The Crash of 1929

Written by: Ronald Blumer

Narrated by: Philip Bosco

The "American Experience" series is essential public television viewing. This episode, "The Crash of 1929" documents the time just before and just after the stock market crash of 1929, which devastated the economy and marked the beginning of the Great Depression.

This documentary is not narrative heavy. Rather, some prior knowledge of the historical significance of the event is helpful, because it does not drag on and on about the details of the events. Nor does it have long lists of historians explaining each and every facet of the crash.

What this documentary does, which I did not anticipate, is to tell the story from the perspective of those most affected by the stock market crash. That is, to say, those who were working on the stock market. Most of the interviews are with the children of bankers and investors whose lives took a dramatic turn on that fateful day. Typically, these are not the most sympathetic figures in history (given that it was their actions which precipitated the crash), but their voices are important in documenting the "American Experience." They were the closest to the epicenter of the economic quake that shook our nation.

So, from a philosophical perspective, it's a great documentary. From a viewing perspective, it's not a thriller. It's a pretty straight-forward interview-style documentary.

I enjoyed it, but I enjoy "American Experience" anyway. If you're of a like mind, I'd recommend it to you.

Men at Work

The Craft of Baseball

In “Men at Work,” George Will, the famous newspaper columnist and political commentator (now a weekly guest on ABC’s “This Week”), has written perhaps the most analytical book on the subject of baseball. No base goes untouched – if you don’t mind the pun. He discusses the history of the sport, both in terms of the rules and equipment as well as the business; the physical beauty and the laws of physics which govern the game; players with great careers and players who never met potential. Although his research is as exhaustive as a PhD dissertation, with as much reasoning and explanation as a Supreme Court decision, Will focuses particularly on four contemporary (for 1988-1989, during the writing process).

The book begins with Will’s lens focused on then-Oakland Atheletics manager Tony LaRussa (now with the St. Louis Cardinals). Through LaRussa, Will schools the readers on the finer points of managing a baseball team – from creating a line-up to setting up a hit-and-run to plotting different types of double-steals, including how to defend them if the opposition tries one. In accordance with the title, the book reveals all of the actual work that goes into managing a game, done mostly by scouts and bench coaches, which include pitching charts and batting charts and team tendencies for stealing and other plays. The most interesting section involved signs, how to steal signs, and how to avoid having signs stolen. For example, the book reveals that sometimes LaRussa’s hand motions are meaningless while something subtle another coach is doing is truly revealing the sign. Other times, a sign might even be given prior to the situation even arising so that the batter or runner already knows what to do while the coach appears to give no sign at all.

The second major section, discussing pitchers, uses Orel Hershiser, at the peak of his career, as the case-study. Hershiser enlightens us to how a pitcher thinks before and during a game. Will argues that nearly every major rule change has been to the detriment of pitchers in order to enhance offense. So, whenever batting averages start to sag, the game is adjusted to keep everything balanced and equal – even to the point of moving the pitcher’s mound back (from forty-five feet to its current sixty feet, six inches). What Hershiser shows, though, is the resiliency of pitchers, who simply adapt themselves to try to outsmart the hitters.

The third section looks at Tony Gwynn – the last batter to (almost) hit .400 – to provide insight into how great hitters approach the plate. Although Gwynn is often credited with a preternatural hand-eye coordination, Will shows us that that eye was trained through hundreds of daily batting practice swings – both before and after games. His approach to hitting - power to the gaps, looking to drive pitches away and adjust for contact on the inside – made him a nearly perfect hitter. His strive for perfection and constant practice, as well as his willingness to examine his imperfections and make adjustments, made him the best all-around hitter in the past three decades and the perfect person to dissect for Will’s book.

The last, and markedly weakest section, discusses defense with Cal Ripken Jr. as the case study. Part of the reason this section is so weak, as Will admits and openly discusses, is the inability to make comparisons of defensive ability using concrete statistics. Yet, Will argues – and correctly – that defense is a crucial part of the game and that it is easy to observe how great defense can help a team win and poor defense can lead to the opposition scoring runs. Ripken’s insights, although interesting, are simplistic at best and focus more on the cat-and-mouse of offensive strategies against defense and pitching which, in some cases, giving well-timed misinformation to a runner in order to gain a defensive advantage later.

“Men at Work” is possibly the best book about baseball ever written. It is certainly the best that I have ever read, and I’ve read most of ‘em. Will effectively mixes anecdotes and stories with statistics (and statistical anomalies), topping that off with great philosophical and analytical discussions of the game, how it is played, and its meaning to us as Americans (not to mention he has a sharp, dry wit keenly used). My biggest complain is that many of the pages are physically imposing with long, unbroken blocks of paragraph, which is more a condemnation of my own laziness as a reader than his ability as a writer, but which also means that the book takes a long time to read. Still, I absolutely enjoyed this book and highly recommend it to any baseball fanatic. I would not recommend it as a jumping-on point for someone who has never seen or played the great American pastime, but, if that’s the case, it may be too late for you already and your soul may already be lost to the abyss of modern entertainment.