Review: Why So Serious? (2024)

By Mike Singer

Almost every rabid basketball fan, regardless of "affiliation," loves to watch Nikola Jokic. It's because he is such a unique player. 

The Denver Nuggets' superstar starts by being 6-foot-11 and 284 pounds ... although it's safe to say that last number has varied over the years. Yet his skill set is completely different than the stereotype of the position. 

Not only does Jokic like to pass the ball more than most big men, but he's creative at it. He might be the best passing big man ever. If one of his teammates is open, Jokic will figure out a way to get him the ball - no matter where that teammate on the court. If it takes a looping, cross-court, diagonal pass to get a good shot, he will figure out a way to do it. 

The Denver center has a wide range of shot techniques, inside and outside. Nikola has a little hop step on his outside shots that is usually unexpected, and effective. If the team needs to bring the ball upcourt due to some matchup problems, well, Jokic can do that too. Add it up, and he's probably the first- or second-most enjoyable player in the NBA to watch - depending on whether Steph Curry is shooting the ball well on a given night. 

Where did this odd collection of talent come from? How was it developed? What does it do for a team?

That, in a sense, is why Mike Singer wrote this book. The former newspaper reporter from Denver takes a good-sized dive into Jokic's life in "Why So Serious?" By the way, the book's title is based on Jokic's nickname of "The Joker," and it also matches nicely with his personality. 

Jokic grew up in Serbia in an athletic family. He had a couple of brothers who played basketball too, and it sounds like they were tough on their "little brother" while watching out for him. Nikola slowly moved up the ladder in the club system of that country. He certainly was a prospect, but it was tough to gauge what his ceiling might be. That was partly because it's a big and relatively unconventional step from Serbia to the NBA. It's also fair to say that Jokic liked to have a good time, and wasn't too concerned as a youngster about nutrition and conditioning. 

But the big man eventually built up a basketball support system around him, and he figured out what he needed to do to improve ... and did it. The short version of the story is that he was good enough to be a second-round draft choice of the Nuggets in 2014, when he was only 19 years old. Denver's front office thought he could develop into something, but you never know about such things. 

Sure enough, Jokic didn't need a great deal of time to improve after spending an extra year in Europe. He averaged 10 points a game in limited action as a rookie in 1985-86, and became a focal point of the team by 2018 or so. Nikola took a giant step forward in 2020-21, averaging 26.4 points per game. Jokic has won three MVP trophies in his career - the only second-round draft pick to win even one of them - and managed to be the league leader in rebounds and assists in 2025-26.

Along the way, of course, the center led the Nuggets to their only NBA championship in 2024. He hasn't been able to repeat that accomplishment yet, but Denver always will have a chance while Jokic is playing top-flight basketball.

Singer made one decision about writing this book right away. He has a lot of chapters in it. There are 95 of them, not including an introduction, epilogue and acknowledgments. I think that's a record for a book under 400 pages. 

Jokic comes off really, really well here. Admittedly, there's not much to criticize in his basketball career to date. But books written in the middle of someone's career usually are like that. We usually need some time after retirement to put things in perspective. Sometimes that's done by an author, and sometimes that's done by a subject him with some help. We'll see. 

For those who try not to miss Jokic's games whenever possible, "Why So Serious?" no doubt will work quite nicely. It covers the highlights and gives some details about the formative years and the glory days. It's probably not anything more satisfying than that; we'll have to wait a while to put some more pieces together. 

Three stars

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Review: Checkmate (2026)

By Ben Mezrich

If you haven't paid much attention to chess in the last several years, you've missed a lot. That's the underlying theme of the book, "Checkmate," which takes a look at this popular game and a famous incident from a few years ago.   

Chess always has a bit of an interesting niche in the world of sports and games. Play it reasonably well and people assume a degree of intelligence. Play it really well and people mix admiration with some questions about your motives. It takes a great deal of study to become a great player, and that single-mindedness can be a a red flag.

Chess had a peak of interest around these parts in the early 1970s when Bobby Fischer became the world champion. It didn't hurt that Fischer was American and thus appealed to United States players who become a little tired of the Soviets dominating the list of world champions. The problem was that Fischer had a variety of personality problems, and was about the last person you'd want to take the game forward. He eventually self-destructed.

Fast forward to the computer age. People wondered for quite a while if machines could ever beat human beings in chess. At one point, humans were said to have an edge at creativity and thus could figure out a way to win. But the machines got smarter and better. In 1996, Big Blue from IBM knocked off champion Garry Kasparov in a close match. It was something of a signal of what was to come. Soon everyone realized that humans would never win such matches in the future. 

But that didn't mean that humans couldn't put their own spin on the revolution. They used the computer programs as teachers, and improved their games. They played on-line against fellow chess lovers, who used to have to find a chess club nearby in order to find opponents. And when the 2020 pandemic arrived and kept everyone inside, chess turned out to be a good distraction for many. Chess internet sites, most notably Chess.com, exploded in membership ... and, naturally, value. (That plays a part in the story to come.)

The downside of this evolution is that it became easier to cheat. All you needed to gain a helping hand in a match is another computer program that could make suggestions. The chess websites try to police that sort of cheating, mostly by looking for clues that a player is doing far better than he should be according to a rating system. It's left everyone feeling a little paranoid, including those who are still playing chess in person. 

That all brings us to the story of Hans Niemann, who is at the center of the book. He was one of the world's top young players in the early 2020s, although he had confessed to cheating at times on line early in his career. Niemann, who had a little Fischer in him, had a match against world champion Magnus Carlsen in a competitive in St. Louis. Unexpectedly, Niemann drilled him - handing him an emphatic defeat even while using the black pieces (considered a small disadvantage).

Even world champions lose once in a while - it happens - but Carlsen was suspicious. He didn't think Niemann was good enough to play at such a high level for an entire game. Carlsen came away thinking that Niemann somehow cheated, and at first hinted those believes in public. That caused quite a sensation by chess standards. Throw in some inflammatory interviews by all sides and some legal actions, and you have a mess. 

Author Ben Mezrich takes something of a step-by-step approach to the story, which might be new territory to many readers who missed the incident when it came out.  He has good access to everyone involved, and no one comes out of this unharmed when events finally settled down. It takes quite a while to rebuild a reputation. 

Mezrich sometimes goes a little over the top with the techniques of narrative nonfiction. The story has plenty of drama on its own, and it usually doesn't need much sweetening to make it interesting. It's easy to wonder if the author was thinking again about how to make this story ready-make for a movie. He did that in a book that was turned into the motion picture "The Social Network," and at the end Mezrich does say that this book would make for a good movie. I admittedly take things from more of a journalism angle that entertaining, although I'm willing to say that his presentation keeps the story moving along nicely. 

I also found myself wondering if Carlsen would have been better off shutting up instead of blowing up the atmosphere with a belief about Niemann that he was unable to easily prove. Well, too late for that. 

"Checkmate" is at its best when taking a look at an activity that changed a lot in recent years, even if the pawns are still moving one square at a time like they have been for hundreds of years. An interest in the subject is all that's needed to find this book interesting. 

(Footnote: I just noticed that Netflix has a documentary available on this episode of chess history. Might have to check that out at some point.) 

Four stars

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Review: Goodbye, Oakland (2025)

By Andy Dolich and Dave Newhouse

The story about how a guy from Buffalo even came across this book is an odd one, if you'll pardon some city-dropping.

I was recently in Athens on vacation. Down in the basement, next to a temporary breakfast area (the place was remodeling), was one of those libraries where visitors were welcome to take a book and/or leave a book. About three-quarters of the selections were in the Greek language, which certainly sped up the skimming process. 

But there were some English-language books, and I noticed a book called "Goodbye, Oakland." Even better, one of the authors was veteran newspaper reporter Dave Newhouse. Ever since I had dinner with Dave in a small group the night before Super Bowl XVIII in Tampa, I've been a fan of his. Therefore, it was an easy call to pick one up and read it. 

Good decision. This is a well-done look around the sporting scene in Oakland - past, present, and future. 

These are tough times in the other city by the bay in Northern California. It may not have hit people who don't live in the region that Oakland is having a very tough stretch when it comes to sports teams. The Raiders packed and left for Las Vegas, and the Warriors packed and left for San Francisco (a lesser tragedy perhaps because of the short distance, but still painful to many). When this book was originally written in 2023, the future of the Athletics was at best up in the air. 

But now we know that the A's are at least planning to end up in Las Vegas as well. The team is playing in a minor-league stadium in Sacramento for the time being. No one seems to know how long "the time being" will last. Construction supposedly has started on the new place, but there's said to be a funding gap on how to come up with $2 billion for it. You'd think that would have been figured out before the steam-shovels arrived. 

With the Athletics' departure from Oakland now in the books, it seems, authors Andy Dolich (a former sports team executive in the Bay Area) and Newhouse provide some updates in a 2025 edition on what the situation was and review what happened. The triple move is not a happy story for the natives of course, and the authors are quite angry over it all. 

At one point in history, Oakland was something like the promised land for pro sports. It entered the game when the Raiders were admitted in the American Football League in 1960. It took some time, but eventually the team thrived. Charlie Finley took his baseball team from Kansas City to Oakland for the 1968 season, and the Warriors actually moved from San Francisco to Oakland in pursuit of a better home in 1971. All won championships in Oakland. To see the city's entire major-league history come to such an abrupt end within a short period of time is rather painful. 

The book really gets off to a great start with stories about the teams and personalities in the old days, particularly when it comes to Davis and Finley. There's little objectivity here, understandable under the circumstances. Davis moved the Raiders out of Oakland twice over the years - you'd think once was enough - and Finley ranks as one of the truly odd personalities in sports ownership history 

Eventually, Dolich and Newhouse get to a series of profiles about some of the major personalities of this era. For the out-of-town reader, some of them are going to be a bit more relevant than others. Names like Franklin Mieuli, Dave Stewart, Jim Otto, Rick Barry, Tony LaRussa, and Billy Martin are given an in-depth look, and we know enough background information to make them enjoyable. A few others who receive chapters are more local celebrities, such as a junior college football coach and a local baseball instructor. Those don't work quite as well when read from a distance, although they do add a bit of "on the ground" perspective. Those stories are mixed in with comments from fans, politicians, urban studies experts, etc. Even some Las Vegas residents get to express an opinion on the twin moves of the Raiders and A's to their city.

The politics and legalities of the moves themselves are particularly difficult to explain, even in hindsight in some cases. Meanwhile, it's also not easy to rewrite a book on the fly, and some of the wording along the way has become a little choppy. 

The important point, though, is that "Goodbye, Oakland" gets the point across that the California city has received a raw deal over the years. Will it ever get a second chance at "major-league status?" Hard to say. But it's easy to root for the city going forward, based on what is contained in the book.

Four stars

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Review: Nolan (2026)

By Tim Brown

Baseball has had plenty of superstars over the years. It's also had plenty of legends. Sometimes the two categories overlap.  

Nolan Ryan has elements of both in his life story, but the legend has something of a lead at this point in history. 

This was someone who broke into the major leagues at the age of 19. He was still playing at the age of 46, still throwing fast balls that players half his age couldn't touch. Ryan won 324 games, threw 5,386 innings, and struck out 5,714 batters.  In other words, he struck out more than a batter per inning during the course of 27 years. Radar guns weren't used to measure pitcher's speed for much of Ryan's career, but most eyewitnesses say no one has ever thrown the ball harder. 

In an age when starting pitchers frequently don't make it to the sixth inning, Ryan had 222 complete games. All of baseball had a total of 25 in 2025, and the leaders had two each. Ryan had 26 in a season twice. 

And how about seven no-hitters? Think anyone will ever break that record unless the rules are rewritten? Me neither.  

Get the idea? They don't make pitchers like this any more, so author Tim Brown is on to something good when he takes on the hurler in a biography, "Nolan." 

Brown's initial problem is that for a superstar, Ryan had an unconventional career. He appeared in one World Series, but only had a small role in the New York Mets' stunning championship of 1969. The pitcher did take part in the 1980 and 1981 playoffs, but his Houston Astros fell short of the Series. Otherwise, he didn't participate in any October baseball. There's not much team glory to cover here. 

While Ryan won a lot of games, he lost a bunch of them too - 292. That's the most in the modern era (since 1961), 26 ahead of Gaylord Perry. The biggest conclusion that can be drawn from that is Ryan played for some mediocre or worse teams that didn't give him enough offensive support. His 294 wild pitches are the most of any player since 1901. You might not have realized that Ryan never won a Cy Young Award. He could have done so in 1973, when he set the one-season record for strikeouts with 383, but finished second. 

Brown - who worked with Jim Abbott on that pitcher's fine book - makes a good decision, then, to step away from a straight-forward recap. After all, this isn't the first book about Ryan. Nolan and his wife both wrote one, and others chipped in too. Brown instead focuses on several aspects and moments of Ryan's life, telling the overall story that way. He takes a look at Alvin, Texas, which is proud as you'd expect of his native son. The author looks at how a scout had to talk the Mets into drafting him in the 11th round, 

The book includes Ryan's use of intimidation on the mound, stories about/from his family, the reaction of teammates and opponents to Ryan's abilities, the last pitch in his career, and life after baseball ... among some other topics. Brown certainly does his homework here, with all sorts of interviews and references including some time with the man with the fastball called "The Express."  

A few minor problems do pop up here. There's not much of an attempt to ponder where baseball's hardest thrower ranks with the all-time greats, since the resume is so unusual. Others have tried to do so, but the results have been somewhere in the top 40 pitchers ever, but not in the Top Ten. Meanwhile, Ryan comes off really well here, to the point where it seems a little overdone in spots. The standout player certainly was an admirable player and person, but some of the praise is a little over the top. 

Brown's writing also is a little interpretive in spots,  which is another way of saying overwritten. For example, there's a spot where the benefits of a strikeout are listed - the offense simply stops for a batter. That means no activity of any time, from homers to singles to sacrifices to errors to outs that advance runners and so on. 

Overall, "Nolan" gets good grades for telling a new generation about this great player. Accept no duplicates - he was an original. 

Four stars

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Review: Baseball Prospectus 2026

Edited by Patrick Dubuque, Craig Goldstein and Bryan Grosnick

It's getting rather difficult to say something new about the latest of the Baseball Prospectus series, which arrives with a thud on the doorstep with version 31 this year. 

For the serious fan who wants to know something about every single important player in professional baseball, this is still the place to go. With knowledgeable comments about more than 2,000 players, it's rare for the writers to miss anyone. I'm happy to report that the latest version has no layout problems, which have popped up occasionally in the past and have caused some readability issues. 

There are a couple of points worth noting here. The amount of information that is now out there is truly amazing. We have all sorts of data on a player's performance - things that would have been unimaginable to track only a few years ago. Each players has a few lines of statistical information that are something of an introduction. I'm not going to tell you that I have any idea what ZSw% stands for, but that's all right. I don't think I need it. The writers of the players' capsules actually are pretty good at getting down to business and defining a player's situation. 

Like most readers I would guess, I do some skimming when the book first arrives. I recognize that I probably don't need to know much about some of the Texas Rangers' minor league pitching prospects right now, but that others might. I'm happy that the information is out there for those who prefer a deep dive on a particular team. I will say that it seems like most of the pitchers in the book spent some time in the minors in 2025, and were flipped up and down like trading cards for whatever reason. It's simply tough to find pitchers with 150 major league innings these days. 

I've commented before that the player comments aren't quite as funny and snarky as they were in the old days, although there are exceptions that are worth a search. Happily, the team comments are almost always original and interesting. They remain a highlight. 

"Baseball Prospectus 2026" is another solid entry in the series. It's useful to read upon arrival, and it comes in handy while watching games or seeing some transactions. Buy it and keep it close by during the current season. 

Four stars

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