Swing Kings: The Inside Story of Baseball's Home Run Revolution – How Maverick Coaches and Analytics Transformed Hitting with Launch Angle

"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.

JARED DIAMOND is a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. Among his many awards are the US National Medal of Science, the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, the Wolf Prize for Agriculture, a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, the Rockefeller University's Lewis Thomas Prize honoring the Scientist as Poet, and election to the US National Academy of Sciences. He has published over 200 articles in Discover, Natural History, Nature, and Geo magazines, plus 400 articles in technical scientific journals. Diamond is the author of the international bestselling books Guns, Germs, and Steel (which has sold over seven million copies), Collapse, The Third Chimpanzee, The World Until Yesterday, and Upheaval. The many prizes that these books have won include the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-fiction, Britain's Science Book Prize (twice), Japan's Cosmos Prize, the California Book Award (twice), the Phi Beta Kappa Science Book Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Germany's Science Book of the Year, Japan's Asahi Shimbun Award for best book of the past decade, France's Lire Prize for best science book published in France, and book prizes of Italy, Sweden, and Switzerland.