Jonah Keri's Prose is Dogshit: A Baseball Feelings Book Review

If I wrote a book about the Devil Rays, I wouldn't mention it on the cover either.

First off, it must be acknowledged that we here at Baseball Feelings have uncommonly high standards for the exquisiteness of prose.  Prose that would seem at least OK-exquisite to most baseball blogeurs is enough to make us throw up forever.  It is a curse, not a gift, although on the whole we are awfully smug about it.  


Secondly, I have no particular problem with Jonah Keri.  I've read him for years at the various places he has been, and enjoy much of his current work at Fangraphs well enough.  Also, much like baseball itself, he's totally acceptable on the radio.  Had you asked me yesterday what I thought of Jonah Keri, I would have told you in a reflective and measured way that not once has Jonah Keri struck me as awesome, nor has he seemed to me a butt.


But The Extra 2%: How Wall Street Strategies Took a Major League Baseball Team from Worst to First and This Subtitle isn't Doing Anyone Any Favours, on the level of prose -- as in the words that have been grouped together into phrases and sentences and indifferently broken up by punctuation -- is awful.  Just awful.  Would you perhaps enjoy . . . a paragraph?

Baseball's stadium extortion game touched every team at some point, in some way -- not just the sport's lesser lights.  Several of MLB's sacred cows threatened to move to Tampa Bay, and Tampa Bay aggressively courted them all.  Other teams invoked Washington, D.C., or Portland, Oregon, or Charlotte, North Carolina, or San Antonio to scare local governments into cutting a giant check.  For a while, George Steinbrenner even made noise about moving the Yankees to New Jersey, a location still technically in the same metro market but worlds apart for many longtime Bronx Bomber fans.  For all the pageantry and history the game offers on the field, off the field the business of baseball includes shady backroom deals, ruthless money grabs, and harsh threats.  No matter who you root for.

Really stuck the landing on that one, didn't he?  And it just carries on like that, man, it just goes.  


An even more serious issue is a lack of awareness re: what words mean.  "Thompson saw the White Sox as a vital part of Chicago's very self, a valuable institution with a history stretching beyond anyone's living memory."  Beyond anyone's living memory. That is a thing that was written in a book.  Or later, when for no real reason than to justify the subtitle, Keri talks about Dennis Kozlowski, the disgraced former Tyco CEO.  You remember him; he threw awesome parties.  However:

An exorbitant salary and unlimited perks weren't enough to slake his greed. To finance his $18 million New York apartment, $6,000 shower curtain, half the orgy tab, and a lot more, Kozlowski looted his own company with impunity.  Four years after the "Vodka-Shooting Penis Seen Round the World," a jury convicted Kozlowski and fellow Tyco executive Mark Swartz of swindling $600 million from the company's coffers.

Putting aside the matter of greed slaking -- which I am reluctant to do but let's just get through this -- I have real doubts about Jonah Keri's command of the word "impunity."  

It's not really fair to complain that this book isn't Moneyball, because Michael Lewis is the vastly better writer and thinker, and he got to the worst-to-first-with-rad-strategies story first, and you know all that going in.  Keri knows that, too: he has pretty sensibly been very "aw shucks" when people bring up comparisons to Moneyball. This is a story worth telling, and Keri tells it, so good for him. But man: as writing, this is just bad writing. The prose is completely insufficiently exquisite. That's really my issue with it.


KS