrecked baseball? Well, in the thirteen years between 1977 and 1990 baseball made more money, had better attendance, got more favorable public approval, and took a firmer grip on the ancillary marketplace – by a wide margin – than in the eighty-six years the reserve system was in force (after 1890.)

Of course, this capitalistic argument falls to pieces when you consider the state of the game post-1990. Morally, I don’t want to watch baseball played by indentured servants, but having robber barons like Charles Comiskey run things did lend an air of stability that has been missed.

In New Thinking Fan's Guide, Koppett wrongly predicts the imminent demise of Wrigley Field in Chicago (above) and Fenway Park in Boston, which he welcomed. "To glorify them because they survived – when their owners were prepared to abandon them years ago and didn’t only because plans for something better fell through – is to miss the point."
Image from https://sabr.org/bioproj/park/wrigley-field-chicago/

There are alterations to the game that needed to be made. The reserve clause needed to go, on moral grounds alone, while not letting Black players in before 1947 was a clear detriment to the quality of play as well. But change is often baseball’s enemy, and that fact can be proven in the way it is played today. I mean, pitch clocks. Really?

One point Koppett makes in this direction I liked a lot, and bears repeating: “Television is a highlights medium. Baseball is not a highlights game.” So true. Even when there are highlight moments, watching a game for them is not a good idea.

But many of his observations are rudimentary, unenlivened by anecdotes like the one about Westrum and Aaron. He didn’t have the same first-hand knowledge of the game he brought in 1967. Too often he is quoting retired players, like Roger Craig and Dusty Baker, who were by then managers and coaches, to lend a modern perspective.

On the Baseball Hall of Fame, Koppett considers the candidacies of various players, wondering how Babe Ruth would have done in the era of the designated hitter: "Every fourth day he’d pitch (and bat). The other three he’d be the DH. He’d wind up with 400 victories and 800 homers, wouldn’t he? And that would make him a double Hall of Famer."
Image from https://scotchwhisky.com/magazine/famous-whisky-drinkers/19736/babe-ruth/ 

He writes a lot about collusion, because it reflects poorly on owners, his least favorite element of the game. He writes nothing about steroids, by 1991 an open secret in baseball, as that would reflect poorly on the players and their union.

One person he rips, surprisingly and at length, is statistician Bill James:

The Bill James approach, of cloaking totally subjective views (to which he is entirely entitled) in some sort of asserted “statistical evidence,” is divorced from reality. The game simply isn’t played that way, and his judgments are no more nor less accurate than anyone else’s.

James is not above criticism, certainly, but this isn’t a fair characterization. Koppett writes like a baseball outsider, but he was really an insider, and here and elsewhere his elitist attitude is exposed.

Mostly my problem with this book is the feeling Koppett’s desire to put out a fresh edition (this was not the first rewrite) was a case of overegging the pudding one too many times, blurring his own perspective from when he had more to say on the subject. Baseball changes too much, why should good books about it have to change, too?