With so little going on in the offseason, I did some catching-up on my reading list this weekend. I finished Mychael Urban's Aces, a book on Tim Hudson, Mark Mulder and Barry Zito. It's a good, not great read, for a Cardinals fan with a statistical bent. On the one hand you have the missing three chapters from "Moneyball" and on the other hand you have a little more insight into our man Mulder and his mysterious 2004 breakdown. Structurally it's a running log of the 2004 season, as opposed to "Moneyball" or "Three Nights in August", which more or less are anthologies around a central theme.

While Billy Beane wrote the foreword, he's a minor character in "Aces" otherwise. Well, at least until he traded Hudson and Mulder, he was a minor character. Maybe Urban recognized we don't need any more Beane talk, but it's at odds a bit with Michael Lewis's claim that Beane, unlike Sandy Alderson, ruled the A's clubhouse. If "Aces" is any indication, the reason for the curious omission of the Big Three's stories in "Moneyball" is that they just couldn't be tied to the main plot of Lewis's tome.

As for Mulder, I still don't know what caused his troubles. The apparent foundation for his fall was that everything always has come too easily for Mulder -- Beane called him the golden child -- and that was explored in depth: When he hit a rough spot he simply was not equipped to deal with it and apparently the matter just snowballed. Mulder had the sense to call noted sports psychologist Harvey Dorfman, as Mulder's problem became mental ("thinking too much") even if it didn't start that way. Beyond the breakdown, we learn many unconnected things about Mulder, such as his dislike for watching video of himself and that he didn't care much for Rick Peterson. In fact Mulder said that four days out of five his main goal was messing with Peterson's mind (Mulder used a slightly different word from "messing"; actually the book has enough f-words to make Richard Pryor blush). His whole cool aloof aura carries away from the field, as he has a history of being intentionally boring so the press will leave him alone.

Barry Zito comes off as the good guy of the three. He's a philosopher-surfer dude who doesn't like to be called a flake. When Mulder had his first bouts with self-doubt, Zito's response was "Welcome to my world." Tim Hudson is the warrior. We Cardinals fans also should appreciate Hudson's pre-trades statement that he'd like to play in St. Louis, since it's a franchise devoted to winning. Probably the best line of the book is Hudson's complaint about the flipping Rally Monkey, although I have a soft spot for lines about the Rally Monkey.

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Speaking of books, I got an ad from MGL that his book is nearing publication. He promises to donate his share of the proceeds to Retrosheet. Although the email started suspiciously like Nigerian 409 spam, I expect this will be my next baseball book.