Rob Neyer’s new book ‘Power Ball’ is about a single baseball game, played between the Athletics and Astros at Oakland on September 8, 2017. Inning by inning, Rob chronicles what happened in the game in detail, all the way up to... well, I won’t spoil the ending.
Except that’s not what this book is about at all. When situations come up in each inning, they spur a tangent that’s about how baseball is played, coached, managed and run in the latter part of the second decade of the 21st Century. From the height of players (an idea spurred by the presence in this game of the five-foot-six Jose Altuve) and how those players did and how that fits into the modern game, to the massive amount of shifting in today’s baseball, to the way front offices are constructed, to the way Statcast has influenced how both roster construction and game play happen today, to bat flips and bat manufacturing, to roster construction, to the use of starting pitching and bullpens, to how African-Americans have declined in numbers in MLB while the number of players from the Dominican Republic has soared, to attendance and how the stadium boom has affected that and TV viewing of games, Rob Neyer has put together a chronicle of just about everything that is part of baseball in 2018.