The Baseball Book Club discussion

This will be the discussion thread for the November non-fiction selection, "The Arm: Inside the Billion Dollar Mystery of the Most Valuable Commodity in Sports" Starting discussion question to follow.

Since we haven't got any responses yet, here it the link to my reviewof the book and hopefully we can go from there. For a general statement, this book had everything I like in non fiction books...wheter baseball or other subjects.


http://sportsbookguy.blogspot.com/201...

I thought it raised some good points and was very disturbing in it's discussion of the 15 to 17 year old crowd of hard-throwing prospects and their dads. It's no wonder why there is an epidemic of Tommy John surgery among teenagers.

I think there is basically something very wrong with the system of leeches who organize the tryout camps and tourneys, preying on the ambition and greed of the kids and their parents to make them show up and try to light up the radar gun.

A guy like Greg Maddux would never even get noticed nowadays.

The topic of young players also touched on another trend that is sad...so few young atletes play more than one sport. Have to concentrate on only one to make it big. John Smoltz spoke eloquently on this topic in his HOF speech and that is discussed in the book.

I think that is so bogus. A lot of kids around here give up every other sport at 6 years old to play year 'round AAU basketball in hopes of being the next Damon Bailey. Then they get to high school and there are 100 5'11 guys who did the same thing and only 1 can play. The other guys wasted their childhood.

The best athletes have always been able to play multiple sports and even the not-so-best can still benefit from multiple sports and avoid the overuse injuries. I think, again, it is a sad commentary on modern parents being so uptight.

I enjoyed most of the book. Some of the stories on up and coming amateurs and the Japanese pitchers lost my interest. But like the rest of you I was shocked on the treatment of young up and coming children participating in these "showcase" tournaments and the specialization of these kids in the hopes of striking it rich in the big leagues.

The Jon Lester part of the book was very interesting and timely coming off the recent Cubs WS win.

This book is exactly what I was hoping to find from this reading group. Thanks Lance. Nice review too. Just ordered from Amazon. Baseball books get zero coverage in the UK (apart from Moneyball).

This subject was discussed in almost every post season game that Kyle Hendricks started so it will be good to investigate this further.

Will post my thoughts probably just after Christmas!

This was a really interesting read. I especially enjoyed the evolution of the surgery, and to see what the current thinking is.
I am glad that he addressed the fact that doctors and coaches don't know yet the best way to handle young pitchers, or pitchers that have just had the surgery.
Limiting to 100 pitches in a game is way too round a number to be "correct", and thoughts go in every direction when determining how many pitches or innings should be thrown in a season. With time, knowledge will continue to grow, but it is distressing to see how many young arms are ruined so quickly.
Medicine has come far in the last few decades, but there is still much more to do in this area.

If there was less emphasis on the radar gun number and more on actually PITCHING, that would help. The book describes the love affair with the speed quite well. Pitch count and innings limits really won't matter if mechanics are flawed.