Not his best. ( )

A fairly interesting book about baseball's hall of fame. James's writing style is easy and conversational, but it gets bogged down talking about archane issues of the Hall's past. James focuses on two players - Phil Rizzuto and Don Drysdale - and disects their Hall of Fame credentials ad nauseam. For someone who has read his Baseball abstracts and other works, this is a mild disappointment. ( )

A good history of and criticism of the Hall and its inductees. Makes for very good reading for baseball fans, though it's not quite up to the level of the Historical Abstracts, say. ( )

"The Politics of Glory" was reissued as "Whatever Happened to the Hall of Fame."

This is both a history of the Baseball Hall of Fame and an examination of the apparent standards used by the voting populaces, with a lot of asides. The history is solid, and covers both the institutional side (how the Hall and museum came to be built, maintained, and ruled) and the election of the players (and others) who are honored there.

James uses a variety of methods to determine the "value" of the players, and ultimately concludes:

* The Hall has no actual standards.
* The BBWA (the baseball writers) has consistently done better than the various Veterans' Committees, however composed.
* It's been too late to "fix" the Hall (whatever you mean by that) since either 1946 or 1949, depending on how you ask the question.

Much discussion about Phil Rizzuto and Don Drysdale, here, and considerable information about George Davis. Other individual players are discussed in less detail, though some are quite vividly portrayed.

This book's methods (and, more generally, methodology) have largely been adopted by other analysts. The rating systems defined here are displayed on the Baseball-Reference player pages, which has led to their widespread adoption in the baseball analysis community.

Great book. Badly needs an update to cover the past 15 years.

This review has also been published on a dabbler's journal. ( )

Date approximate ( )