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Football science, hoops humor, baseball

San Francisco Giants pitcher Juan Marichal (left) swings a bat at Los Angeles Dodgers catcher John Roseboro (center) as Dodgers pitcher Sandy Koufax (right) jumps in to stop the fight during a game at Candlestick Park in San Francisco on Aug. 22, 1965.Charles Doherty/San Francisco Examiner/AP FILE PHOTO

Let’s get the discouraging stuff out of the way first.

For the chapter titled “Why Woodpeckers Don’t Get Concussions,” the authors of “Newton’s Football’’ spoke with Bill Simpson. For years, Simpson has been building the helmets that protect race car drivers from concussions.

Journalist Allen St. John and Yale engineering professor Ainissa Ramirez learned that Simpson had offered his expertise to the NFL, having taken seriously the league’s contention that it might be time to reinvent the football helmet.

“How’d that go?” the authors asked. “It’s a cesspool of politics, this whole thing,” Simpson told them. “I’m trying to do the best I can do, but I’m being ignored.”

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Lots of the rest of “Newton’s Football,’’ St. John and Ramirez’s “Freakonomics’’-like take on the connections between science and football, is fascinating. Consider, for instance, when the authors explore the thin line between loud delight and silent horror.

The simplified version of that inquiry goes like this: Football fans are thrilled by the big hit — as long as the guy who gets hit returns to his feet quickly. How many seconds does a player have to remain motionless on the field before the roaring dies and is replaced by hushed fear?

Ten seconds? 30 seconds?

At some point the situation on the field descends into what that authors call the “Uncanny Valley,” and nobody knows quite what to do because in order to enjoy football “fans need to believe that [players are not) getting hurt.”

“Newton’s Football’’ is divided into thematic sections examining aspects of football’s past, the game itself, the players, and the future. It is full of unexpected observations and analysis, some of it thoroughly scientific, that will educate fans of the game, whether they like it or not.

Before settling in Brooklyn last year, the Nets had played in lots of places all over Long Island and in New Jersey.

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Mostly they played badly.

According to former team president Jon Spoelstra, one of the lowest of the team’s low points came during his tenure. “[W]e had six guys in jail,” he said. “Not together, because that would have meant teamwork.”

Veteran basketball writer Jake Appleman’s “Brooklyn Bounce’’ traces the talented but hapless team, through its inaugural 2013 season in a new home that offered new hope to fans, or at least to those fans who hadn’t protested the construction of the new home.

The subtitle notwithstanding, Appleman’s book includes lots of material about days so bad that they make this season’s Nets look like contenders. He couldn’t resist mentioning the evening during the team’s final season in New Jersey that featured pop culture royalty of a sort.

“There was the night when Nicole Polizzi, Snooki of ‘Jersey Shore’’ fame, met Kim Kardashian courtside,” he writes. “It was a moment that seemed to signal the end of times.”

Appleman’s wit, enthusiasm for his subject, and familiarity with the players lifts “Brooklyn Bounce’’ above most season chronicles, and the Snooki-Kardashian riff is only one of the places where he departs from basketball for his references, dipping into the movies and music with similes that illuminate who the Nets are and what they and their Russian owner, who allegedly sometimes forgets where he’s left his yacht, are trying to do in Brooklyn.

Most brawls involving Major League Baseball teams include a lot of shouting and shirt-grabbing. Sometimes there is shaking. The brawl between the Giants and the Dodgers on an August afternoon in 1965 was different.

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Any game featuring both Juan Marichal and Sandy Koufax should have been remembered as a duel between two of the game’s greatest pitchers.

Instead, that game was remembered as the day Marichal hit Dodgers catcher John Roseboro on the head with a bat.

John Rosengren’s “The Fight of Their Lives,’’ a dual biography that alternates chapters on the two players, establishes the background for the event. Marichal was frantic with worry about his family in the Dominican Republic, which, in the throes of political upheaval, was unwillingly hosting thousands of US troops.

Roseboro, who was black and lived in South Central Los Angeles, was concerned enough about the riots in Watts to sit on his porch with a gun.

Unsurprisingly, Marichal was regarded as the villain in the piece. He was the one with the bat.

But in the fullness of time, Roseboro acknowledged that to some extent he provoked the attack, in part with a throw back to Koufax that either grazed Marichal’s ear or got close enough so that the pitcher thought it had.

But finally “The Fight of Their Lives’’ is about a fight that took place against a backdrop of cultural upheaval and the reconciliation Roseboro and Marichal were able to achieve.

Each helped the other to move beyond the incident both of them regretted deeply.

They became close friends. At Roseboro’s memorial service in 2002, Marichal said “I wish I could have had John Roseboro as my catcher.”

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A book about a fight during a baseball game almost 49 years ago may seem less than necessary. A book about forgiveness and healing in the context of sports and beyond should be welcome any time.

BROOKLYN BOUNCE: The Highs and Lows of Nets Basketball’s Historic First Season in the Borough

By Jake Appleman

Scribner, 256 pp., illustrated, $27

THE FIGHT OF THEIR LIVES: How Juan Marichal and John Roseboro Turned Baseball’s Ugliest Brawl into a Story of Forgiveness and Redemption

By John Rosengren

Lyons, 288 pp., $25.95


Bill Littlefield hosts National Public Radio’s “Only A Game’’ from WBUR in Boston. He is writer in residence at Curry College in Milton and can be reached at blittlef@wbur.bu.edu.