Watching Baseball Smarter: A Professional Fan's Guide for Beginners, Semi-experts, and Deeply Serious Geeks

Pages 79 to 110 are completely missing.

If binding is baseball, the people who did the binding would be kicked out of bush league.

Also, the information is very elementary and meant basically for elementary students.

I bought this for my 26 yr old son for his birthday. My fiance, a baseball Aficionado,
started looking at it and said, this great I want this, too. I'll be ordering 4 more books today.

The subtitle of this well crafted work: "A Professional Fan's Guide for Beginners, Semi-Experts, and Deeply Serious Geeks." For the first two categories, right on! Geeks are not going to learn a whole lot that they already do not know. That aside, though, this is a nice work.

Examples of what is in some of the chapters: Chapter 2 focuses on "Pitchers and Catchers." The first part of the chapter describes basic pitches (and how they are thrown)--fastball, curveball, slider, change-up, split-finger fastball, knuckleball, screwball, spitball (naughty, naughty!), eephus, and gyroball (does it even exist?). Each is described, with a bit of humor added here and there.

Chapter 5 explores "Fielding." There are brief descriptions of what each position has to do. As an old second baseman, I enjoyed reading about the basics of the double play and so on.

Chapter 6 examines "Stadiums" (but should this not be "Stadia," to use the proper Latin term?). One of the more enjoyable features is the description of some unique fields. Think Fenway Park or Wrigley Field. But why not talk about the cool stadium in Cleveland?

Chapter 9 takes a peek at "Random Stuff to Know." E.g., Why K for strikeout on scorecards? What about uniform numbers? The seventh inning stretch? And so on.

This book is a lot of fun. Even hard core baseball fans might enjoy it for its style, even though they may not learn a great deal that is new. For beginners and intermediate fans, though, this will be quite a pleasure!

watching baseball smarter really doesn't get as in-depth as i had hoped. its more for beginners and people somewhat familiar with the game. its not a bad book, its well written and easy to read. if you are looking for something to blow your mind, this isn't it.

About: Guide to the generalities and intricacies of the game of baseball.

Pros: Very informative, funny, great use of examples. Even I learned something and I consider myself pretty knowledgeable about the sport.

Cons: Would've liked to see an index.