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

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.

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.