When we look back at how the newspaper industry crumbled, and sportswriting in particular got better as a result, we will look take an extra special look at Joe Posnanski. Joe, an ordinary writer for the Kansas City Star by day, is a super blogger by night. Sure, lots of sportswriters have blogs. But mostly they see them as outlets for smaller ideas, quick posts, and links to their real articles. They think that blogs are supposed to be short, quippy blurbs marked by a singular idea, more a forum for comments than a place to write. Not Joe. Joe writes thousands and thousands of words nearly every day on whatever he wants, and it’s always well-written and interesting. He goes on long tangents marked with asterisks. He makes up new words. And he tells great stories. Now that is a blog.

Posnanski also wrote a book, The Soul of Baseball: A Road Trip Through Buck O’Neil’s America. If you’re like me, you are young and your knowledge of baseball history is pretty sparse. You barely know who Buck O’Neil is, and you would have a hard time naming five Negro League players who didn’t also play in the big leagues. Joe’s book, in which he chronicles a year traveling with Buck, is a good place to start. Buck O’Neil was a great person, and not just because he played and managed in the Negro Leagues and endured the jeers and bigotry and second-class status of blacks in America at that time. A constant theme of the book is that people always want to ask Buck about that. How did you do it? Are you bitter that they treated you so poorly? Are you mad that you never got a shot to play in the big leagues? And Buck would say:

Where does bitterness take you?
To a broken heart?
To an early grave?
When I die
I want to die from natural causes
Not from hate
Eating me up from the inside.

Even when he was snubbed by the Hall of Fame in the year they inducted seventeen Negro Leaguers into the Hall of Fame, Buck wasn’t bitter. He was sad. The truth is, he doesn’t have Hall numbers. He was a first baseman with a career slugging percentage of .391. But when you read this book, that’s the last thing you care about. Buck toured the country speaking to everyone about the Negro Leagues, teaching and sharing his love for the game and his knowledge of its history. He was a manager. He was a scout. He helped establish the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum and was its chairman. He isn’t in the Hall, but Major League Baseball did name an award after him: The Buck O’Neil Lifetime Achievement Award, to be presented at most every three years.

Buck’s is a great story, and Posnanski tells it well.

Another blogger, Derek Zumsteg, gives a very different account of baseball history in The Cheater’s Guide to Baseball. Zumsteg’s is a funny and even-handed account of pushing the limits, bending the rules, and outright breaking them for victory or profit. The book is broken into three parts: the “underhanded but not illegal,” the “illegal but cute,” and the seriously illegal, such as throwing games, betting on games, and using illegal drugs (like steroids).

Zumsteg, or DMZ as he has known on USS Mariner, brings a refreshing distance to all these subjects, rarely judging or criticizing anyone. Those who are familiar with his blog may miss his typical passion and intensity, but will recognize the combination of a sober consideration of the facts with a fun, chatty tone that is typical of his writing. That is understandable. Zumsteg is personally interested in the moves and machinations of the Seattle Mariners, posting caustic but informative invective on his blog, but he takes up a bemused air when considering the history of the sport. He’s not going to defend Shoeless Joe Jackson, because hey, he did what he did. But at the same time he gives the economic background of the Black Sox Scandal: Charles Comiskey was a total cheapskate, and he was totally ripping his players off. Zumsteg doesn’t use this fact to clear the players. In fact, he says, “There is nothing anyone could do that could do more damage to the game’s integrity.” But later he quips, “The Black Sox scandal is another example of how cheating forced baseball’s evolution… The sport today is healthier and stronger for the protections that have stood since 1919 as a result of the team’s transgression.” So is it not really “the worst thing ever to happen to baseball”? (Or is that Bobby Bonilla?)

I don’t know what it is, but the book is often jarring with its little stabs at “moralism” and honesty. At the beginning, Zumsteg asks whether cheating is wrong (somehow, I think it’s wrong by definition), and then tells us that “everything that’s called cheating is not cheating.” He makes some hazy distinctions, then adds: “But even fighting, gambling, drug use, and umpire intimidation, which compose the far end of the spectrum of cheating, are established parts of the game and have shaped their evolution.” So… does that mean they are not wrong? Just because they are established and have helped shaped the game, does that mean they are fine? God forbid Zumsteg should take a stand. Oh sorry– he does take a stand on something: “the ponderous stupidity of ‘God Bless America’… Because what troops on leave from getting shot at isn’t competent elected leadership to get them home, it’s a tinny PA announcement and hearing ‘God Bless America.’” Whatever– this is in one of the book’s fun little inset features– but that’s the most passionate Zumsteg gets in the book, and it has nothing to do with the book’s subject.

Look, I really liked The Cheater’s Guide to Baseball. It was a lot of fun. I learned a lot. But the author’s central thesis, that cheating (you know, breaking the rules) is essential to baseball (a game with rules) and that cheating has helped to form the modern game of baseball through adaptation and evolution, and all those people who go on and on about purity and all that are just boring old moralists anyway, is quite tedious and largely meaningless. Then, in the conclusion, Zumsteg makes the wild implication that the effort of teams “to hire and pay the best players” is cheating. That’s cheating? What the hell? Flipping through back pages, I wonder, did I just read a lighthearted chronicling of cheating in baseball, or some quasi-Marxian deconstruction of baseball history?

Really, it’s not that big a deal. Most people reading this book won’t notice or won’t care about the sometimes bizarre definitions and distinctions of cheating that the author makes. But if you’re like me and you’re sensitive to these things, skip the beginning and the end and read the middle. It’s full of vaseline, cork, pine tar, resin, superballs, spit, glue, Billy Martin, and all sorts of other fun stuff.