The Game: Inside the Secret World of Major League Baseball's Power Brokers

I usually avoid books about sports but this book reads like a brilliant, well structured novel about the movers and shakers in baseball with names you recognize and personalities you love, or hate. They have no secrets left and no places to hide from Jon who has been behind the sports scene and in the locker rooms most of his writing career. Read it because, it is well written by a superior author with unrelenting investigative skills and a wicked sense of humor, even if it is about about baseball!!

Admittedly this is a great historical read of baseball during the time period it covers. However, the author just cannot help interjecting his political rhetoric into what could have been one of, if not the best, book ever written on baseball. The read becomes after a while a sequence of cant put the book down pages, which is then halted by a political lecture rant that throws the reader entirely out of sequence. Perhaps the author should concentrate his writings solely on his baseball knowledge, which he is without peer, or concentrate his writing on political hit pieces, of which he is the least of peers.

Wow...all of the five star reviewers can't be the author's shills....I guess.....but I can't remember buying a book and only making it 100 pages before cutting my (time) losses short. Not only is it the most boring non-fiction book I recall attempting, but the author's "Ooooooo I hate Republicans!' (Bush is featured prominently) pro union bias calls into question the objectivity you'd expect from an examination of this topic. Perhaps some objectivity emerges in the next 500 pages, but I'll never know. The El Dorado County Library will have a book donation.

If you're a baseball fan, and haven't delved into this book yet, you need to do so ASAP, because this one is going to go down with classics like Ball Four and The Bronx Zoo as one of the best books ever written about baseball.

For starters, you have the unusually intriguing story of how three distinctly different adversaries with completely different agendas--Bud Selig, a persuasive businessman/ambassador with an incredible sixth sense of when to swing for the fences and when to play short ball, and George Steinbrenner, who really is as big a son of a bitch in real life as he is portrayed as being in the media, and the MLB Players Association, a union so powerful it probably could have gotten Bernard Madoff off with a few hours of community service--learned to tolerate each other, to not only save baseball, but created a thriving money-making machine.

So the narrative itself is outstanding, but there are two elements that really set this book apart.

First, the unreal access the author was able to get. In every contract negotiation, marketing ploy, quality-control strategy and political crisis involving MLB the past twenty years, the reader not only feels like he has a front-row seat to the festivities, he also feels like he is sitting right next to an expert commentator, who is explaining all about the combatants, the chess maneuvers they're using, and the effectiveness of their moves. For example, when I read about Selig roaming the country, explaining to bewildered politicians like Minnesota's Jessie Ventura that they are going to have to figure out how to build new stadiums using public funds, or risk losing MLB in their communities, I could only envision Don Vito Corleone shaking down hapless rivals, making them offers they can't refuse.

Secondly, the book is just chuck full of great inside information not previously reported in the media. For example, did you know the federal government was well aware Mark McGuire and Jose Canseco were heavy steroid users for at least 12 years before Jose's tell-all book came out? That's right! The FBI conducted a comprehensive investigation into steroid trafficking in Oakland in the early 90s, which culminated with the indictments of 70 people. But because the FBI was targeting "sellers" and not "buyers" the agency let Jose and Mark off the hook. But it was well aware of their involvement. (Which is why, years later, when the scandal broke, and folks like Lenny Dykstra and Sammy Sosa were trying to attribute their massive muscle gains to things like protein shakes and creatine, there must have been a cadre of federal agents at the FBI Headquarters in D.C. laughing themselves silly!) This kind of great inside information is all over the book.

So when you combine all the aforementioned elements, it combines to form a one-two-three punch that make The Game as good a book as I've ever read.

Great insight into power, money and politics of our national pastime.
You will definitely want to pay attention to the man behind the curtain
as Jon reveals the 'inside baseball' of the power broker board rooms.
Get your cracker jacks, a hot dog and a beer and just enjoy. I did.
Thank you, Jon. Triple off the wall -well done !

My first memories of going to a baseball game is about the time of the strike. I went to Candlestick park a few weeks before the season was shut down, and I observed from afar ten years later as the MLB was marred with a steroids controversy. This was an excellent, well researched account behind the scenes of the powers that be in the game. It's impressive to think of all the research Mr. Pessah put in to report on all the details of conversations, testimonies, panel investigations and weave it in a way that makes the reading compelling and tough to put down. This book is not just for baseball fans, but anyone interested in big business and how it uses its mighty hands of influence and money to tip the balance to make them even more money. Baseball is a reflection on our modern society where inequality affects the game, except as Mr. Pessah shows that within the confines of the MLB there is space for the union to put pressure on the owners, and eventually the owners decided that a shared revenue plan is good for the greater game. During a time of enormous income disparity-- an inside-look into the most powerful in baseball-- this book give us a better picture on how our society functioned over the past twenty years.

On the positive side, there was a lot of behind the scenes detail about the labor negotiations, the steroid fiasco, and the internal politics which was very well done. On the negative side, this was a very Yankees centric book. The author is clearly a Yankee fan. The rest of MLB serve as foils for the travails and triumps of the Yankees. A more overarching approach would have served the author and readers better.

Absolutely terrific! A must-read for all baseball fans!

Glen Waggoner

The access and information in this book is incredible, but the execution is somewhat lacking. The author certainly has a disdain for Bud Selig, which is at least understandable, and an obsession with George Steinbrenner. The book reads as much as a biography of Steinbrenner as it does as an examination of the inner machinations of baseball from 1992 - 2010. This book basically focuses on the Brewers and the Yankees while taking shots at George Bush and Jerry Reinsdorf. Steinbrenner is lauded as a genius, Selig as an evil buffoon, Don Fehr and the players union as victims, and the rest of baseball as irrelevant. A little bit more objectivity and inclusiveness would have drastically improved this book.

A must read. Jon Pessah is a brilliant style of writing with interesting perspectives. Well done Jon... well done!