Baseball and the Blame Game, Scapegoating in the Major Leagues

I have another website readerman.net where I review everything I read. I have been posting reviews there since June of 2005. I will periodically post reviews of some of the baseball books I have read and as I read new ones I will post those also. If you have a baseball book that you are interested in purchasing, let me know. I run a used bookstore for the county library system and we sell items the library can no longer use for cheap. Good books are usually around $2.00, here is the first of the reviews. The dates are when I read it, and the RRRRR are out of five.

Baseball and the Blame Game, Scapegoating in the Major Leagues by John Billheimer; 2007; McFarland & Company Publishers, Inc., Jefferson, NC; 216 pages; Inter-Library Loan from the University of Vermont, Burlington, VT; 11/12-11/15

A very thorough examination of why some players who make misplays or commit error are forever blamed for their mistakes and others aren't. It examines why Fred Merkle shouldn't be blamed for failing to touch second, why Steve Bartman, Bill Buckner and Mitch Williams should not have received death threats for the mistakes they made. The author contends that a player likely to be remember for their mistakes if the play for an east coast team, if they are not a superstar, the play resulted in the lead being lost, if it was in the late innings and if it was a mental error. Since the author is a member of SABR there is a lot of math involved, complete with charts and graphs. It was interesting to read and very enlightening about Ernie Lombardi, Johnny Pesky, and Fred Snodgrass among others. RRRR