Under The Knife 7/13/22
Don't Talk About Book Club
I’m not sure if anyone has similar reading interest to me, but inside this space, I often get asked about things that I read that have furthered my thinking. I figured I’d give you five recent ones. I’m using Amazon links, but please feel free to support a local bookstore.
Everyone’s probably read Range already, and has probably signed up for David Epstein’s newsletter. If you haven’t, do it. Epstein is everything people think Malcolm Gladwell is, except a much better communicator. I recently re-read Range and picked up new things. It’s not a textbook by any stretch, but it’s one you can pick up again and again because your lived experience as well as your goals are going to color how you read the book. Epstein is a treasure.
Peak performance is at the heart of Stealing Fire, which is basically Moneyball for human performance science. You might not be a Navy SEAL, but things at such extremes do trickle down and the type of things they’re using now are the type of things we’ll use in our daily lives soon. Once you get the concept of STER - trust me, read it - you’ll get the full value of the book right there, but there’s so much more. This book is one that really showed me how much value is underlying the world of human performance and sports science, just waiting for the right productization.
I am a terrible meditator. I don’t think I’ve ever made it through a ten minute meditation without having the ol’ monkey mind start in. The same is true of exercise, where my doubts can often sabotage me on ways to my goals (to say nothing of my body struggling.) Brad Stulberg takes a different approach in The Practice of Groundedness. My first read of it when it came out last year left me feeling mixed. The idea that productivity should be second is tough for me, but I was able to use some of Stulberg’s methods. I try to find meditation in tasks, seeing small improvements in things I do. I was left cold by Stulberg’s previous Peak Performance, which makes how much I learned from this one a bit surprising.
You’ll have to really stretch your mind to get it around Tom Fazio’s In Pursuit of Weightlessness. Fazio’s Kwai Chang Caine style is not for everyone and he can wave his hand at the problems in his system, but just seeing how he gets where he’s going is a journey. His concept is a pragmatic variant on Taleb’s Antifragile, something that is talked about a lot but implemented very little. Weightlessness might work outside a team concept, in a sport not only more individualized, but outside the mainstream, but there’s a lot of thought provoking nuggets here for the rest of us.
The last is fiction, because that can stimulate the thinking. No book has done that more recently than The Peripheral. William Gibson has created a genre and seemingly created reality, as well as writing Pattern Recognition, which might be my favorite book ever. He coined the term “cyberspace” and now, you’ll be haunted by The Jackpot. I will tell you that the first hundred pages or so make no sense at all. You’ll be thinking what is this book and then, in a magical ten pages, everything comes together and if you’re jaws not on the floor like mine was, I’ll be surprised. It’s about to be a TV show and given it’s from the Westward people, I don’t know if that’s good or bad.
That’s plenty for you to read - and don’t forget to get The Science of Baseball! - so I’m curious how many read them. Is there room for a UTK Book Club? For now, let’s get to the injuries:
MIKE TROUT, OF LAA (back spasm)
It’s always a worry when Mike Trout has a physical problem. There’s really no comps for Trout, currently or historically. People like to pair him with Bryce Harper, but there’s not really any similarities aside from being contemporaries. The same is true for Mickey Mantle. Trout’s size, speed, and power combo is sui generis, which makes comping him to anyone but him an exercise in futility.
Trout’s been durable, with most of his injuries traumatic, but he’s also at an age where we should see some physical changes. He’s muscled and thick, but hasn’t put on any weight or seemingly slowed down. While he’s not a hair-on-fire Harper, he’s not scared to dive or make a hard slide into third. The hope is that this is merely a reactive spasm and that he’ll miss minimal time, if any, but the ASB timing may factor in. Him missing the game is bad for baseball and for the Angels, though it’s more important to the latter that he not miss any of their real games.
Trout struck out twice in Tuesday’s game, then left with what were called back spasms. These were unusual in that they were in the upper back - I’m told it’s the traps - rather than the more typical lower back. Lower back spasms are usually the result of overtwisting, or some kind of vertical jolt to the spine. An upper back spasm is almost always a reaction to force, so one doctor I spoke with thought he likely had an unusual force in his swing. That’s probably something like a hand slipping than muscling up on a pitch.
Any Trout injury has to be taken seriously, and also taken in an historic context. Trout’s lost more to the pandemic than anyone. His chance at 600 homers is almost gone and even 500 is reduced, requiring longevity and durability across the final part of his career. As I said, comping Trout is impossible, but does Jim Thome’s 30s, at least from a power standpoint, sound out of line?