3 Sports Books to Read Since We’re All Inside

Well, it’s another week of staying indoors and socially isolating because of the outbreak of COVID-19. As I already blogged about in the past, there’s no new (or at least barely any) sports being played that we can watch on TV. Sure, there’s a slew of old sports games being played on TV, such as the Raptors’ Championship run from last spring and Blue Jays World Series games from 1992 and 1993, but I can only take so much of that. You could check out some cool sports documentaries (which I’ll cover in a future blog), movies, and last week I wrote about some classic hockey video games that you should check out, but what about sports books (the forgotten medium of my generation)? There’s plenty of good ones, but here’s three that I highly recommend:

The Extra 2%: How Wall Street Strategies Took a Major League Baseball Team From Worst to First by Jonah Keri

We all know the story about Moneyball (a fantastic book and movie) and how the Oakland A’s were able to use statistical analysis to field competitive teams on a shoestring budget, but what about the other small market teams in baseball? The Extra 2% chronicles the rise of the Tampa Bay Rays. From their inception as the Tampa Bay Devil Rays in 1998 until the mid-2000’s, they were the laughing stock of the MLB, never getting a sniff at the postseason. In 2005 Goldman Sachs colleagues Stuart Sternberg and Matthew Silverman bought the team and started implementing their Wall Street strategies into practice. Under their leadership, they looked under every rock to find ways to get ahead and they found ways to maximize investments in every department including marketing and public relations. The Extra 2% shows what went wrong before and how the new owners fixed the situation. Eventually Tampa Bay would go to the World Series in 2008 and became one of the biggest underdog success stories in all of sports in a world where the divide between big and small budget teams is so large.

Up, Up & Away: The Kid, The Hawk, Rock, Vladi, Pedro, Le Grand Orange, Youppi!, The Crazy Business of Baseball & the Ill-fated but Unforgettable Montreal Expos by Jonah Keri

Yes, another baseball book by the excellent Canadian author Jonah Keri (I swear it’s the last one). Pretty much everything you want to know about the book can be found in that (long) title. It can be fun to look at the success stories in sports, but often it’s more interesting to look at the failures and see what went wrong. Unfortunately the Expos moved to Washington to become the Nationals for the 2005 season, but the Expos impact on culture (especially in Quebec) and sports still remains relevant to this day. The book covers everything from the inception of the team from the late 60’s to their eventual demise. You’ll read about their beginnings in small Jarry Park Stadium, their move to the (oh so) problematic Olympic Stadium, how the athletes embraced the culture and people of Montreal and how the people of Montreal embraced the colourful collection of players right back. The story presented is a bittersweet one, as Montreal is still searching for a way to get a new MLB team, but still very much worth the read.

Hockey Confidential: Inside Stories from People Inside the Game by Bob McKenzie

This book (by one of the all-time great hockey reporters) takes a different approach to telling hockey stories, instead of focusing on the sports or events, it focuses on the people and how certain events affected their lives. The book has eleven chapters, each chapter covering different people and different stories from all across the hockey landscape. Just a few of the stories include NHL league office executive Colin Campbell’s brush with death when he almost drowned plowing snow off his backyard skating rink, all-star John Tavares’ relationship with his uncle (also named John Tavares) who is the greatest lacrosse player of all-time, and head coach Sheldon Keefe’s road to redemption as he tried to shake the ghosts of the past and his former affiliation with David Frost. There’s a lot more I could get into, but you have to read the book to get the best experience. The book has greater appeal to just hockey fans, and appeals to anyone that just wants some good human interest stories.

There you have it, three sports books to keep you occupied while were stuck socially isolating for at least another few weeks. Being stuck inside isn’t the worst thing to happen to us, especially when there’s so many books we can read.