Flip Flop Fly Ball: An Infographic Baseball Adventure Review

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Flip Flop Fly Ball: An Infographic Baseball Adventure ReviewWith its leisurely pace and summertime schedule, baseball is well suited to inane statistics, wild speculation and other flights of fancy. Flip Flop Fly Ball delves deep into baseball's trivia fringe with sharp infographics and a special point of view.
Robinson's experience is quite an interesting one. Not just being a baseball fan from England, but also as someone who didn't come to baseball until well into adulthood. That gives his impressions of the game a unique flavor. While partaking in the multi-ballpark roadtrip has almost become a cliche, it takes on a different tone from Robinson's perspective. His talk of meeting weird people at the bus station and finding a place to smoke plays a fun contrast to the usual Americana and father/son warm fuzzies.
While the writings takes up a fair chunk of the book the majority of pages are dedicated to Robinson's paintings and most importantly his infographics, illustrating anything and everything having to do with baseball; from which numbers have been retired the most to which teams give out the most bobbleheads.
Rather than waxing philosophical like many baseball books, Robinson waxes almost nonsensical from graphics on stadiums with the most aesthetically pleasing parking lots to an "interview" with that dove Randy Johnson obliterated with a fastball in 2001. Just to better point out the book irreverent nature, the final graphic is the box score of a fantasy game between the E Street Band and the Wu-Tang Clan. (I won't spoil who won)
Flip Flop Fly Ball is well worth the purchase; both as a unique and humorous look at the American pastime, and as a fine coffee table diversion for long, plodding, walk-filled August gamedays.Flip Flop Fly Ball: An Infographic Baseball Adventure OverviewHow many miles does a baseball team travel in one season? How tall would A-Rod's annual salary be in pennies? What does Nolan Ryan have to do with the Supremes and Mariah Carey?You might never have asked yourself any of these questions, but Craig Robinson's Flip Flop Fly Ball will make you glad to know the answers. Baseball, almost from the first moment Robinson saw it, was more than a sport. It was history, a nearly infinite ocean of information that begged to be organized. He realized that understanding the game, which he fell in love with as an adult, would never be possible just through watching games and reading articles. He turned his obsession into a dizzyingly entertaining collection of graphics that turned into an Internet sensation. Out of Robinson's Web site,www.flipflopflyball.com, grew this book, full of all-new, never-before-seen graphics. Flip Flop Fly Ball dives into the game's history, its rivalries and absurdities, its cities and ballparks, and brings them to life through 120 full-color graphics. Statistics-the sport's lingua franca-have never been more fun. (By the way, the answers: about 26,000 miles, at least if the team in question is the 2008 Kansas City Royals; 3,178 miles; they were the artists atop the Billboard Hot 100 when Ryan first and last appeared in MLB games.) Craig Robinson is, among other things, an Englishman and a New York Yankees fan with a soft spot for the Colorado Rockies and a man-crush on Ichiro. Last season he played outfield for the Prenzlauer Berg Piranhas in the Berlin Mixed Softball League (.452/.548/.575). His previous books include Atlas, Schmatlas: A Superior Atlas of the World and Fun Fun Fun.

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The Extra 2%: How Wall Street Strategies Took a Major League Baseball Team from Worst to First Review

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The Extra 2%: How Wall Street Strategies Took a Major League Baseball Team from Worst to First ReviewA hard one! There certainly are not a lot books out on the Rays, and any intelligent baseball book is well worth a read. However, as well-intentioned as this work is, and the fact that if you are a baseball fan you are bound to read it, I cannot give it a great review. Here are a few points:
First, there really is NOT much there. It seems like it would have been a better magazine article. There is heavy repetition that is not really needed.
There are no interesting secrets, no revelations, not even a real idea of how the team works.
Tropicana Field is heavily featured; the general discussion of stadium building is interesting but how many times can the author complain about the Trop? Really, I think a reader would "get it" early in the book.
The history of the team is interesting - perhaps a history of the Rays would be a better work.
Inevitably, this will be compared to Moneyball. Face it, the author's premise/thesis is designed to appeal to fans of that work. However, this work is nowhere nearly as involved, or as interesting as Moneyball.
You do not get a lot of player info; more of this would bring the story to life. Yes, there are some anecdotes, particularly re: Garza and Longoria but not enough to really get an idea of the management mindset.
Overall, I do not regret buying this, and do not want to dissuade you, but it could have really been something great. I feel that a great book could be written about this team, but this is not it. In the meantime, this will have to do.The Extra 2%: How Wall Street Strategies Took a Major League Baseball Team from Worst to First OverviewWhat happens when three financial industry whiz kids and certified baseball nuts take over an ailing major league franchise and implement the same strategies that fueled their success on Wall Street? In the case of the 2008 Tampa Bay Rays, an American League championship happens—the culmination of one of the greatest turnarounds in baseball history. In The Extra 2%, financial journalist and sportswriter Jonah Keri chronicles the remarkable story of one team's Cinderella journey from divisional doormat to World Series contender. When former Goldman Sachs colleagues Stuart Sternberg and Matthew Silverman assumed control of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays in 2005, it looked as if they were buying the baseball equivalent of a penny stock. But the incoming regime came armed with a master plan: to leverage their skill at trading, valuation, and management to build a model twenty-first-century franchise that could compete with their bigger, stronger, richer rivals—and prevail. Together with "boy genius" general manager Andrew Friedman, the new Rays owners jettisoned the old ways of doing things, substituting their own innovative ideas about employee development, marketing and public relations, and personnel management. They exorcized the "devil" from the team's nickname, developed metrics that let them take advantage of undervalued aspects of the game, like defense, and hired a forward-thinking field manager as dedicated to unconventional strategy as they were. By quantifying the game's intangibles—that extra 2% that separates a winning organization from a losing one—they were able to deliver to Tampa Bay something that Billy Beane's "Moneyball" had never brought to Oakland: an American League pennant. A book about what happens when you apply your business skills to your life's passion, The Extra 2% is an informative and entertaining case study for any organization that wants to go from worst to first.

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