Ever since the days of Babe Ruth, the home run has been a cornerstone of baseball, both in terms of generating offense and also drawing fans to the game. In recent years, the proliferation of home runs in the game has been responsible for how the game is played and viewed. While there have been many reasons given why this has occurred – a livelier baseball, performance-enhancing drugs, watered down pitching – this book by Jared Diamond looks at a more basic reason, the way batters swing at pitches.

Several of today’s biggest stars in baseball are discussed in the book such as J.D. Martinez, Justin Turner and Aaron Judge. However, they are not the stars in this work. Instead, the book centers on the coaching these and other players received from coaches who were not employed by any baseball team and had little to no success in the sport. But these men – Richard Schenck, Craig Wallenbock and Bobby Tewksbary to name a few – had radical ideas on how to swing the bat that were far different than what many coaches had been teaching hitters for years. Their stories alone, without the addition of the baseball players, would make a great book. Reading about the “Teacherman” as Schenck is known as online and is hated in the Internet work, or the story behind Tewksbary being asked to pitch to Josh Donaldson at the 2015 Home Run Derby (and the subsequent end of their professional relationship shortly thereafter) was just as good as learning about their teaching methods.

When the star players mentioned before, and other players such as Marlon Byrd approached these hitting gurus to get help with their hitting, the new ideas were first met with skepticism. But eventually with enthusiasm as they all learned a new basic thought – instead of swinging down on the ball and hitting more ground balls, one should swing the bat up on the ball and put the ball in the air. This concept sounds simple, but did not catch on right away. As Diamond notes, it is popular now as is the use of launch angle to measure a batter’s effectiveness.

While launch angle is fairly new, Diamond doesn’t dismiss some traditional methods of measuring a hitter’s success. When talking about the success of players such as Martinez, Turner and Judge, he cites their batting averages as well as OPS (on-base percentage + slugging percentage), home runs and launch angle. This was a nice mix of both traditional and new age statistics, which this reviewer believes is the best way to determine a player’s effectiveness.

One surprising aspect over the course of the book was how Diamond was describing the traditional teaching of hitting coaches at all levels of professional baseball. Of course, the swing coaches employed by the players all thought those methods were outdated and actually hurting the hitters. Throughout the book, Diamond notes how they and many hitters believed that these coaches were simply passing on what they were taught and those lessons were not as effective any longer. This read much like how traditional scouts were portrayed in the book and movie “Moneyball” as being out of touch with the way the game is played today.

One would not expect a book talking mostly about outsiders influencing the game and helping to create some of the biggest stars to be such an easy and entertaining read, but “Swing Kings” fits that description perfectly. Fans of today’s game, especially passionate ones, will want to read this book on an important aspect of why the home run is more prevalent than ever.

I wish to thank Harper Collins for providing a copy of the book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.