"The best baseball book I've read in years." -- Sam Walker - "An
exhilarating story of innovation." -- Ben Reiter - "Swing Kings feels
like a spiritual successor to Moneyball." -- Baseball Prospectus
From the Wall Street Journal's national baseball writer, the
captivating story of the home run boom, following a group of players who
rose from obscurity to stardom and the rogue swing coaches who helped
them usher the game into a new age.
We are in a historic era for the home run. The 2019 season saw the most
homers ever, obliterating a record set just two years before. It is a
shift that has transformed the way the game is played, contributing to
more strikeouts, longer games, and what feels like the logical
conclusion of the analytics era. In Swing Kings, Wall Street Journal
national baseball writer Jared Diamond reveals that the secret behind
this unprecedented shift isn't steroids or the stitching of the
baseballs, it's the most elemental explanation of all: the swing. In
this lively narrative romp, he tracks a group of baseball's biggest
stars--including Aaron Judge, J.D. Martinez, and Justin Turner--who
remade their swings under the tutelage of a band of renegade coaches,
and remade the game in the process.
These coaches, many of them baseball washouts who have reinvented
themselves as swing gurus, for years were one of the game's best-kept
secrets. Among their ranks are a swimming pool contractor, the owner of
a billiards hall, and an ex-hippie whose swing insights draw from
surfing and the technique of Japanese samurai. Now, as Diamond artfully
charts, this motley cast has moved from the baseball margins to its
center of power. They are changing the way hitting is taught to players
of all ages, and major league clubs are scrambling for their services,
hiring them in record numbers as coaches and consultants. And Diamond
himself, whose baseball career ended in high school, enlists the
tutelage of each swing coach he profiles, with an aim toward starring in
the annual Boston-New York media game at Yankee Stadium.
Swing Kings is both a rollicking history of baseball's recent past and
a deeply reported, character-driven account of a battle between
opponents as old as time: old and new, change and stasis, the
establishment and those who break from it. Jared Diamond has written a
masterful chronicle of America's pastime at the crossroads.
