The Rotation: A Season with the Phillies and One of the Greatest Pitching Staffs Ever Assembled by Jim Salisbury & Todd Zolecki. (Running Press, 255 pg., $15). HB, 2012.
No one should be surprised that
baseball today reflects many of the main characteristics of our
culture, but the idea bears repeating nonetheless. This connection
exists even in the province of baseball literature and baseball
books, and a perfect example of it can be found in The Rotation: A
Season with the Phillies and One of the Greatest Pitching Staffs Ever
Assembled by Jim Salisbury and Todd Zolecki; a book about a
hyped-up situation that had to be started and worked on even as the
situation came into being. The Rotation is hardly the first
baseball book to attempt to capitalize on the latest hot topic, but
it did run a greater risk than normal in wedding itself to an idea, a
group of players, and a team that were not guaranteed to produce the
expected result. As things turned out, the authors did have to deal
with disappointment instead of triumph; their own triumph is that
they still managed to produce a book not only worth reading but one
which provides an important lesson for those sports fans wise enough
to glean it.
The big idea behind The Rotation,
of course, is that prior to the 2011 season the Philadelphia Phillies
put together a starting pitching staff of all-star moundsmen that
would dominate baseball and almost inevitably lead the Phillies to
another World Championship. The big four in the group were Roy
Halladay, Cliff Lee, Cole Hamels, and Roy Oswalt. Joe Blanton was
scheduled, as an after thought, to fill the fifth slot in the
rotation. It was an impressive array of arms and pitching talent, and
many a Phillies fan as well as distraught fans of other teams,
assumed that this lineup of big guns would decimate the competition
and reduce the rest of baseball to fighting over second-best status.
But any sports fans paying attention should have known better. No
matter how good a team looks on paper, they still have to go out and
perform in the actual competition … against other hungry determined
talented athletes who are almost certainly not ready to roll over and
concede anything. Many a championship banner has been mentally raised
before it has been earned. Just ask Miami Heat basketball fans about
that (Eds. note: review written before the Heat won the 2011-12
championship).
The Phillies themselves certainly knew
the danger they were facing, and all through the book, from the very
beginning of spring training, the authors depict the principals
constantly holding onto a dual mindset: positing that the only
acceptable outcome of the 2011 season is a World Championship while
reminding themselves that they still have to perform up to their
potential in order to meet their own and the world’s expectations.
The problem was, as the St. Louis Cardinals demonstrated in 2011,
that sometimes it is easier to be the underdog than the favorite, to
be the chaser rather than the leader. It was the Cardinals who beat
the Phillies in the very first round of the baseball post-season last
year. St. Louis wasn’t necessarily a better team. Chris Carpenter
was simply one-run better than Roy Halladay in the Fifth and deciding
Game of the series … on that particular day. Yet, the loss was
devastating and seemed to invalidate everything the Phillies had
accomplished during the season, which was considerable, by the way.
This all-consuming disappointment which can ruin the joy of an entire
season’s worth of accomplishment might be another lesson worth
learning, but it is probably expecting too much to think that sports
fan and the participants themselves might absorb it.
Each member of the Phillies’ newly
formed quartet of greatness is introduced in one of the first four
chapters of the book; and each chapter not only serves as an
adroitly-drawn profile which helps the reader understand each
pitcher, but it also focuses on exactly how each pitcher came to be
part of the team. The authors show us much to admire about each of
these outstanding pitchers –especially in the cases of
down-to-earth Roy Oswalt who has not let fame and fortune change him
and the intensely focused-and-driven but grateful and generous Roy
Halladay– but their accounting of Cliff Lee’s path back to
Philadelphia is something else. Some readers may find all the
excruciating detail about the hush-hush negotiations between Lee’s
agent and Phillies’ management that it took to re-acquire the free
agent fascinating; other readers, like me, may be disgusted by the
descriptions of the blatant greed that would cause an agent to
squeeze every last nickel (the cost of hotel suites on the road) out
of the employer (the Phillies ballclub) who has already committed to
making the player and his family fabulously wealthy.
After the introductions (“The Fifth
Starter” and “The Supporting Cast” are two additional
get-to-know-the-players chapters), the rest of the book is a month by
month account of the season and its highs and lows, as the rotation
leads the Phillies towards the team’s post-season destiny. The flaw
in the team turned out to be the offense, which for most of the first
half of the season just didn’t produce enough runs. The acquisition
of high energy outfielder Hunter Pence from the woeful Houston Astros
on July 29 helped quite a bit but wasn’t enough to stop the
Cardinals’ juggernaut in October. At times in these chapters, the
constant presentation of the big four’s pitching statistics can be
a little wearying, but it is tough to do a seasonal account without
keeping the reader abreast of such matters; and in this case, the
stats are crucial to the authors’ obligation to assess exactly how
the rotation did. In order to have the reader’s full attention, in
fact, the authors do their overall assessment in the chapter (“One
of the Best”) right before the denouement, “October.” It’s a
smart decision, as it allows the reader to fully digest how well the
Phillies’ Foursome did. It seems clear in the end that the authors
succeeded in the goal of the book. They show that The Rotation was
about as great as everybody expected it to be, but that in 2011 that
just wasn’t enough.
Reviewed by: Mike Shannon (March 9,
2012)