Baseball Meat Market: The Stories Behind the Best and Worst Trades in History

by Shawn Krest

Shawn Krest is an incredible and gripping sportswriter who shares a detailed narrative behind the best and worst MLB player trades in history. Few topics of baseball can get fans as easily riled up as trades, and any baseball fan will spout words of rage or thrill at the big blockbuster ones. However, reviewing those mismatch trades is a little like judging the best home runs by how far they went. Instead of only focusing on the first-round knockouts, this book deals with the 12-round title fights of baseball trades. The best trades are the ones that changed the history of the sport. The worst ones didn't just get a GM fired-they cost a city its team. In this book, readers get a bird's eye view of these most important trades and how they shaped baseball into what it is today.


Shawn Krest, award-winning sportswriter for the ACC Sports Journal, CBS Sports, ESPN and the MLB official website, writes in the book's introduction, "To fully understand a trade, we must peek inside the front office, listen to the phone calls and read the texts. We must look through the scouting reports and see who's thought to be losing a step, and who might be able to extend his career if we move him to the bullpen. We need to check the locker room for cancers. Then we need to make a choice-Scott Pose, Tom Marsh or that kid from the Reds? There have been times when it was done better than anyone else. There have also been times where someone wishes he could take it all back-along with his job." Readers get the inside scoop on what was, what wasn't and what could have been. For any serious fan of the great sport of baseball, all the excitement and history is right here in the Baseball Meat Market.

Genres: Baseball, Sports

240 pages, Hardcover

First published March 29, 2016

Reviews

[Jason · Rating 3 out of 5]

The stories that the book tells are truly interesting, and the author gives a decent amount of background information on the key names in play for each trade. There are a handful of grammatical errors in the Kindle edition, which, as an online blog editor of a few years, bothered me since someone presumably got paid to edit this thing.

My other pushback to this book is that the author uses WAR as the determining factor for grading these trades, and I'm all for WAR. I have a good amount of knowledge when it comes to saber metrics and I don't shy away from them. The complaint comes twofold. First, while WAR is used at the end of the chapter to summarize the deals, batting average, stolen bases and home runs are the primary ways to analyze deals in the meat of each chapter. It felt like the book was caught in between the two stat worlds at times.

The other part that I found to be an odd choice was with the WAR totals used at the end of each chapter. The WAR that the author uses for each player involved felt misleading. Essentially, only the WAR that was accumulated with the team that they were traded to is shown, not the player's overall WAR for the rest of their career, or, if they were traded again because the owner wanted to slash salary, there is no mention of what the value was of the other players that were brought in. So while Player X (for example) accumulated 43.7 WAR and had a Hall of Fame career, Player Y only accumulated a 2.3 WAR and was traded the following offseason. But how much were those players worth in total?

A real world example of this (not from the book) would be the Jeff Samardzija trade a few years back. The A's gave up Addison Russell, Billy McKinney and Dan Straily for a couple months of Jason Hammel and a year and a half of "The Shark." The A's didn't win the World Series (or the Wild Card game) and the A's traded Shark that winter. That's where the author would leave this--both players the A's acquired were gone and their top prospect along with them. But the A's traded Samardzija for Marcus Semien, who has been worth 8.6 WAR, and a couple of replacement level players. The Cubs obviously won the deal (they later traded Straily and Luis Valbuena for Dexter Fowler) there was still some info left to give a more full picture of what transpired.

I get why the book is formatted that way, but it felt like there was some story left on the table here.

[Frank · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a funny one because the central premise of the book--evaluating famous trades based on the Wins Above Replacement (WAR) stat--is the least interesting part. This book excels in the stories behind the trades, an illuminating snapshot of the era in which they were made. Even for the trades made at the height of my baseball fandom, I learned a lot of new and fascinating details.

[victor harris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very detailed and laden with statistics, many of which are of a modern sabermetrics variety that were not available when some of the historic trades were made. That aside, it does provide good coverage of the inner-workings of the general managers and owners who engineered the trades and the fruits and folly of such decisions.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a baseball nerd, I loved learning more about the background of some of the biggest trades in baseball history. Highly detailed and informative. Not too much crossover value for non-fans, but serious baseball fans will love it.

[Eric Parsons · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting breakdown mainly on why some trades happened and then behind the scenes workings on how. Most trades were actually quite boring, even the famous 5-for-1 of Von Hayes. Still, a decent enough read for baseball fans, with heavy weight given to WAR as the determinant on who won a trade.

[Jim · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a great book for Baseball fan who are interested in some of the big trades made in baseball. The only problem I had with the book was the print was small.

[Owen Fay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good Book