With Tim Wakefield starting tonight just three wins shy of 200 for his career, now is as good a time as any to look back on everything the Knuckleball pitcher has accomplished and the long and unexpected path that has lead him to this point. With Boston Globe Online writer and biographer Tony Massarotti, Wake takes us through his early days as a young player up to his unlikely emergence as an important role player with the some of the greatest Red Sox teams every to grace the Fens of Boston in his autobiography, Knuckler.

Readers seeking out a tell-all, insider’s account of the clubhouse will not find it here. Wakefield is straight-forward and honest about his feelings on his own role and his disputes with management, but he offers little about his relationship to teammates and refrains from casting judgment toward any of the controversial figures he shared the locker room with from Barry Bonds to Carl Everett or Manny Ramirez. Red Sox fans won’t be surprised to find that Wakefield is the consummate company man on page just as he is on the mound.

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The Extra 2% by Wall Street Journal and ESPN.com contributor Jonah Keri is the story of how one smart small-market team used strategies born on the trading floors of Wall Street to challenge their big budget competitors for October glory. That plot may sound familiar. On the surface, The Extra 2% is very similar to Michael Lewis’ game-changing write-up of the Oakland A’s and their iconoclastic GM Billy Beane.

Written more than seven years after Moneyball changed many people’s opinions of baseball strategies and management, The Extra 2% might tell a similar rag-to-riches story, but it is unlikely to have the same impact or to become short-hand for a contentious philosophy. Keri is writing in a world that has largely accepted statistical analysis and where young Wall Street-trained front office personnel are commonplace. As a result, the story of how the Tampa Bay Rays managed to pass baseball’s two richest teams in the standings and become a regular contender in the game’s toughest division, offers little in the way of revelation for the reader. In Keri’s telling, the Rays’ top management takes a poorly run team and uses intelligent PR, marketing, and negotiation tactics to turn the franchise around. The team’s turn-around in the standings is enough to make this book compelling, but the lack of a consistent narrative thread holds this book back and leaves the reader lacking a real understanding of how the Rays are different from any other intelligently run organization.

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This is the first of what I hope will be a semi-regular series reviewing books on baseball, especially those that are relevant to the Red Sox, here at Over the Monster. There is an endless supply of great writing on the sport and I would like to do my best to honor it and help spread the word.

Pinstripe Defection from writer Clay McKinney is a fascinating David and Goliath tale, pitting Arkansas lawyer Jason Browning against the high-powered attorneys of the New York Yankees in a case dealing with the dark, hidden world of international baseball scouting and signings.

The book follows the legal proceedings revolving around the strange signing process used to acquire Michel Hernandez, a Cuban catcher coveted by the Yankees. In unraveling the case of a disputed contract, McKinney touches on the dangers Cuban players faces as they defect to pursue life, liberty and baseball fortune in America and glimpses the often unsavory dealings teams undertake in their quest to get at baseball’s largest untapped mine of talent. 

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Chris Jaffe, a writer at The Hardball Times, recently released a book detailing baseball managers from 1876 through 2008. For more information on the book and to purchase it, visit the publisher's website.

Chris was kind enough to send me all the Boston-related excerpts from the book. I didn't really know what to expect before reading the writeups. I didn't know actually how much information Chris would be able to get for most of the older managers. But to my surprise, every writeup was quite detailed. If the writeups were any indication of the rest of the book, it seems to be quite extensive.

One thing I wasn't fully aware of was Jimy Williams' success in Boston. Williams handled the pitching staff like no other manager has in big league history. Williams' tendencies to yank pitchers early kept his starters healthy, meaning down the line they were that much better. Williams didn't try to stretch his starters; he knew what they were capable of and didn't push them. As a result, his Red Sox teams in the second half always seemed to do better in the first half.

You see the Williams' philosophy of managing pitching staffs a little more today, but no one has quite replicated what he was able to do. Should we see more of it? Perhaps. Then again, Williams never won a World Series for the Red Sox either.

A lot of other blogs do this, so I'll throw it out, too: is anyone interested in participating in an Over The Monster book club?

Essentially, we'd all agree on a Red Sox/baseball book and read it. That's the premise. There's a lot of different routes we can go: we can just say, 'hey, finish it in a month' and then I'll make a post and we can talk about it. Or we can do it in shifts, so read the first three chapters and then have a post. There's a lot of ways we can do it. We can even have people participating to write posts that are on the front page that get other discussion started, so it's not just left with me.

For example, a nice comment might be: "The symbolism of Dustin Pedroia's bat is his hatred for being so short." Obviously, that's a winner.

The OTMBC is just a good way to kill the offseason. We might as well educate ourselves while we wait for spring training, right?

There is a poll attached. Please answer it, homies.

via images.barnesandnoble.com

It is usually hard for me to pick up a book and read it right through in just a couple of sittings. Usually I pick the book up and read 10 pages at a time. That tends to end with A) me never finishing the book or B) finishing the book 2.5 years later. With "Deep Drive" by Mike Lowell with Rob Bradford, I finished it in about four sittings.

I was unsure what I would get out of this book before I started reading it. I've read books "by" athletes "with" journalists before, and they tend not to be anything special. They tend to be the typical, "I did this, this and this. Yay for me," type of story. I was pleasantly surprised very quickly in to this book.

As you can imagine, a good chunk of this book is about Lowell's battle with cancer. The book does a fantastic job to help the reader understand how Lowell was feeling during all those moments. There were times when I felt like I was with Lowell when he was given the bad news. Plus there were moments when he had cancer scares and his wife, Bertica, had some personal issues.

On the lighter sides of things, there was a lot on his ability as a baseball player. The man could barely hit the ball for extra bases in high school, let alone a home run. Also to note, do you know who his double play partner was in high school? None other than Alex Rodriguez. Lowell, the second baseman, and Rodriguez, the shortstop, weren't fully developed at that point -- Rodriguez hit eighth in the lineup, Lowell ninth. Think that coach still has his job?

When it came down to the nitty gritty of hitting and defense, that's when I was really intrigued. Of course, there's no one better to learn the art of playing defense at the hot corner than Mike Lowell. He had a section of one chapter just talking about his old glove and new glove. Sounds boring to the casual fan, but I was on the edge of my seat.

On regards of hitting, there was an interesting part about when he was in a slump during spring training with the Sox. At one point he basically told former Sox hitting coach Ron "Papa" Jackson that he wasn't going to keep messing with his stance and stuff because it just wasn't working. Jackson kept making all these suggestions, but Lowell couldn't keep up with them because it just stunted his growth. That lead to Lowell explain when a hitter just knows he's hitting the ball well, despite it being a hit or a line drive or anything else.

There were some really hilarious parts of the book. One part that stands out in my mind was when Dustin Pedroia challenged Lowell to a game of ping pong. And since Lowell can handle himself at the table, he accepted. The result was 28 wins in a row for Lowell. Pedroia finally won a game after Lowell gave him a huge lead to start the game. Pedroia went yelling and screaming in the clubhouse, prompting Terry Francona to say something along the lines of: "What, did they cut the legs off the table so you could see over it?"

Lowell had a lot of high praise for a lot of people. One person in particular was Josh Beckett, who wrote the foreward to the book. Ever since their days in Florida they have been close and the trade even made their bond stronger. Out of anyone, Lowell probably gave more credit to Beckett than anyone else in this book. A lot of it was based off of his attitude and how much of a badass performer he is.

I was worried Lowell wasn't going to talk about the 2007 off-season, obviously something that should have been noted. But I was pleasantly surprised to read the epilogue and find all that information there. Lowell continued to say that he loved Boston and he loved the fans and didn't want to leave, but he was also tempted by other suitors. But what it came down to was that he wanted to stay in Boston because he loved it so much.

What I will take most out of this book is just how great of a guy Lowell is and how much he really does care about the fans. He is a down to earth family man and that's what I appreciate most about these athletes. It's easy to be a jerk and do whatever you want, but guys like Lowell are the opposite. He's the heart of the sport of baseball. He and guys like him are the reason the sport ticks. It's a true pleasure to be a fan of his.

I definitely recommend this book to all Sox fans that cherished watching Lowell succeed through the 2007 seasons. In the end, I give this book 4 out of 5 Bill Muellers (as much as I like Lowell, I still love Bill Mueller).