The Baseball Talmud: The Definitive Position-By-Position Ranking of Baseball's Chosen Players

by Howard Megdal

Book Overview

From the icons of the game to the players who got their big break but never quite broke through, The Baseball Talmud provides a wonderful historical narration of Major League Jewish Baseball in... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0061558435
• ISBN13: 9780061558436
• Release Date: March 2009
• Publisher: Harper
• Length: 307 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 5.2" x 7.2"

Customer Reviews

Great Book

This book tells you everything you wanted to know about Jewish Ball players. Found out things I didn't know. Great. Bought these as gifts for friends.

A fun book to read

I enjoyed reading this book. It presented a lot of information of which I was unaware. However this is a book to pass onto friends and not one that would remain in my library.

How Good Is Jewish All-Star Team?

This is a good book. By my count it lists 159 players by position. Some,of course, are quite famous. Others really obscure. Perhaps only playing a few innings or games. But, hey they made it to the big leagues. Which is certainly an accomplishment. The author uses both traditional and modern statistics to justify his choices. His criteria of Jewishness is liberal. Taking those who converted as well as those with one Jewish parent. It must have taken a lot of research to compile this list. Perhaps he's a modern day physiognomist. It would have been nice to have included photographs of those included as well as their career statistics both major and minor league. For those who may be interested in the topic there were several other books previously published. The Jewish Baseball Hall Of Fame by Erwin Lynn (1987). Ellis Island To Ebbets Field by Peter Levine(1992) Big Book Of Jewish Baseball by Joachim & Peter Horvitz (2001). So this update is timely allowing for the addition of newer players. Chapter 14 of the book discusses how the chosen team might fare against some very good regular teams of the past. The author concludes that the Jewish team would do extremely well. He concludes the chapter saying "let the discussion commence." I have no problems with his player rankings. But I do find it troublesome that he's playing an all-star Jewish Team against regular teams. Really not apples to apples. I have a Diamond Mind computer baseball simulation game that is quite accurate. It provides all the teams from 1927-present. You can play past seasons or different era teams against each other or make up your own teams by drafting players. This league was played by picking the players best, or arguably best, season not by career totals so you could, for instance, choose 1927 Babe Ruth. In any event, I thought it would be interesting to see how some ethnically chosen all-star teams would come out playing a 160 game season. Six teams were chosen. I originally wanted to include an Asian team but had difficulty completing a roster. So to complete the league I picked a group of players I considered to be kind of oddfellows. Who had had various issues thru their careers involving personality disorders,crime,drugs,goofy behavior. I played this league in 2005 before Steroids became a full blown issue. So that wasn't a criteria. The Sluggers were comprised of famous players not ethnically identified. So they were basically your White team. W L PCT RUNS RUNS AG ERA TEAM BA Regular All-Star Sluggers 101 59 .631 1093 894 5.00 .296 Darktown Panthers 96 64 .600 1045 822 4.45 .279 Latin Kings 88 72 .550 923 893 4.94 .272 Italia Whoppers 83 77 .519 899 811 4.51 .274 Oddfellows 65 95 .406 775 947 5.41 .274 Maccabees

A Tip of the Yarmulke to The Baseball Talmud

Howard Megdal, author of The Baseball Talmud, was kind enough to send me a copy of his book recently. The book chronicles and ranks Jewish baseball players position-by-position since the game's inception and is an excellent reference for anyone interested in the subject. All of the players hitherto mentioned on Jews in Baseball are analyzed and humanized by Megdal. There are also many, many more players that I haven't even scratched the surface with. Players like Andy Cohen, Moe Berg, and Jose Bautista. And for anyone who belongs to the Bill James' school of thought, Megdal is a huge proponent of sabermetrics. Of course, he provides you with the traditional statistics, but he goes into greater depth with nifty stats like VORP, WARP, and Pythagorean won-loss record. Megdal also digs up remarkable numbers that often go overlooked (like Lou Boudreau's walk/strikeout ratio in 1948: 98/9). Megdal even enlists the help of a baseball statistician to figure out how effective the All-Jewish team would be in a neutral environment. I won't give away anything. Let's just say they wouldn't be pushovers... At first, I thought I would skim through The Baseball Talmud and only check out my favorite players, but I really couldn't put it down; it's extremely immersive. From cover to cover, you'll learn something new about players you thought you already knew everything about. You'll see names long forgotten by most fans that conjure up images of different eras, egos, and ballparks. You'll be reminded of how good some of these players were. You'll be encouraged to see how good some of the current players are - and still can be. Most of all, you'll be filled with an indescribable sense of pride. When you see the formidable All-Time Jewish Team Megdal puts together, you may even let your imagination run wild and envision "the eventual cosmic baseball tournament between religions."

Nice meld of humor and stats

In The Baseball Talmud, Howard Megdal uses sabermetrics and humor to answer once and for all the question of who was the greatest Jewish player of all time--Hank Greenberg or Sandy Koufax? (According to Megdal, it's Greenberg by a hair.) Megdal has a good sense of humor and a nice writing style. How can you not like a guy who writes things like: "Right field is the Jewish people's deepest position. If a baseball diamond were America, right field would be New York City. If a baseball team's roles were professional organizations, right field would be the American Bar Association?" It's not giving anything away to say that his top 10 are (in order): Hank Greenberg, Sandy Koufax, Lou Boudreau, Shawn Green, Buddy Myer, Sid Gordon, Ken Holtzman, Harry Danning, and Mike Lieberthal. After that, Megdal goes position-by-position to assemble the all-time Jewish All-Star team and estimate how they would fare against some of the greatest teams in baseball history, from the 1906 Chicago Cubs to the 1998 New York Yankees. He doesn't give the team a name, but he ought to call them the Kosher Krushers. As someone who is more interested in baseball stories than statistics, I was pleased to see that Megdal does a good job of explaining some of the more complex stats. All in all, a fun read for baseball fans of any denomination (including non-believers).