Clearing the Bases

For a variety of reasons, some valid, some not so valid, my reading slowed down a good bit over the last month. However, I'm back in the groove again, and I just wrapped up legendary Phillies third baseman Mike Schmidt's book, Clearing the Bases.

The book was essentially equal parts autobiography of Schmidt's life in baseball and commentary on the state of today's game. The autobiographical piece was very insightful to me. Schmidt was my favorite player growing up (and probably remains my all-time favorite, though Chase Utley stands a good chance of assuming that role if he continues his current level of play and spends most/all of his career with the Phillies), but the reality is that I really can't remember watching any baseball until around 1987, and Schmidt retired in early '89, so I really never knew a whole lot about his career. I think one of the major fascinations I had with his story was that, even for a guy with Hall of Fame talent like he had, he still needed a number of breaks to wind up where he did. Identifying baseball talent is, always has been, and probably always will be, a rather inexact science.

As for his commentary on the current game, I was rather impressed with it as well. While, like most players I would assume, he clearly shows favoritism to the era he played in (he referred to it more than once as the best era of baseball), he doesn't come at today's game with a "back in my day, we did it this way, and we liked it" mentality. While he does share a few concerns, for the most part he looks at the evolutions in the game (more fan friendly, but also hitter-friendly parks, lighter, harder bats, etc) over the last 30 years as positives that should be maintained. He even blew me out of the water by advocating expanding the DH to the NL. I guess even a Hall of Fame player can't be right about everything...

As you might expect, he did spend a significant amount of time on steroids. Interestingly enough, Schmidt came on the Dan Patrick show this morning, right after Dan had finished interviewing Jose Canseco. Schmidt basically said a significant reason for him to write his book was the kind of spotlight that Canseco's book had put on baseball and steroids when it came out in 2005. Schmidt's take on what to do about numbers from the steroid era pretty much matches mine, that you can't erase history, you just need to make sure you put it proper context. That's actually his take about baseball history across eras in general. One thing I will say is that I think Schmidt views himself as more of an authority on what actually went on in clubhouses during the steroids era than he actually is. While I'm sure as a former player, he's much more in touch with that sort of thing than say, me, the fact of the matter is that he left the clubhouse in '89, before steroids really invaded baseball. So, when he states as fact that most players in the steroid era didn't use, I have to take that with a grain of salt. I like Mike Schmidt a lot more than I like Jose Canseco, but unfortunately I think Canseco clearly has to be viewed as more credible on this issue.

Anyhow, another very good read. My next book will be Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of 6 MIT Students Who Took Vegas For Millions, by Ben Mezrich. If that sounds familiar to you, it's the book the movie 21, which just opened last weekend, is based on. I was aware of this story, and had heard of the book via a Mezrich appearance on The Jim Rome show a few months ago, so when I heard about the movie, I decided I needed to put the book on my reading list. Hopefully I'll have it finished in time to go catch the movie while it's still in theaters.