Jason Schwanz dot com

The Tag and The Meme

Filed under Baseball, General

I done got tagged to do a book meme. This is a meme that I can get on board with.

The rules of the meme are:

1. Pick up the nearest book of 123 pages or more. No cheating!
2. Find page 123
3. Find the first 5 sentences
4. Post the next 3 sentences
5. Tag 5 people

As for the nearest book, my bookshelf at work is directly behind me, so all of the books were equidistant from me. Therefore, I chose a non-technical book, Management by Baseball: The Official Rules for Winning Management in Any Field. It’s an entertaining read, with some enjoyable baseball stories used to describe his management philosophy. On with the reading.

This excerpt is talking about Mickey Mantle’s 565-foot home run in April of 1953.

First, there was the stadium-dimension factor, compounded by estimating the distance from the fence to the adjacent street, compounded by (the Yankee publicist) [Red] Patterson’s use of pacing as a measuring technique, compounded be the 10-year-old’s memory of where the ball was (no where it landed, but where it stopped rolling). And while sometimes a lot of little inaccuracies can cancel one another out, remember it was a publicist doing the measuring — a person who had every incentive to maximize the number to inflate the importance of the story. Bad tools, weak quality control, biased agent: a fatal combo in baseball or in your organization.

On with the tagging.

• Karla
• Stephanie
• Jim
• Aj
• Bren