Barra, Allen

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BARRA, Allen

PERSONAL: Born in Birmingham, AL. Education: Attended University of Alabama at Birmingham.

ADDRESSES: Home—South Orange, NJ. Offıce—Wall Street Journal, 200 Liberty St., New York, NY 10281.

CAREER: Sports writer, columnist, and commentator. Frequently appears on Major League Baseball Radio.

WRITINGS:

(With George Ignatin) Football by the Numbers, 1986, Prentice Hall Press (New York, NY), 1986.

(With George Ignatin) Football by the Numbers, 1987, Prentice Hall Press (New York, NY), 1987.

(With Joe Glickman and Jesus Diaz) That's Not the Way It Was: (Almost) Everything They Told You about Sports Is Wrong, Hyperion (New York, NY), 1995.

Inventing Wyatt Earp: His Life and Many Legends, Carroll & Graf (New York, NY), 1999.

Clearing the Bases: The Greatest Baseball Debates of the Last Century, with a foreword by Bob Costas, T. Dunne Books (New York, NY), 2002.

Brushbacks and Knockdowns: The Greatest Baseball Debates of Two Centuries, T. Dunne Books (New York, NY), 2004.

Big Play: Barra on Football, Brassey's (Washington, DC), 2005.

Sports columnist for Wall Street Journal; contributor to periodicals and Web sites, including New York Times, Village Voice, Slate, and Salon.com.

SIDELIGHTS: "There are few who write [about sports] so entertainingly or instructively as [Allen] Barra," Paul Kaplan declared in Library Journal. Barra is probably best known for his sports columns for various newspapers and Web sites, including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Salon.com, and his columns have been gathered into several book-length collections. Barra's writings are notable for the rigorous yet unorthodox ways in which he looks at athletics; as a Publishers Weekly critic wrote in a review of Clearing the Bases: The Greatest Baseball Debates of the Last Century, "It is a rare sportswriter who can cite [former Cardinals and Dodgers general manager] Branch Rickey and Irish writer/revolutionary Sean O'Faolain in the same work, but Barra does it with ease."

Barra's favorite subject is baseball, particularly its great debates. Was Mickey Mantle better than Willie Mays? (No.) Were Jackie Robinson and Babe Ruth as good as their current legendary status would suggest (Yes and no, respectively.) Who was the best baseball player of the twentieth century? (Mike Schmidt.) These questions and others are covered in what may be Barra's best-known book, Clearing the Bases, and a follow-up volume, Brushbacks and Knockdowns: The Greatest Baseball Debates of Two Centuries. Although Barra's writings cover the entire history of baseball, his "thesis—inasmuch as he can have one in a collection of articles such as this," Nine contributor Jan Finkel wrote of Clearing the Bases, "is that overall the best baseball ever played is being played today."

Barra makes his controversial argument, as well as other observations, through the intensive use of statistics. He consistently prefers provable facts to the anecdotal and impressionistic, and, as Jonathan Mahler explained in a New York Times Book Review critique of Clearing the Bases, "can work himself into a lather whenever a commentator declares that you just can't trust the numbers where so-and-so is concerned." However, Barra's "sheer enthusiasm for the sport ensures that he never lapses into the pedantic," as a Publishers Weekly contributor wrote in a review of Brushbacks and Knockdowns.

Barra is also the author of Inventing Wyatt Earp: His Life and Many Legends, a book that examines the process by which the frontier lawman's life was transformed into an enduring American myth. Many books have been written about Earp and his exploits, but critics praised Barra's addition to the genre. This "well-researched, provocative study of the man and his legend offers us a welcome opportunity to consider what our several versions of Wyatt Earp tell us about ourselves," explained New York Times Book Review contributor Richard E. Nicholls, the critic adding that the work is "engaging, detailed and refreshingly pugnacious." Wild West reviewer Louis Hart praised Barra's "enthusiastic" tone in the book, while Charles V. Cowling noted in Library Journal that Inventing Wyatt Earp is not only "intriguing" but also "a well-written and carefully documented book."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Alberta Report, February 8, 1999, review of Inventing Wyatt Earp: His Life and Many Legends, p. 36.

BC Report, February 22, 1999, review of Inventing Wyatt Earp, p. 58.

Booklist, December 1, 1998, Jay Freeman, review of Inventing Wyatt Earp, p. 647; March 1, 2002, Wes Lukowsky, review of Clearing the Bases: The Greatest Baseball Debates of the Last Century, p. 1077.

Journal of American Culture, June, 2003, Hubert I. Cohen, review of Inventing Wyatt Earp, p. 204.

Kirkus Reviews, February 15, 2002, review of Clearing the Bases, p. 231.

Library Journal, September 1, 1986, William H. Hoffman, review of Football by the Numbers, 1986, p. 210; November 15, 1998, Charles V. Cowling, review of Inventing Wyatt Earp, p. 74; February 1, 2002, Paul Kaplan and Robert C. Cottrell, review of Clearing the Bases, p. 103; May 1, 2004, Paul Kaplan, review of Brushbacks and Knockdowns, p. 118.

New York Times Book Review, July 30, 1995, George Robinson, review of That's Not the Way It Was: (Almost) Everything They Told You about Sports Is Wrong, p. 14; April 18, 1999, Richard E. Nicholls, review of Inventing Wyatt Earp, p. 25; January 23, 2000, review of Inventing Wyatt Earp, p. 32; May 5, 2002, Jonathan Mahler, review of Clearing the Bases, p. 29.

Nine, spring, 2004, Jan Finkel, review of Clearing the Bases, p. 155.

Publishers Weekly, November 30, 1998, review of Inventing Wyatt Earp, p. 60; March 11, 2002, review of Clearing the Bases, p. 61; March 29, 2004, review of Brushbacks and Knockdowns, p. 50.

Roundup, December, 1999, review of Inventing Wyatt Earp, p. 25.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), May 9, 2004, Mark Luce, review of Brushbacks and Knockdowns: The Greatest Baseball Debates of Two Centuries, p. 4.

Wall Street Journal, March 19, 1999, Elizabeth Bukowski, review of Inventing Wyatt Earp, p. W13.

Western Report, February 8, 1999, review of Inventing Wyatt Earp, p. 36.

Wild West, June, 1999, Louis Hart, review of Inventing Wyatt Earp, p. 74.