His books are collections of the columns he wrote for "The Washington Post" and various magazines. Since he didn't retire untl 2021, it remains a mystery, at least to me, why he's put out no books since 1996.
"Cracking the Show" covers the time period of 1989-1993. I enjoyed reliving the great World Series of that time period. The 1989 earthquake series, swept by the A's, was followed by the 1990 series, in which the A's were swept by the Reds. Boswell explains how the Reds simply overwhelmed the A's with their fundamentally sound baseball: "Once the game began, everyone saw how the Reds' speed and base stealing, their hit-and-runs and bunts, their pursuit of the extra base, and their mighty bullpen both unnerved and unmanned the A's". Boswell mocks the haughty A's: "Unfortunately, even in defeat, the dominant tone of the A's was that of the disbelieving, excuse-seeking blowhard." Boswell makes an apt comparison of the 1988-1990 A's to the 1969-1971 Orioles, in that both of these were dominant teams which went to the World Series three years in a row as favorites, but only won one of them.
Boswell gives much-deserved criticism of the 1991 series, in which the Twins won because of their home-field advantage. (The Metrodome was a monstrosity, and thank goodness Target Field has since replaced it.) Boswell says: "So this is what America's pastoral summer game has become--a sport played in a large, loud tin drum." With four extra-innning games, this series was "the closest, most drama-filled, but surely not best-played or best-managed Classic of all time".
And then we had the Toronto Blue Jays reigning supreme in 1992 and 1993. Boswell says that "if a team ever won with presence, with an aura of utter confidence, it was these '93 Jays...Maybe nothing beats a sense of entitlement."
The most significant off-the-field story durng the five-year period which this book covers was the lifetime ban Pete Rose received for betting on baseball. Boswell starts the book with a collection of seven columns he wrote about this sad episode.
Boswell echoes the mixed freelings most of us feel about Rose. In a column entitled "Arrested Adolescent", Boswell writes: "For thirty years, America has cheered Rose for remaining a child. He was selfish but charming. Vain but joyous. Shallow but shrewd. Crude but funny. Greedy for all the candy but generous once he got it. Prone to the vices but honest about it. Oblivious to society's conventions but also mythically large. Given no gift, save his obsession for baseball, he made himself a hero." Boswell's conclusion: "Rose deserves our empathy, though maybe not too much sympathy."
The Rose saga can be seen as a three-act drama. While Boswell agrees with the first act (the lifetime ban), he has harsh criticism for the final two acts. The second act was the prosecution of Rose for income tax evasion, for which he received a five-month prison sentence. Boswell points out that this prosecution was "for neglecting to report about three percent of his income. How does that compare to the national average?" I can answer this question. The IRS tells us that only about 87% of income is reported. This thirteen percent of unreported income is four times the perentage that Rose failed to report. The usual approach in this type of situation woud be to allow the taxpayer to pay the back taxes, plus interest and penalties, with no criminal consequences. But because Rose was prominent, he was treated overly harshly, just as Hunter Biden is being treated today.
The fact that both presidential candidates are calling for removing the income tax on tips illustrates the general antipathy we have towards taxing cash income. Certainly many Americans have earned money they failed to report to the IRS. Why Rose was so severly persecuted by the government remains a mysstery to me.
But the greatest injustice Rose suffered came in the third act, with the vote ruling him ineligble for the Hall of Fame. By a 12-0 vote, the Hall of Fame board voted to "exclude players on the permanently ineligible list from the ballot". The only living person on this list was Pete Rose.
Boswell's feeling about this is summed up by the title of his 2/5/91 column: "White-Collar Lynching". The sensible approach would have been to keep Rose on the ballot and allow the baseball writers to decide whether he should be enshrined or not. This is what the board has done with the steroid cheaters, who damaged the game far more than Rose ever did by his betting. The writers have responded admirably by keeping out players like Bonds and McGwire who otherwise would have made it easily.
Bill James expresses a different view of the Rose saga in his book on the Hall of Fame, "The Politics of Glory". James argues that anybody on the permanent ineligible list should not be eligible for the Hall of Fame, but he strenuously disagrees with the decision putting Rose on the ineligible list. He says that investigator John Dowd "leapt to the conclusion that Rose was guilty, and twisted and bent the facts to support that conclusion." He says that Rose "waa banned from baseball on the basis of rumor, hearsay, slander, gossip, and irrelevant information." He concludes that "If Pete Rose ever sues baseball seeking to nullify the agreement he made with Giamatti, under which he agreed to accept a lifetime ban, he absolutely will win."
James is no lawyer, and he has an exaggerated sense of the extent to which the legal system can intervene to solve disputes between private entities. There is no government action involved here, so constitutional due process protections do not apply.
George Will writes about the Rose saga in his book "Bunts", a collection of his baseball columns from 1974 through 1998. Will sees Rose's gambling problem as part of a pattern of norms-ignoring recklessness which characterized Rose's whole life. Will points to the collision at home plate in the 1970 All-Star game, in which Rose barreled into catcher Ray Fosse, ruining Fosse's career. He says that this "was within the rules. It also was unnecessary, disproportionate and slightly crazy". Will writes that "Rose's slide broke rules no less real for being unwritten. In time, he would shred written rules, of baseball and society".
Will discusses Rose's "slide into gambling, debts, drugs, incessant adultery and the company of muscle-bound dimwits...His retinue included drug dealers and other hangers-on, who greased his slide into criminality. By 1987 he was losing $30,000 a week to bookies."
Will says that the Dowd Report made the facts of Rose's betting "entirely clear". The evidence included "the testimony of eight eyewitnesses, Rose's handwriting on betting slips, and telephone records showing that during a ninety-day period, thirty minutes before every game--home or away, night or day--Rose placed calls to people who placed bets."
So how did Bill James get this so wrong? My own theory is that he just didn't give the Rose issue much serious attention. His chapter on Rose and Shoeless Joe Jackson is only five pages long. By contrast, a chapter discussing whether Don Drysdale is a Hall of Famer runs to 34 pages.
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