That does look interesting. I just got tickets for the Brooklyn Cyclones for Sunday. Our first baseball game of the year.

(I love minor league ball, especially Mets minor league ball.)

It was on "Fresh Aire" yesterday and it is well worth listening to. Informative and entertaining.

Did he answer why is baseball so boring on TV? heheh

I cannot recommend Keith Hernandez's Pure Baseball enough. It's not just "a-ha" nerdy trivia that you learn one time, but things to keep in mind every pitch of every game-- particularly the battle between the pitcher and the batter.

Hernandez is a little more in-depth than Hample, I think, by the sound of this interview.

I just bookmarked this thread so I can find the books again at Christmas for my baseball-nerd partner. First I had to check the baseball shelves (yes, he keeps the baseball books enshrined from the rest of the library, and they're the only thing besides the Shakespeare shelves to get such high-ranking treatment) to be sure he doesn't have them both.

Amazingly, he does not. Thanks for the recs. Invaluable stuff.

Did he answer why is baseball so boring on TV? heheh

Actually, he did. He talks about the pace of baseball in the Fresh Air interview and why it's a requirement of the game.

I loved this point he made -- he said something like "Basketball is a forty-eight minute game that takes two hours to play. Football is a sixty-minute game that takes two hours to play. Baseball is a three-hour game that takes three hours to play."

That little comment summed up a lot about baseball for me. I like the pace. Suddenly I realized, hey, yeah - what is that additional 60 minutes of a televised football game all about? Oh, yeah - not requirements of gameplay - instead, the requirement of the television station to deliver my eyes to advertisers and the requirement of the NFL to continue to generate ridiculous hype in order to command those large advertising fees.

IT's not that baseball isn't hooked into the pro sports bucks - it is. But if all televised sports were only on TV for the amount of time it took to play the game, and the athletes were playing the entire time we were watching, THEN we could talk about the pace of televised baseball.

I heard this too. On the drive to work at 6 in the morning. On NPR Talk on Sirius. Or maybe it was NPR Now. Whatever. It was great.