Paths to Glory: How Great Baseball Teams Got That Way

by Mark Armour, Daniel R. Levitt

An essential experience of being a baseball fan is the hopeful anticipation of seeing the hometown nine make a run at winning the World Series. In "Paths to Glory," Mark L. Armour and Daniel R. Levitt review how teams build themselves up into winners. What makes a winning team like the 1900 Brooklyn Superbas or the 1917 White Sox or the 1997 Florida Marlins? And how are these teams different? What makes each championship team a unique product of its time? Armour and Levitt provide the historical context to show how the sport's business side has changed dramatically but its competitive environment remains the same.Utilizing new statistics to evaluate a player 's value and career patterns, Armour and Levitt explore the teams that took risks, created their own opportunities, and changed the game. How did the Washington Senators achieve the unthinkable and blow past Babe Ruth 's Yankees in 1924 and 1925? How did the 1965 Minnesota Twins quickly rise to the top and why did they just as suddenly fall? Did Charlie Finley assemble the last old-fashioned championship team before free agency, or was the Moustache Gang another example of winning by building from within? Why did the star-laden Red Sox of the 1930s keep falling short? In exploring these teams and more, Armour and Levitt analyze the players, the managers, and the executives who built teams to win and then lived with the consequences.

Genres: Baseball, Sports, Nonfiction

422 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2003

Reviews

[Rick Pyle · Rating 5 out of 5]

The "guns-in-their-lockers" California Angels chapter is worth the price of admission alone!

[Seth · Rating 3 out of 5]

I did not like this as much as I remember liking their later book. This was repetitive, too detailed and not enough big picture, and sometimes wrong. The history of the reliever was very interesting, but even more interesting for how they seem to have mispredicted the future.

[Agatha Donkar Lund · Rating 4 out of 5]

THINGS I LEARNED FROM THIS BOOK:

1. The Expos only went to the playoffs once because they all did too much cocaine.
2. It can be mathematically proven that Todd Walker sucks, which gave Keri no small amount of delight.
3. Joe Torre was once almost traded to the Astros for some dude I'd never heard of.
4. Joe Torre managed the Braves for a while in the 80s! AND GOT FIRED.
5. Charles O. Finley was Billy Beane-ing it up in Oakland about thirty years before Billy Beane would do it himself.
6. Milt Pappas for Frank Robinson: still the Worst Trade In The History Of Baseball, for the Reds, at least.

Interesting book; heavily reliant on mathematical models to explain why teams were great (or the opposite: why teams that should have been great never actually made it that far), but also contains a lot of personal anecdotes from owners and players about the teams they played on. Sometimes it goes on a bit long about irrelevant things -- brief predictions about Shoeless Joe Jackson's career if he hadn't been banned from baseball are one thing; twenty pages of predictions are entirely another -- but overall it was a worthwhile read, and the writing is excellent.

[Jonnyh · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a very good book because I really enjoy baseball, and it fit my taste in books. I liked how the book really goes in-depth and explains the hidden aspects of baseball that I didn't know about. It explains all about how different teams over the course of baseball history have gotten to the World Series, and have been successful. Not just from the aspect of the players, but from the coaches and the owners as well. Overall, I would recommend this book to baseball fans, or sports fans because other people wouldn't understand it very well, in my opinion, because it contains a lot of complicated statistics with batting and pitching that the average person probably wouldn't understand.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well researched and written; solid statistical analysis without becoming a math book. Great chapters on the 1917 White (Black) Sox & evolution of the fireman/closer.

[Doug Howgate · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very interesting. Didn't think it was too well written.

[Greg Fanoe · Rating 1 out of 5]

Eh. Not technical enough to be interesting from a mathematical perspective, not well-written enough to be interesting from a literary perspective. Some cool stories, I guess.

[Michael C Dreimiller · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great job of detailing the process of putting together some of the most successful teams in baseball history. Very interesting stuff if you're a fan of baseball history.