Books with author John Harrold

There is simply no other book like this one on the market. One reason may be that a market scarcely exists for the secrets that baseball’s greatest hitters (or “strikers,” or “stickers”) brought to their craft over a century ago. Like other sports, and like our culture generally, baseball coaches and gurus have invested heavily in the notion of progress. Today is better than yesterday (goes the dogma) in every way, thanks to technology, training, and medical advances. A lot of that notion is true: some of it is bunk.“Players are stronger and healthier today.” True; so why do they strike out one out of every three trips to the plate? “Because pitchers are throwing much harder.” Generally speaking, yes; but the mound is also lower, the hitting background is better, batters wear helmets and body armor, and a zero-tolerance exists for knockdown pitches. Tris Speaker fanned 13 times in 674 plate appearances during the 1920 campaign while batting .388 and leading the league (for the fifth of eight seasons) with 50 doubles. Who performs at that rate today, even in Little League?John Harris believes in the value of historical research and scientific method—and he also entertains a skepticism of our blind, arrogant faith in the present’s superiority to the past. Convinced that yesteryear’s batsmen must have done at least some things better (precisely because they amassed such dazzling numbers while being less healthy and less tutored), he has invested years in reverse-engineering the swing that preceded Babe Ruth and the “live ball.” No single type of swing existed back then, it turns out; in fact, hitting featured a vast diversity of styles compared to the modern game. Nevertheless, certain tendencies can be isolated (front-foot hitting, shifting in the box, choking and hand-spreading, etc.). To judge by casual explanations offered of (for instance) the Georgia Peach's three-inch hand spread, today’s color commentators and technical analysts haven’t a clue about what was going on with Ty Cobb or Honus Wagner. As for baseball historians, they can tell you about Ed Delahanty’s drinking problem or Fred Clarke’s eye for the girls... but most of them have no interest whatever in how their subject gripped a bat.Dr. Harris corrects many such oversights, insofar as is humanly possibly over a century later and with little more than grainy still photos to go on. True students of the game will be shocked--and perhaps delighted--by how many potentially game-changing tips he has managed to uncover for the next generation of hitters... if any risk-takers emerge among the crop, that is.

Any devout baseball enthusiast will appreciate the creative metrics that Dr. Harris has applied to the careers of young black ballplayers whose big-league life (in the cases examined here) began a good six or eight years after Jackie Robinson’s debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers. The “study group” is mostly drawn from Post Cereal cards that Harris lovingly collected as a boy. Some of his collection’s most promising members had dropped off the map when he revisited the cards decades later, and he grew curious. Black players, especially, seemed abundant in this unhappy set of strange disappearances. The project started, therefore, in a thesis: as of about 1960, making it in the Major Leagues remained much harder for African-Americans than for Caucasians.Statistical review included not only a comparison of black and white batting averages, Earned Run Averages, and other standard metrics, but also an exploration of environmental conditions, such as how often players endured the disruption of being traded and how much time they spent in inactivity between starts. There are two sides to every story, of course, and Harris takes pains to underscore the presumptions and blind spots in his own arguments; but the tendency for black players to encounter more obstacles and fewer rewards often emerges rather powerfully.As Dr. Harris attempts to refine these findings with additional research into sportswriters’ accounts and other sources, he unveils a theory never succinctly proposed by any source: that the prejudices in question were not simply a conditioned reflex to skin color, but that the “anything goes” baseball of the Negro Leagues made coaches and managers of the Fifties’ systematized, highly controlled Major League game very suspicious and uncomfortable. Members of the Caucasian “brain trust” feared being shown up or drawn beyond the bounds of their expertise. This stylistic prejudice—which lay close to the heart of the game’s racial prejudice, Harris believes—appears nowhere more clearly than in the emphasis of the home run. Aaron, Mays, Robinson, Banks... they all rose to glory on an impressive wave of homering; but potential superstars like Pinson, Altman, Al Smith, and Floyd Robinson may have been ruinously infected by Home Run Fever.Such a conclusion, because it removes prejudice from the purely ideological corner of racism and chooses to view it as a complex puzzle—because, that is, it doesn’t confront us with a simplistic “good guy/bad guy” scenario—will disappoint many of today’s social critics who want to cast all racial questions in a “good vs. evil” mold. Dr. Harris stresses, however, that he is uninterested in being the “white scholar trying to advertise… moral enlightenment” in a grand feat of virtue-signaling. Referring to prejudices that beset his own son’s baseball experience—not racial, but nevertheless severe—he asserts instead, “I am a father who once felt the anguish of looking on helplessly as his son’s confidence was sabotaged—and who has re-aggravated that anguish in pondering the young lives of a few talented men now gone from this world.”The book thus ends up being a personal odyssey: an odd, even unique evolution for a work on sports history. But then, baseball is a unique game. It bonds fathers and sons, and it breaks down barriers that ordinarily separate our communities. If John Harris’s approach defies the expectations of sportswriting by confusing its subjects with our sons and our brothers, does it not also therein suggest the only possible solution to the problem of racial bigotry?

The age of the NES was transformative for video gaming. The console, and its Japanese predecessor, the Famicom, were extraordinarily popular in that time. When a console is that popular, it attracts a lot of people to make games for it. Many of these games are good. Many of them, to put it bluntly, are not.But it isn’t always easy to decide which are which. Some games present many of the warning signs of a bad game, but there’s something there, waiting, some might say lurking, for a persistent player to come along, to make them say, if just for a moment, “maybe this isn’t so bad after all.” And a few games were popular at the time but their stature has fallen, recently, as they get proclaimed the “black sheep” of their series.Come with us on a journey through the Other Half of the NES library. The games that could have been, if they had a better developer, if they had put in just a bit more effort, if someone had cared about their license a little more, if there had been more marketing money to spare, or even if they had been released a little earlier. To find the grime-covered treasures, ignored or even derided by others. And once we’ve found them, we’ll give you a few tips, just enough to get you started seeing the fun hidden beneath all the mud and gunk.It’s not that they’re all great games. Some of them aren’t even good. But they all have something there, some thing that can be enjoyed, even celebrated. At least you aren’t stuck with only one to play until your next birthday.

The Atari Video Computer System, aka VCS, later renamed the Atari 2600 after its model number (CX2600), was the first popular programmable home video game console.The VCS wasn't the first in any area except one: it was the first really popularprogrammable home video game console. Sales of the VCS were gigantic. Atari would ultimately move 30 million units, and the machine remained in production until 1992. It lasted a venerable 15 years, and survived long enough to compete against the SNES. And it did all this with a hardware set that could at best be described as ludicrous. This is generally a book of reviews of interesting Atari VCS games, but there are some important caveats. For inclusion, the most playable version of the game has to be for the VCS. For example, the VCS port of Missile Command is a very good game. But the arcade version is much better: it has three bases instead of one adding a touch more strategy to it, it has missile "matchbooks" that let you use one explosion to touch off others, there are more and more varied types of enemies, and it's generally just a better game overall. You're about as likely to be able to play the VCS or Arcade versions these days, so, why not play the arcade one? This also rules out a host of arcade conversions. In a few cases, the stars of programmer skill and hardware capability combine in such a way that the version on the lowly Atari VCS, a machine with 128 bytes of RAM and ludicrously primitive display capability, is actually a competitive version, and sometimes it is superior in one or more ways. Two games this is true for is Asteroids (whose game variations provide interesting ways to play the arcade doesn't try to match) and Space Invaders (the two-player co-op versions of which make it actually more interesting than the arcade).This is a book of such games. Reasons to scour eBay for tapes, or else drag out an emulator. Gameplay doesn't go obsolete, but some games do become, ah, less accessible over time. Here are 21 that are still fun.

This unique hitting manual has a complicated history. Dr. Harris wrote HITTING SECRETS FROM BASEBALL'S GRAVEYARD as a salute to great Deadball Era batsmen like Cobb, Speaker, and Wagner after investing twenty years of off-and-on research in the project. The techniques he unearthed from first-hand accounts, old photos, and much experimental reverse-engineering stunned him to a point that he found himself wanting to recommend their revival. LANDING SAFETIES fulfills that wish. This volume is a straight-up, unapologetic set of techniques for hitting low line drives so as to increase your chances of reaching base. The modern hitting game has become almost the exclusive province of tall body types employing styles that generate "big flies"-so much so that, halfway through the Major League season, you find regular starters still struggling to reach .200 against radical shifts and multiple Big League clubs averaging nine strikeouts per contest. Left-on-base numbers are also soaring as runners-in-scoring-position averages plunge. As the period's name says bluntly, balls didn't travel well in the Deadball Era. Hitters therefore developed techniques to drive the unlively ball through or over the infield: that was the "percentage" move. It still is, especially for shorter players who will never be able to compete at "long ball" with teammates a foot taller than they. Equipped with the techniques laid out in this book, those same players of the shorter (and often more athletic) body type will be forcing the coach to choose between a giant who homers every third game while striking out twice each game, on the one hand, and a more compact fellow who bats around .400. With almost a hundred black-and-white images, this book represents the Old School approach very graphically. Photos of yesteryear's stars are stirred in with Harris's modeling positions himself for which few or no photos exist (usually because they are mid-swing shots that earlier cameras couldn't capture). The results should be very useful to young players-girls as well as boys-who eagerly seek a way to out-perform their larger, more attention-getting rivals.NEW TO THE SECOND EDITION: a step-by-step, fully illustrated breakdown of Tris Speaker's dynamic load into the pitch from a "shuffle-step"; a full chapter on approach, emphasizing the importance of opposite-field and up-the-middle hitting; and two angles featuring frozen-frame analysis of how well front-foot hitting with the Old School downward stroke covers the zone when compared to more recent swing paradigms.

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