Fantasyland

Fantasyland by Sam Walker. Penguin.

This book sucks; don’t read it.

If you’re in a rush, those six words should be enough.

Otherwise…

So this is a book about a sportswriter who manages to talk his way into an expert fantasy baseball competition, Tout Wars. He uses his sportswriter-insider access to talk to actual ball players and baseball execs, and learns nothing. He hires two guys, an idiot and a smart guy, and proceeds to ignore the smart guy and actually pay attention to the idiot. He doesn’t win.

A hint for authors and editors: if you want to look sophisticated by including accents in foreign names, do so consistently. And if you want to transcribe quotes by people with bad English, do so consistently, and not using some half assed ad-hoc system. It’d be worth it.

Told by a flake, full of useless words and phony emotions, signifying nothing.

Update: What I really meant to write was that when I saw this book, I was hoping it would be Moneyball II, which it definitely was not. Otherwise I doubt I’d have even picked it up.