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Product Description
Nobody loves baseball more than Joe Morgan. He's proved it with his hall-of-fame performance on the field and his brilliant color commentary in the broadcast booth. Bob Costas says, "There may not be anyone alive who knows more about baseball than Joe Morgan.
In his playing days, Morgan was a key cog in the Big Red Machine, and he saw the game at its zenith. From his perch in the broadcast booth he watched as baseball self-destructed, culminating in the devastating strike of 1994. And in 1998, he saw the game come back with baseball's electrifying resurgence in the season of McGwire, Sosa, and the Yankees.
But as great as '98 was, Joe knows that baseball still has a lot of problems. And while baseball may be back, Joe wants the fans, the players, and the owners to know that some serious changes still need to be made. In Long Balls, No Strikes, Morgan draws on three decades' experience and passion as he dissects what has gone wrong and right for baseball. Some of his insights may seem unorthodox, some will be controversial, but that's never stopped Joe Morgan before.
How do we improve the game on the field?
Raise the mound
Abolish the designated hitter forever
Make the umpires learn the strike zone
And that's only the beginning. . . .
How do we improve the game off the field?
Erase the invisible color line that keeps African-Americans from holding management positions
Expand the talent pool by sending more scouts to the inner cities
Have all teams share equally from the same profit pool
And that's not all. . . .
Joe Morgan doesn't believe in "the good old days." Tomorrow's game can be even better than yesterday's. But at the end of the century, the game stands at a crossroads. One path leads right back to the troubles that nearly destroyed the game forever in 1994. The other leads to a new Golden Age. If baseball wants to continue to thrive, some changes must be made. But before there are changes, we need to ask the right questions. And if Joe Morgan doesn't know the answers, then no one does.
Amazon.com Review
The 1998 season was a year of wonders, to be sure, but attendance remained lower than it was before the '94 strike, 14 clubs suffered box-office declines, and the TV ratings for the World Series were in the tank. "Baseball is back," Hall-of-Fame second baseman Joe Morgan observes, "but it's not back all the way." One of the National Pastime's most engaging and entertaining explainers--as broadcaster, author, and spokesman--Morgan steps up in complexity from the basics of his last effort, Baseball for Dummies, to take some candid swings at what's right with the game these days, what's wrong with it, and how the wrongs can be righted. Naturally, he insists that baseball's owners and the players union put their house in order, and here he's not afraid to point fingers and name names. He hates that an owner like the White Sox's Jerry Reinsdorf can cry "about the lack of fiscal responsibility" in the game and then break the bank 18 months later to sign Albert Belle, a move that was so expensive he had to dismantle his team to pay for it. "Who," asks Morgan, "twisted his arm to do that?" Nor does he keep still about baseball's less-than-excellent record on minority hiring in executive and managerial positions. On the field, he strongly advocates a return to more base stealing and a higher mound, the dumping of the DH, and a less fluid strike zone. In a nice touch, he recruits the opinions of prominent baseball names--like union head Donald Fehr, manager Dusty Baker, executive Mike Veeck, and pitcher David Cone--and then comments on them. He presents a strong case for why former teammate Pete Rose's only admission to the Hall should be by ticket.
For Morgan, the 1998 season opened a window, but that's all it did. "How we utilize this opportunity," he writes, "will determine whether baseball can reclaim its title as the National Pastime, or will become a sport that has passed its time." --Jeff Silverman
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