MLB: Five Myths Busted By Brian Kenny’s New Book
Brian Kenny has spent 30 years as a sports journalist, serving as a SportsCenter anchor and host of Baseball Tonight on ESPN and now hosting shows across MLB Network’s programming. Being so immersed in baseball has led Kenny to some interesting insights into today’s game, and he’s put them all in one place for the world to read. But be warned, he pulls no punches when it comes to some of MLB’s most cherished stats and players.
Right off the bat, Brian Kenny lets his reader know that his book Ahead of the Curve is not for the closed-minded baseball fan. In the preface to the book, Kenny jumps right into what will be his overarching theme: the way the game of baseball is played, and the way we’ve always been taught to think and talk about it, is inherently flawed.
“So we have something happening right in front of us,” he writes. “Something we think about and discuss on a daily basis at least six months a year. An industry where strategy and information are vital. And yet for nearly a century, no one ever bothered to think about it deeply enough to give themselves an incredible competitive advantage, even when presented with the information.”
Throughout the pages of Ahead of the Curve, Kenny brings to light a plethora of ways in which teams, managers, players, and the people that write about the game are stuck in an era of baseball that passed by quite some time ago. Accepted thought is criticized at every turn, records and achievements believed to be gold standards of excellence are torn down, and baseball media is taken to task for failing in keeping up with the times. So many of the truths every baseball fan holds sacred are cast in a new light.
What emerges is a new prism through which to analyze Major League Baseball, one steeped in advanced statistics, an avalanche of new data, and strategies and methods of playing the game that possess the potential to have old-school baseball men grumbling or rolling over in their graves. Insightful and well-researched, Kenny’s book is the culmination of a movement that was birthed in the late-1970s with Bill James, hit adolescence in the early-2000s with the Moneyball A’s, and has now sprung into adulthood in front offices and baseball media across the industry.
What follows are five myths that Ahead of the Curve takes head on, exposing the archaic value put on cherished stats and strategies, the way the game is written about and analyzed, and how the future of MLB may look sooner rather than later.
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