There’s a nuanced story about arm injuries in baseball. One that is full of depth and hard questions. The sort of story that a journalist can make a career out of as they plow forward and seek to uncover the truth and provide answers. Perhaps one day such a story will find its way into the baseball stratosphere, but The Arm is decidedly not that book. Jeff Passan’s effort falls well short of hard-hitting journalism; heck, it barely covers the ground needed to be called a fluff piece.
At the heart of The Arm is Passan’s unyielding desire for one thing and one thing alone, access. The story doesn’t matter to Passan anywhere near as much as gaining the access needed to talk to someone who has any sort of stature or place within the realm of the story he’s covering. In the case of The Arm, this is showcased to near perfection in the section that deals with Trevor Bauer and Kyle Boddy. Everything presented about them is surface. We all know the crevices that are beneath that surface. Passan knows that in order to keep the access he has gained to those two figures, he needs to smooth over those crevices. To do otherwise would be to risk the precious access he has acquired. Thus, he doesn’t dig a speck beneath the surface; he uses empty words to relay what Boddy and Bauer tell him as absolute fact. He does his best to foist them up on high, way above the darkness that everyone would soon discover encapsulated them. Passan isn’t interested in the darkness; he’s not interested in much of what Boddy or Bauer has to say at all. His lone interest is in allowing the reader to see the access he has been granted and to take all the necessary steps to ensure he does not lose said access.
The Arm is, unfortunately, a book that has little to nothing to say. Yes, arm injuries are happening. No one is expecting definitive answers, but they’re expecting more than a surface-level treatise on the subject. Passan could have told the entirety of The Arm in one of his standard articles, but here he has stretched it out in length. There’s not enough content for the length of the book, so Passan pads out his word count with flowery prose that tells the reader nothing and reveals no hard truths. The Arm isn’t just a weak effort as far as books go; it’s an unneeded effort on a topic that is in need of actual attention from someone far more skilled than Passan.
I wanted to like The Arm. Despite my issues with Passan’s reporting for various news outlets, I hoped that he would be able to present something interesting out of such a ripe topic. Sadly, Passan favored access and vanity over writing and reporting. The effort ends up a shallow mess and a waste of time. Hopefully, someday people will forget about The Arm and arm injuries in baseball will get more than surface-level treatment delivered at the altar of access.
Lead photo courtesy of Unknown – HarperCollins Publishers
