by Roger Angell ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 23, 2001
Written with Angell’s usual economy and intelligence, and with a tact that matches its subject’s reticence, this look at an...
A look at the life, last Yankee season, and psyche of an elder statesman of the pitching rubber.
Ever since Cone joined the New York Mets in 1987, he has been one of the most interesting, frustrating, and formidable pitchers in either league. He helped the Mets rumble to a divisional title in 1988, only to collapse against the Dodgers in the league championship series. Tarred with a reputation for hard living and dangerous high jinks, Cone was traded away from the Mets in 1992—and landed with the Yankees in 1995. His dramatic Bronx career included a wrenching loss to the Mariners in the first round of the playoffs, seven no-hit innings and a World Series–saving win against the Braves in 1996, and a perfect game against the Montreal Expos in 1999. New Yorker baseball writer Angell chronicles Cone’s career in the context of his gut-wrenching, heartbreaking 2000 season, his last with the Yankees. Interspersed with the story of his increasing frustration over what would become a 4–14 record and the Yankees’ own lackadaisical slide into the playoffs are chapters on his Kansas City childhood and his domineering father Ed, his early career in the Kansas City Royals’ farm system, his bittersweet Mets years, his return to New York as a Yankee, his work as a players’ union representative, and his decision this year to go to spring training with the Boston Red Sox. Throughout, Angell provides insight into the psychology of pitchers and the mechanics of the slider, the wild escapades of young ballplayers on their own for the first time, the ambivalent feelings of the rich sons of working-class fathers, and the void left by the loss (at an age when most people are only hitting their stride) of the skills of a champion—and, finally, of the game itself.
Written with Angell’s usual economy and intelligence, and with a tact that matches its subject’s reticence, this look at an unusual baseball life will appeal to all students of the game—even those who have little use for the Yankees.Pub Date: May 23, 2001
ISBN: 0-446-52768-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
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IN THE NEWS
by Peter May ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1994
Bill, Hillary, and Al? Nope—Boston Globe sportswriter May means big as in BIG. His three are the towering trees of the Boston Celtics: Larry Bird, Kevin McHale, and Robert Parish, whose lives and baskets are cheered to the rafters in this gung- ho hoop-scoop. May has a hot topic here since, as he shouts more than once, the tremendous trio did indeed make up ``the greatest frontcourt in the history of basketball.'' Also the longest-lived, dribbling together for nearly a decade, snaring heaps of championships along the way. As a portraitist, May hits three-pointers every time. Bird: the hick from French Lick, Indiana; the human basketball machine; winner of three consecutive MVPs; the best team player in history and, except for Michael Jordan, the best, period. McHale: laid-back, undervalued, dribbling and driving with breathtaking grace but always in Bird's shadow. Parish: the silent one, indestructible and inexorable, still on the courts in 1993, now the oldest player in the league. As a historian, however, May slows the game to a snail's pace as he reports in endless nit-picking detail about the trio's high-school days, scouting reports, signings, and contract hassles. Things speed up when the guys hit the NBA and tear up the court, blowing away archrivals Philadelphia and Los Angeles and—in the 1985-6 season, when they were 40-1 at the Boston Garden—reaching an apex of basketball harmonics never seen before or since, and making a strong claim to being the best team ever assembled in any sport. ``If I could, I would go back and play that year every year for the rest of my life,'' says McHale with an intensity that readers, egged on by May's partisanship, will likely echo. Not as thrilling as a Bird-McHale-Parish charge to the basket, but good enough for those who never saw—or who want to recapture—the real thing. (Eight pages of b&w photographs—not seen)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-671-79955-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1993
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by Dan McGraw ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 5, 2000
In the Wild West, bullets flew in barrooms; today, it’s epiphanies. One should beware of both.
A sometimes teary and always beery memoir of a son, a dying father, and their mutual love affair with Cleveland and its football Browns.
U.S. News and World Report editor McGraw begins in August 1999 on the day his father, terminally ill with colon cancer, entered a hospice. First identifying himself as “the family fuckup” (a characterization he proves beyond a reasonable doubt in subsequent pages), the author then adopts a rough chronology, following in desultory fashion the dismal fortunes of the 1999 Browns, the NFL expansion team awarded to Cleveland after the previous owner, Art Modell, had whisked the old Browns away to greener (i.e., more profitable) pastures in Baltimore (a “little rape act,” as McGraw puts it). Intercut with brief accounts of the 1999 Browns’ 2–14 season are descriptions of the author’s Irish Catholic boyhood and extraordinarily dissolute adolescence, of his father (a noted Cleveland trial attorney who was both hero and nemesis to his son), of the “old” (highly successful) Browns, of other professional athletic teams in Cleveland, of the hours the author spent in neighborhood bars (where he was a popular regular), and of his father’s final moments of life. McGraw is disturbed that the new Browns seem more interested in luring yuppie families to the games than in catering to their old fans (who, as the author admits, were noted for drunkenness, violence, and urinating in drinking fountains). “[E]verything about these new Browns seemed regimented and scripted,” he complains—and in one manic, indecent burst of hyperbole he compares the current team management to Nazis. McGraw’s other principal concern is to make certain we know about his prodigious drinking problem; for most of his adulthood, we learn, he has been drunk—a condition that would explain some of his more bizarre declarations (e.g., women have not played football, so they are more likely than men to hold grudges).
In the Wild West, bullets flew in barrooms; today, it’s epiphanies. One should beware of both.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2000
ISBN: 0-385-49833-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2000
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