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. 

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, storeis 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 couple of minor problems do pop up here. 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 flowery. 

Overall, "Nolan" gets very good grades for telling a new generation about this great and unusual 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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Review: The Bosses of the Bronx (2026)

By Mike Vaccaro

Members of the sports media, particularly in New York City, must miss George Steinbrenner. 

Yes, the late owner of the New York Yankees (he died in 2010) certainly had his faults. But - if nothing else - George was good for business. That's especially true if you worked for a newspaper in the New York area, and it was especially, especially true if you worked for one of the tabloids in New York. Steinbrenner craved appearances on the back page of those papers like the rest of us crave air and water, and was an expert with supplying sportswriters with stories - true or manufactured.

Can you blame, then, Mike Vaccaro for giving George's baseball life yet another review in his book, "The Bosses of the Bronx?" Probably not - even if it's territory that has been well covered in publications over the years. In other words, a lot of trees have fallen to chronicle the Steinbrenner Years. 

How was it? Graig Nettles summed that era up nicely one day: "When I was a little boy, I wanted to be a baseball player and join the circus. With the Yankees, I've accomplished both." 

Way back when Steinbrenner first bought the Yankees in 1973, he was name only known to sports trivia experts. He was the owner of the Cleveland Pipers of the American Basketball League, a rival to the National Basketball Association in the early 1960s which was funded by Harlem Globetrotters boss Abe Saperstein. It's mostly remembered now as the place where the three-point shot was born. Steinbrenner signed Ohio State star Jerry Lucas and tried to force his way into the NBA, but the plan eventually collapsed and so did the whole league. From there, George had hopes of buying the Cleveland Indians in baseball, but that never quite worked out. 

But when CBS decided to sell the Yankees in the early 1970s, Steinbrenner led a group that bought the team at something of a bargain rate. The deal was announced on January 3, 1973, and it didn't take long to realize that Steinbrenner's management style was on the flamboyant style. We were all off on a unique ride that really didn't end until George's health started to fail in the 2000s. 

That ride was stressful to almost everyone involved, but it was never boring. Steinbrenner could stop hiring Billy Martin to manage his team, and he couldn't stop firing him either. It happened five times, and No. 6 seemed likely until Martin died in a car accident. By that time reporters were referring to a particular time period of Martin's managing with Roman numerals, as in Billy V. A couple of other managers received second chances too. 

The playing roster was always interesting too. Steinbrenner wasn't exactly the most patient of men when it came to baseball development, always trying to win now rather than wait for young players to ripen. That had its benefits at free agent time, when Reggie Jackson and Dave Winfield signed big contracts. But it also led to some top prospects heading elsewhere for major-league mediocrities (i.e. Jay Buhner for Ken Phelps), and the Yankees also came close to trading a couple of young players named Ron Guidry and Mariano Rivera before they backed away. Not coincidentally, the Yankees did their best work a few years after Steinbrenner had been suspended by baseball - not once, but twice. The staff had the chance to build up the team without interference, leading to the championship runs of the late 1970s and late 1990s. 

Not many could have pulled off yet another interesting book on those years, but Vaccaro is up to the task. He's one of the most readable columnists out there, and certainly did some good research into some of the most famous moments of Steinbrenner's time on the job. There are many fun little bits of information that sweeten the recaps of events nicely. 

It's at least interesting to note that Vaccaro doesn't spend a great deal of time on George's sons, Hank and Hal. The Yankees usually have been very good since George gave up his spot of control with the team. Steinbrenner was technically still in charge when the Yankees won the World Series in 2009. But they haven't won it since then, only reaching the final playoff round in 2024. 

It's easy to wonder a bit if we need another book on that era. But at least Vaccaro has the sources and the writing style to keep people reading "The Bosses of the Bronx." Yankee fans of those years certainly will find reasons to smile when going through this worthwhile effort.

Four stars

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