You Stink!: Major League Baseball's Terrible Teams & Pathetic Players (Kent State Uni Press: Black Squirrel Book) [ペーパーバック]

Imagine if sportswriters from the past 150 years were magically able to gather together and swap stories about the worst baseball teams they ever saw. That conversation, if I had to guess, would resemble the content of Wittenberg and Aubrecht's new book "You Stink!". This supposition crossed my mind within a few pages, and the more I read, the more I became convinced of it. Maybe that is not precisely what the authors intended, but at least for me, that is what came across.

It would be easy enough for a causal fan to peruse one or more of the many websites offering baseball statistics and say "oh, its obvious why the 1916 Athletics or the 2003 Tigers stunk." Wittenberg and Aubrecht provide some of those statistics, but numbers themselves are not really the focus of the book. The authors go beyond the numbers to show the circumstances of why these awful teams took the field as they did. Sometimes the stories are well known, but many times they are not. Telling the "why" is the strength of the book.

It is worth noting what the book is not. If you are looking for an in-depth, sabermetric analysis of specific players and teams, you will not find that in "You Stink!". In the main, the book relies on batting averages, home runs, RBI and ERA. Currently fashionable statistics like OPS, WAR and WHIP do not appear. I don't consider this to be a drawback: not every baseball book needs to offer that type of discussion, and many hardcore baseball fans I know roll their eyes when I argue that player so and so's high batting average standing alone doesn't show he is a particularly effective hitter. Further, given the records posted by these teams speak for themselves, I would posit that, although using advanced metrics might be somewhat helpful to put some of the statistics in context, their use here would be largely unnecessary and could even detract from the stories of these terrible teams.

There are some errors in the text (for example, Mickey Mantle hit 54 homers in 1961, not 56 as stated). You might scream to yourself when you catch one, but in the end, they do not detract from the narrative or diminish the excellent storytelling the book offers. Also, the errors are easily fixable, and I would be surprised if these little mistakes aren't cleaned up when the book goes into a second printing.

In sum, "You Stink!" is storytelling at its finest. If you have even a passing interest in sports history, you'll be entertained. And if you are a baseball fan, you'll surely enjoy it. To the authors: well done, gentlemen.

Many of us like to read and hear about the greats of sports - and the media is quite happy to accomodate us fans. But just as interesting, if not more so, are the boneheads, incompetents, and boobs that made up some of the worst teams to ever have the audacity to contaminate the diamond. There have been a few small works in the past that highlighted some of these knuckleads of baseball history, but along comes Eric Wittenberg's and Michael Aubrecht's aptly titled encylopedic tome, "You Stink!" And the players (and some coaches) and the teams herein were indeed the most olfactory-insulting individuals of the game. Before reading this book I knew of a few of them, but the book opened me up to the crowned princes of doofuses - such as the 1942 and 1961 Phillies (the '42 team badly diluted by WWII enlistments), the 1962 Mets (worst baseball record of the modern era), and the 1969 Seattle Pilots (aptly described as "a joke" by one player of the team). And there's a lot more in here. The books includes not only detailed descriptions (you'll feel the pain along the way with the players, owners and then-fans) of the putrid teams and seasons, tables and tables of stats, and dozens of photographs.
A bonus is the Foreword written by none other than Dave Raymond, the original "Phillie Phanatic" mascot. As Dave succintly writes, "Ultimately what you get with You Stink! is the celebration of a sport that gives us more than wins and losses." And that's exactly what the book does - while it gives us a wonderful treatise of the worst the American pastime has yet had to offer, it celebrates the sport in a way no other book has yet done... by presenting the good and the bad in the personalities that keep us glued to the TV or anxious to get into the stadium seat.
So whether you are a sports fan or not, a baseball afficianado or you've never watched a game in your life, grab up this book and sit back and enjoy. This book is, in the end, more than just a celebration of baseball and the worst nitwits to ever grace a field - it is a celebration of American life.

The best thing I can say about this book is that it is loads of fun. It tells great stories of the game's worst teams and players and does so in a humorous but not condescending tone. Some of these stories have been told before others are recent enough to be brand new. What is most enlightening is that while we see a lot of traditionally bad teams like the Phillies and the Senators there are representatives of other franchises. The one big miss here is I have to ask where Mario Mendoza is? The guy who set the phrase for poor hitting should be in this book. Oh well it is still a great and enjoyable read. It is a pleasure to see the bad teams and players get their due!