The Books Briefing: The Dark Side of Athletic Perfection

Baseball, like many sports, sometimes seems as though it’s leaving the realm of human athleticism and instead marching toward an almost technical optimization. Steroids (illicitly taken) have made some players stronger than ever. Sabermetrics, which involves the detailed statistical analysis of baseball data, has turned the artistry of staffing a team into mere mathematics, a phenomenon that the author Michael Lewis writes about in . Even players’ skills are , the writers Ben Lindbergh and Travis Sawchik contend in .