Sunday, August 16, 2009

P'n'E Book Review: "The Code" Is A Load

Dear God, what a horrible book. This steaming pile is proof positive that you can get anything published as long as you know the right people. The premise of the book is baseball's unwritten "code" as far as retaliation, brushbacks, respect, hard slides, so on and so forth. Good idea, terrible execution. The "author" of this excuse for literature simply cobbled together quotes from a few current and a lot of former players, the vast majority of which were Minnesota Twins. What you wind up with is a million variations of "yeah, sometimes you gotta drill a guy- but you never go for his head". It's broken down into chapters including Excessive Celebration, Showing Up Hitters, Sliding Hard, et cetera yet every subject concludes with "if somebody does that, you gotta drill him- but you never go for his head". I always wished they'd make a book version of "Groundhog Day", now I realize they did. Jeez. Another thing about this hardbound colostomy bag that really grinds my gears is the insistence to awkwardly tack the phrase "the code" into nearly every insipid quote. I could go on and on about every shortcoming this literary equivilant of herpes has but I really don't want to think about it anymore.

No comments: