Thank you, Globe Pequot / Prometheus Books, for providing this book for review consideration via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

Mr. Book just finished Shocktober: The Biggest Upsets in World Series History, by Jonathan Weeks.

This book will be released on January 7, 2025.

This book about World Series upsets wasn’t a bad one, but could have much better. The author decided to write about 22 upsets. The book wasn’t long enough to provide good coverage of 22 of them and he was almost always shortchanging the game recaps in order to provide coverage of the teams and their seasons. The problem with the team recaps was his statistical usage was stuck in the batting average, triple crown stats, wins is what matters mentality.

The author also focused on too many series, but didn’t even get all of the upsets. It is not difficult to find ones that he missed. Just off the top of my head, I can add 1931, 1945, 1953, 1963, 1966, 1995 and 1996 to a list of notable omissions from the book.

This book could easily have gotten a C, but based on the strong team recaps (albeit with poor statistics), I’ll give it a B instead. Goodreads and NetGalley require grades on a 1-5 star system. In my personal conversion system, a B equates to 3 stars. (A or A+: 5 stars, B+: 4 stars, B: 3 stars, C: 2 stars, D or F: 1 star).

This is the fourth book by this author that Mr. Book has read. He gave Lore Of The Bambino, The Legend Of The Mick and The Umpire Was Blind! each B’s, while he gave Baseball’s Dynasties And The Players Who Built Them a D.

This review has been posted at NetGalley, Goodreads and my blog, Mr. Book’s Book Reviews

Mr. Book finished reading this on October 6, 2024.