I don’t like to start my reviews too negative, but that’s really hard this time around, The Best Team Money Can Buy is that bad of an offering. When I turned the final page I was left with the overriding thought that I didn’t have a single positive morsel to offer about Molly Knight’s tome about the 2010s Los Angeles Dodgers. The more I thought about Knight’s book the more I realized it wasn’t just that I had nothing positive to say, but rather that I had a deep urge to ward anyone off from ever reading the absolute dreck that is The Best Team Money Can Buy.
Early on in the book, there’s a passage where Knight dismissively mentions that perennial Dodgers backup catcher A.J. Ellis was right to miss the birth of his daughter. That somehow his prioritizing his job over the birth of his child was the right thing for him to do. She never offers any actual reasoning and never goes down the rabbit hole of explaining why a father would be right to miss his daughter’s birth. That would require Knight to be aware of what she is writing and to want to extrapolate her thoughts and her worldview. Unfortunately for Knight, but really for anyone reading this book, she isn’t capable of such reflection or theorizing and the end result is neutered thoughts like the Ellis one that dot the landscape of The Best Team Money Can Buy.
At one point Knight attempts to wade into political waters when discussing Yasiel Puig and it’s clear almost immediately that she is out of her depth. She makes up some complete hogwash about Cuban reporters being spies for Cuba’s Communist government. There’s zero evidence to support her claim, but she trots it out there because as Knight repeatedly shows, she simply needs to write something down for it to be true. I happen to deal with a lot of Cuban baseball reporters, some of whom wholeheartedly support Cuba’s government, others who have no real opinion, and others who are in active resistance against said government. Knight can’t be bothered to present such complexity, and as her portrayal of Puig shows, she’s simply not capable of presenting depth or complexity in concept or in human form.
A great example of why it’s hard to tackle Knight seriously is that she spends large chunks of The Best Team Money Can Buy talking about how the owners of the Dodgers, the Guggenheim Group, have limitless funds. Then, later in the book with no narrative explanations whatsoever starts writing about how the group couldn’t keep playing players big money because they were risking losing too much skin. Not only is that never how the Guggenheim Group has operated, but it’s part and parcel of the weak narrative structure that Knight employs throughout the book. She wants to simply recount what happens because people will think a paint-by-numbers accounting of a season is interesting as long as she is the one doing the accounting. At the same time, she has no time for facts or evidence for most of the points she asserts. That leaves the narrative of The Best Team Money Can Buy as not inert, but rather as without any sort of form. It’s whatever Knight needs it to be at a given moment, only it’s never any good or worth reading.
To say that I loathed every single page of The Best Team Money Can Buy would be a massive understatement. Knight’s effort is vacuous and bereft of anything remotely interesting. The gravest sin of Knight’s book is that it is incredibly boring. She is essentially offering game breakdowns, but stretched out and padded in such a way that nothing is added to them. Listen, I can accept a good game recap or even a good season recap. What I can’t accept is boring drivel where the author has absolutely nothing to reveal about the subject. That’s The Best Team Money Can Buy in a nutshell, too much time spent with a boring writer who has nothing of interest to say about the 2010s Dodgers, the players, coaches, etc. It’s been a long time since I advised folks to avoid a book completely but with so many baseball books available to read, not even Dodgers fans should waste their time with this monotonous imposter of a novel.
Lead image courtesy of Unknown – Simon & Schuster
