This Month
Michael Street reviews
Dan Formosa's Baseball Field Guide
Friday July 18, 2007 4:30pm
I have a new favorite baseball book. Not the kind that you read cover-to-cover, with a brilliant storyline about the ups and downs, real or imagined, of a team's season or a player's career. It's the kind of baseball book you want to have handy when you're watching a game at home, or even stick in your pocket if you're heading out to a game. It's the kind of baseball book beloved by grizzled vets or brand-spanking-new fans, one which will likely teach anyone a thing or two about the great national pastime we all love.
That book is the Baseball Field Guide, a slim, well-designed paperback volume that could fit in your jacket pocket or on the arm of your couch. Deceptively packed with information, this comprehensive guide to baseball rules will answer any question you might have about baseball rules and their interpretation. If you've ever tried to plow through the official baseball rulebook, you know it's about as interesting as a breeze through your average Senate budget bill, and no easier to read. Finding a rule is about as easy as understanding it-but even the pros who should know the rules can't figure things out.
Take earlier this season, when the Reds batted out of order and the umps and managers had to huddle for a good ten minutes to figure out how to handle the situation. I found my answer in a minute and a half, turning to the section on "The Batting Order" and the subsection "Three Ways to Deal with An Improper Batter." Though I'd never seen this situation before, I found out that 'Outs, if any, will not count and all runners will return to their positions as if the improper batter had not come to bat. The next proper batter will come to the plate (even if that means that the previous improper batter must bat again)."
Before any of the so-called experts on the field-umpires or managers-I had my answer, and could chuckle through their false starts and hesitations, adding and removing batters and outs from the scoreboard. Bet Dusty and the umps wish they had such a handy volume.
The nice thing about the Field Guide is precisely this: it's well-organized and well-designed, so that you can find your answers quickly and easily. It's not really the kind of book you read cover-to-cover, even if I did, to be sure I filled in all the cracks and crevices of my missing baseball education, like spackling over an old wall.
If you do read it through, you're likely to learn something, even something absolutely basic, as I did several times. For example, as many times as I've seen pitchers throw from the set and the windup positions, I was fascinated to see it spelled out, suddenly realizing that pitchers face the plate during the start of the windup, but face either first or third if from the stretch. As stupid as it sounds, it was something I'd seen thousands of times before, but I'd always focused on the slide-step and stretch positions of the pitcher and not the setup before the pitch.
It's stuff like this that may encourage longtime baseball fans to read it all, even if the stuff at the beginning is awfully basic. Still, as with the difference between windup and set (or stretch) positions, it might fix in your brain for the first time, just by seeing it in print.
An even better use for the book is as primer for a newbie fan, whether it's your cricket-loving buddy from Eton, or your new girlfriend at her first game. You can endure the endless questions, and struggle to explain everything you instinctively understand (or have never considered), like what the heck the umps and managers are talking about before the game to the intricacies of the much-ballyhooed infield fly rule. Or you can just hand this book to the newbie in question, preferably before the game, so that he or she actually pays attention to the game and doesn't get sucked into this useful book instead.
The Baseball Field Guide has other more peripheral items that are helpful, like a diagram of the dimensions and layouts of all the major-league parks (even if it's doomed to obsolescence whenever the two Florida stadium situations are ironed out). A scoring section lets you know exactly how to calculate each major statistic, including all the rules about saves. Budding umps and softball league scorers can benefit from learning the tiniest aspects of their positions, something you'll never learn (or learn so easily) from the official rulebook.
The book's not perfect, as they needed a second pair of eyes to catch a few mistakes, like when the "seventeen ways a batter can be awarded bases" is followed by a list of eighteen ways, which also led to lack of correspondence between the numbered diagram on the same page and the method it's describing. And the icons, which look like the stylized people icons used on street signs, make some diagrams look like you're watching a game of Atari Baseball, with all the graceful elegance of those early stick figures.
And yet these are minor issues, weak groundouts amid a bunch of hard line drives to the wall and soaring home runs. There's no end to the useful information in the Field Guide, and it really is indispensable, whether as a constant companion during games or an endless source of baseball-rule trivia ("How many ways can a runner be put out?" "What's the difference between interference and obstruction?").
My copy's already well-thumbed and well-worn, in spite of its durable binding and cover. This is a book built to be used, and used often, which you'll do, only putting it back on the shelf after the last pitch of the World Series, itching to pick it back up again when pitchers and catchers report in the spring.
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