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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Review: Ford Frick (2026)

By Dave Bohmer

Now here's a name that doesn't come up a great deal these days, even when the discussion is restricted to baseball historians: Ford Frick.

Frick served as the Commissioner of Baseball from 1951 to 1965, and he's not exactly well remembered these days. Frick's most memorable moment might have come in 1961, when Roger Maris was trying to break Babe Ruth's record of 60 home runs in a season. Maris did have eight extra games to do it, thanks to the introduction of a 162-game season, and Frick suggested that a new record might need some sort of qualifier or marking in order to separate it from the Babe's record if it came to that. (Note: Frick and Ruth were very close friends until Babe dies, which raised some conflict of interest issues.) 

The nickname for that qualifier became an asterisk, and Frick became associated with it. At the time, the idea didn't seem so ridiculous. But soon people came to think that a season was a season, and the record should be for the season no matter what the number of games was. Other sports (notably football) have lengthened their seasons over the years and not had that problem. Baseball always treated its records more seriously than the others, and Frick paid the price. That and some other incidents hurt the Commissioner's reputation for history. 

Author Dave Bohmer took it upon himself to revisit Frick's life and times in his book. "Ford Frick" seems to have been attractive to the author because Frick attended DePauw University, while Bohmer serves as director emeritus of the Pulliam Center for Contemporary Media and Media Fellows Program at that same institution. How does he do? It's a mixed bag overall.

There wasn't a direct path to baseball administration in the relatively early days of the sport's history. People rarely worked up to the job, as Rob Manfred essentially did. Frick came out of DePauw and became a sportswriter and sportscaster in the 1920s and 1930s. But his life took a turn in 1934 when he was named as the National League's public relations director in 1934, and moved up to be league president later that same year. When Happy Chandler was pushed out the door as Commissioner in 1951, Frick took his place. 

While reading this, it's striking just how much baseball administration has changed over the years. The American and National Leagues really were separated in many ways, as many of the issues that came up for baseball in Frick's years were considered "league matters." Umpires reported to the league office, and expansion was done somewhat haphazardly. This essentially means that Frick's hands were tied more often than not when it came to taking the proper action. Frick received some criticism for doing little or nothing in certain baseball matters, but he didn't exactly push open the envelope all the time. That really has to remembered when considering his legacy.

But that's not to say there weren't matters to consider. Baseball went from the railroad age to the airplane age during Frick's tenure. No longer did baseball teams have to be bunched closely together in the Northeast and Midwest so that they could play games on consecutive days after a train trip. That meant that cities with two teams (Philadelphia, Boston and St. Louis) were likely to lose one of them, especially with shifting demographics as the nation's population spread through the South and West. Throw in the Dodgers and Giants' stadium issues, that forced both of them out of New York City to head West, and the possibility of a new league called the Continental - which essentially forced the hand of the sport toward expansion - and changes were inevitable, unprecedented and a bit messy. It's difficult to think Frick could have done too much differently under the rules of the sport at the time.

Other big issues came up as well. Baseball grappled with the idea of how to prevent the rich teams from signing all of the top prospects when they were coming out of school. There were restrictions on bonuses and rules about the usage of players. To his credit, Frick probably guided the sport to the free agent draft that has become a part of the landscape of the business today. Baseball also had some anti-trust issues with the courts during his time on the job, as the courts and Congress both weighed in on the issue. Frick preached the owner's standard line about how the reserve clause was necessary for the sport to survive; he turned out to be spectacularly wrong on that, although he had plenty of company. The Commissioner was involved in the decision to play two All-Star Games per season, a viewpoint that has not aged particularly well. 

Bohmer ends his story with a chapter on the beginning of baseball and how the Hall of Fame got its start in Cooperstown, New York. The legend is that the game was invented by Abner Doubleday in that tiny upstate hamlet in 1839, even though there was little backing evidence to the story. Once the decision was made to put a Hall of Fame there, Frick put in a lot of work to make it a success. It might be the most interesting chapter in the book.

What's missing to a certain degree here is an analysis of how baseball did as a cultural attraction during Frick's tenure. After World War II, baseball really was the national pastime and the unquestioned biggest sport around. The majors attracted huge amounts of attention, and the minor league even did well too. But by 1965, that advantage was disappearing. Pro football was on the march, and headed toward a dominant economic position. Baseball was slow to react to that, in part because it didn't have the proper administration that could made changes. The owners (or, as they are too frequently called in the text, "magnates") waited too long to keep up with the times. Frick probably was never going to have the power to change that arc.

Frick himself wrote an autobiography about his life, and a previous biography on him came out in 2016. There's good research in this version, and that makes "Ford Frick" a valuable tool in judging those years ... - even if it might to lead to some honest disagreements about how those years affected baseball going forward.

Three stars

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Review: Moses and the Doctor (2026)

By Luke Epplin

It's turning into a good year for the American Basketball Association. 

It has been 50 years since the ABA stopped bouncing its red, white and blue basketball in order to complete a merger with the National Basketball Association. Earlier this year, Amazon Prime started showing a good-sized documentary on the ABA, complete with rare video clips that few have ever seen before. 

Joining that project in 2026 has been a new book about two of the biggest names in the ABA. It's called "Moses and the Doctor." If you don't know the full names of those two guys, this book might not be for you. Come to think of it, you probably even aren't on the correct website.

Luke Epplin's second book is somewhat split into three interwoven portions - two of them essentially short biographies. Julius Erving probably remains the face of the ABA, even though he spent more years in the NBA. "Doctor J," as he was known by everyone, might have been the last of the legends in basketball. He came up through the University of Massachusetts in an era when every college basketball game wasn't on television. He left early to join the ABA, which didn't receive a great deal of attention either from the TV networks. 

So you had to go to see a game to watch The Doctor operate, which was something of a chore. However, it probably was worth the effort. Erving was something of a descendant of Elgin Baylor, who took a relatively earth-bound game and took it to the air. Erving more or less perfected it, turning basketball into artistry in a sense. When the two leagues merged in 1976, Dr. J ended up with the Philadelphia 76ers - and people in the rest of the country couldn't wait to see him. 

The other title character was a great player too, but in an entirely different way than Erving. Moses Malone didn't even bother to go to college, as he had his heart set on turning pro right out of high school. The Utah Stars allowed him to do that. Malone immediately showed that he was a tremendous rebounder even at the pro level - a machine who gobbled up loose balls like no one had ever played the game.

Malone bounced around in his career - including a week's long stay in Buffalo with the Braves (it still hurts hoop fans in Buffalo to think about that episode) - before landing in Houston. There he became the league's Most Valuable Player. Malone was so good that the Rockets couldn't really afford to keep him at that point. 

That brings us to the third part of the story, the 76ers. Their history was often the story of "good but not good enough." Many times the Boston Celtics were in their way, and that team was a little bit better most of the time. Philadelphia piled up some painful playoff losses in the 1970s and 1980s with Erving around, and it was easy to wonder if the team would ever reach the mountaintop.      

Then Moses arrived in Philadelphia to lead the Sixers to the Promised Land (you knew that was coming). Philadelphia had a terrific team in 1982-83, dominating the regular season and then only losing a total of one game in three playoff series to win the championship. It was essentially the first and only time that a couple of the ABA's best were the main parts of an NBA championship. The combination of Erving and Malone were worth noting because they were such different players. Erving brought his ABA grace to dazzle onlookers, while Malone could have brought a hard hat and lunch pail to work - thus fitting in with the NBA stereotype of substance over style. 

What might not be remembered about this group is that its fame was fleeting. Erving's flame was starting to flicker at that point thanks to age, and Malone's body also soon started to rebel against the heavy, year-round workload. The 76ers were good but never contender-good for the next few years as the pieces scattered, which they always do eventually. The subtitle of the book is "Two Men, One Championship, and the Birth of Modern Basketball." It's difficult to make the case for that last part, even if it was a heck of a one-year ride.

Epplin's first book, "Our Team," was a terrific look back at the Cleveland Indians of the late 1940s as they helped usher integration into baseball. The author is back here with a slightly less compelling premise for a book, but he still does a fine job of putting the pieces together. Plenty of research went into this, and there are guaranteed to be some stories here you've never heard. 

"Moses and the Doctor" captures a particular era of NBA history quite nicely. It brings the story of two greats and their time apart and together back from the past, and delivers it in an easy-to-read manner. The target audience immediately responded once this was published, as it was on the New York Times best-seller list. 

Four stars

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