cover image My Team: Choosing My Dream Team from My Forty Years in Baseball

My Team: Choosing My Dream Team from My Forty Years in Baseball

Larry Dierker, . . Simon & Schuster, $25 (280pp) ISBN 978-0-7432-7513-2

In a move sure to ignite passionate debate among the faithful, baseball vet Dierker—he pitched for and managed the Astros for years and is currently a columnist and broadcast commentator—has taken his argument for the best players of all time and put it into print. With his own personal Hall of Fame, Dierker goes through his fantasy team position by position and comes up with the "[t]wenty-five guys who would be practically unbeatable." This is not for novices, for Dierker is a hardcore connoisseur of statistics and has the charts and analyses to prove it. He tries his best to keep the book from being the usual dry recitation of numbers and sprinkles in anecdotes from his history in the game to add some needed perspective. What's most rewarding is how often Dierker departs from the numbers, dismissing, for instance, the great-on-paper Gary Sheffield because he played for too many teams: "My guess is that he has been a less than inspiring teammate." As for controversy: Dierker chooses Bonds for left field, but doesn't take McGwire for first base since the former had a better record than McGwire did outside of the years he was rumored to take enhancements. (July)