Unwritten Rules of Baseball

The Code, Baseball’s Unwritten Rules and Its Ignore-at-Your-Own-Risk Code of Conduct by Ross Bernstein; 2008; Triumph Books, Chicago, IL; 240 pages; 978-1-60078-3; 2/8/09-2/11/09 Remember during the first OJ trial, when Marcia Clark or Johnny Cochran would ask for a sidebar, and they got to be a joke.  Well that is what this book suffers from is way too many sidebars, there are boxes with antecdotes everywhere, breaking the flow of the narrative.  Bernstein didn’t really write a book, he talked to a bunch of players and coaches about the different aspects of the code and then transcribed what they said.  He did some research and then cut and pasted it into book form.  I was looking forward to this but it was a real disappointment.  Some pages were nothing but sidebars, which I think should have been included in the narrative.  The book is choppy because of all the different ways it is broken up, chapters on stealing signs, on charging the mound, running up the lead and the like.  I think this could have been told in a chronological order, how things have changed over the years.