These days, when a team wins baseball’s Fall Classic, it’s a given that there will be a book or two about the accomplishment. In some cases, the local newspaper will pore over its archives and photos to produce a “quickie” publication, hoping to seize the moment when giddy fans will lay out their bucks for a nice keepsake.

Then there are books like BUZZ SAW that are more thoughtful and analytic.

More than a “buzz saw,” this is a story of a jigsaw, painstakingly putting puzzle pieces together, experimenting here, tinkering there, until the Washington Nationals saw themselves looking back at the rest of the National League after winning a wild card berth and advancing through the playoff rounds in thrilling fashion to make it to the World Series.

"Dougherty makes very good use of the expanded space of a book by filling in the details that escape daily reporting. That makes BUZZ SAW a worthwhile read in a stadium of baseball reading."

There are a couple of reasons for that. One is the success of Michael Lewis’ classic MONEYBALL, published in 2003. Here was a new and controversial way of thinking brought forth by Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A’s, which turned traditional baseball on its head. No longer could a ball club go by the “gut feelings” of the scouting staff in assembling their rosters. Now statistics were the rage in calculating and projecting the potential value of the players.

This became a business model not only for teams to follow, but for authors as well. MONEYBALL begat THE EXTRA 2%: How Wall Street Strategies Took a Major League Baseball Team from Worst to First, by Jonah Keri (2011), which begat BIG DATA BASEBALL: Math, Miracles, and the End of a 20-Year Losing Streak, by Travis Sawchik (2015), which begat THE ONLY RULE IS IT HAS TO WORK: Our Wild Experiment Building a New Kind of Baseball Team, by Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller (2016), et al.

Jesse Dougherty, a beat writer for the Washington Post, is the latest to follow this path as he examines how the Nationals put together their unlikely story. Mired with a poor record early in the 2019 season due mostly to a leaky bullpen, manager Dave Martinez and GM Mike Rizzo scraped together a baseball band of brothers who slowly but surely fought back from the depths of despair to beat the favored Houston Astros in unprecedented fashion: neither team won any of the games played on its home field.

However, despite the proliferation of the MONEYBALL model, Martinez and Rizzo have been around long enough to know that there are intangibles. Ace pitcher Max Scherzer calls August the “month of hate” because by the time the dog days of summer roll around, you’ve been around your teammates perhaps a bit too long. Nerves fray, and things that were minor annoyances in April have the potential to boil over and ruin a team. You need a few colorful characters who can keep the squad loose during tense times.

A beat writer is confined by the “real estate” allotted to him or her by the geography of a physical newspaper (a little less so on a website). They can only give the reader so much --- the nuts and bolts of what happened during a game, maybe a feature on a player or a story about some decision by the front office.

A book like this --- one that follows a (usually successful) team’s exploits over the course of a year --- doesn’t need much in the way of recapitulation; fans know what happens. It’s the way the story is told that makes the time spent reading worth it or not. In this case, Dougherty makes very good use of the expanded space of a book by filling in the details that escape daily reporting. That makes BUZZ SAW a worthwhile read in a stadium of baseball reading.