Swing Kings

"The best baseball book I’ve read in years." — Sam Walker • "An exhilarating story of innovation."  — Ben Reiter • "Swing Kings feels like a spiritual successor to Moneyball." — Baseball Prospectus

From the Wall Street Journal’s national baseball

writer, the captivating story of the home run boom, following a group of

players who rose from obscurity to stardom and the rogue swing coaches who

helped them usher the game into a new age.

We are in a historic era for the home run. The

2019 season saw the most homers ever, obliterating a record set just two years

before. It is a shift that has transformed the way the game is played,

contributing to more strikeouts, longer games, and what feels like the logical

conclusion of the analytics era. In Swing

Kings, Wall Street Journal national baseball writer Jared

Diamond reveals that the secret behind this unprecedented shift isn’t steroids

or the stitching of the baseballs, it’s the most elemental explanation of all:

the swing. In this lively narrative romp, he tracks a group of baseball’s

biggest stars—including Aaron Judge, J.D. Martinez, and Justin Turner—who

remade their swings under the tutelage of a band of renegade coaches, and

remade the game in the process. 

These

coaches, many of them baseball washouts who have reinvented themselves as

swing gurus, for years were one of the game’s best-kept secrets. Among

their ranks are a swimming pool contractor, the owner of a billiards hall, and

an ex-hippie whose swing insights draw from surfing and the technique of

Japanese samurai. Now, as Diamond artfully charts, this motley cast has moved

from the baseball margins to its center of power. They are changing the way

hitting is taught to players of all ages, and major league clubs are scrambling

for their services, hiring them in record numbers as coaches and consultants. And

Diamond himself, whose baseball career ended in high school, enlists the

tutelage of each swing coach he profiles, with an aim toward starring in the

annual Boston-New York media game at Yankee Stadium.

Swing Kings is

both a rollicking history of baseball’s recent past and a deeply reported,

character-driven account of a battle between opponents as old as time: old and

new, change and stasis, the establishment and those who break from it. Jared

Diamond has written a masterful chronicle of America’s pastime at the

crossroads.