Coming Apart at the Seams: How Baseball Owners, Players, and Television Executives Have Led Our National Pastime to the Brink of Disaster - Hardcover

Sands, Jack; Gammons, Peter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0025424114 ISBN 13: 9780025424111

Publisher: Macmillan Pub Co, 1993

Synopsis

Discusses how major league baseball got where it is today and what can be expected in the 1990s

About this title

From Publishers Weekly

This chaotic book treats baseball's structural woes topically and chronologically, making the writers' arguments hard to follow. Sands, a Boston attorney, and syndicated columnist Gammons convincingly show that major-league baseball has been radically altered--and perhaps destroyed--by high salaries, TV contracts and labor struggles. But they ineffectively present some points, such as the team owners' roles in the downhill slide, and their generalizations do not hold up: for example, they paint the Busch family (who run their Cardinals with a keen eye for profits) and Gene Autry (who wants only for his Angels to win a World Series) with the same broad brush. Sands and Gammons make the customary observations about baseball finances--the TV networks paid too much for broadcast rights, the players' salaries suggest enormous inequities--and conclude by suggesting measures that might salvage the sport: by restructuring the major leagues, adding a new league, and redefining the role of the commissioner. The average baseball fan won't be much impressed.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Sometimes you can tell a book by its cover--or at least by its title! In this insightful look at the national pastime, Sands, an attorney and sports agent, and Gammons, a nationally syndicated columnist and ESPN baseball correspondent, set the tone by including an introductory quote, "Baseball must be a great game to survive the fools who run it." Interweaving actual events of the 1980s and 1990s with a futuristic scenario of the game in the 21st century, the authors substantiate the book's title with a convincing argument. In an era where owners cry poverty while paying mega-million-dollar salaries to players, Coming Apart at the Seams is certainly not a matter of crying wolf but an alert that should be read by discerning sports fans.
- Albert Spencer, Coll. of Education, Univ. of Nevada-Las Vegas
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Macmillan Pub Co
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0025424114
• ISBN 13: 9780025424111
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 266