Clearing the Bases: Baseball Then & Now

In this 152-page, over-priced volume, Starr, a former major and minor league player and the owner of the San Diego Padres when the team was still in the Pacific Coast League, compares and contrasts the diamond stars of the 1920s and '30s with those of today. Disclaiming nostalgia, he favors players of the past and builds a creditable case based on the almost astonishing increase in strikeouts, the lack of minor league training for the moderns and the concomitant decline in mastery of the fundamentals. He also has his say about the myth of the lively ball and the claim that today's bigger and stronger athletes are necessarily better. Finally, he blasts so-called computerball statistics, pretty well demolishing the notion that they have much significance. (Mar.)