An appealing mix of baseball and cultural history.
During one of the most tumultuous years in our history, a remarkable baseball season unfolded.
In 1968, most baseball players had to work a second job to make ends meet. There were no wild-card teams or division winners. That year the Detroit Tigers became only the third club in history to rally from a 3-1 deficit to defeat the powerful St. Louis Cardinals in the Fall Classic. Showcasing this looming match-up, Wendel (Writing/Johns Hopkins Univ.; High Heat: The Secret History of the Fastball and the Improbable Search for the Fastest Pitcher of All Time, 2010, etc.) foreshortens the season by focusing on the stories of individual Tigers Gates Brown, Willie Horton, Dick McAuliffe and, especially, pitchers Denny McLain, who won an astonishing 31 games, and Mickey Lolich, the Series MVP. The author also looks at Cardinal stars Lou Brock, Curt Flood, Tim McCarver, Orlando Cepeda and especially pitcher Bob Gibson, among the game’s all-time greatest. He charts the thrilling Series game by game. More intriguing, though, is the season’s unique backdrop: the “Year of the Pitcher” in baseball and the national turmoil surrounding the sports world. In addition to McLain and Gibson’s heroics (both won the Cy Young and MVP awards), the season saw five no-hitters (including a perfect game by Catfish Hunter), a consecutive game strikeout record by Luis Tiant and an unprecedented scoreless innings streak by Don Drysdale. Meanwhile, the country was falling apart. Urban riots and massive antiwar demonstrations helped persuade LBJ not to run again. By the time the Chicago Democratic Convention exploded in the streets, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy had already been assassinated. Wendel touches briefly on how the year agitated other sports, but he focuses on the baseball story and the athletes accustomed to ignoring the outside world. They found that impossible to do in the chaotic year of ’68.
An appealing mix of baseball and cultural history.Pub Date: April 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-306-82018-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2012
Familiar headlines rehashed with no value added.
Sportswriter Layden (The Great American Baseball Strike, 1995, etc.) colorlessly recounts Buster Douglas’s 1990 upset of Mike Tyson.
Douglas was a 42-1 underdog when he defeated the fearsome brawler in Tokyo, but this text doesn’t match the excitement of simply watching the fight on video. The truth is, neither Tyson nor Douglas are interesting characters, and Layden’s rambling, often repetitious narrative doesn’t make them any more compelling. Tyson had become the youngest heavyweight champion ever in 1986, and his undefeated record included many first-round knockouts. Douglas, meanwhile, despite growing up in a family of boxers (his father was a tough middleweight), was a reluctant warrior who would have preferred a career in basketball. Prone to weight gain and often passive in the ring, he somehow summoned one great night of boxing that, coupled with Tyson’s taste for fast living and disdain for prefight training, propelled the unknown fighter to the title. His success was short-lived. The following year, Evander Holyfield knocked out Douglas, who promptly ate himself into a near-fatal diabetic coma. He gamely recovered and returned to the ring for several forgettable bouts, finally retiring in 1999. Tyson, imprisoned on a rape conviction following his loss to Douglas, fought with mixed success until 2005, but his aura of invincibility had been erased on that fateful day in Tokyo. Layden walks us through the milestones of both fighters’s careers and provides some revelations concerning infighting among Douglas’s ever-changing handlers. He rarely provides interesting behind-the-scenes material about the sport. Quotes garnered from interviews with the two principals (Tyson’s via cell phone) prove only how inarticulate and unappealing they both are—which may the book’s most lasting revelation.
Familiar headlines rehashed with no value added.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-312-35330-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Destined to take its place among the classics of baseball literature.
New York Times columnist Barry (City Lights: Stories About New York, 2007, etc.) delivers an all-angle take on the longest, and surely the strangest, game in baseball history.
On a frigid evening in April 1981, 1,740 Pawtucket, R.I., Red Sox fans settled into their seats for a game with the Rochester Red Wings of the AAA International League. With the score tied 1-1 at the end of regulation, the teams played on. And on. On past 12:50 a.m., when the curfew provision, mysteriously missing from that year’s edition of the rule book, would have suspended the contest; on past the 21st inning, when each team maddeningly scored a run; on past the 29th and record-tying inning; on past 4:00 a.m., the bottom of the 32nd, when the league president was finally reached and ordered the umpires to suspend the contest. Wittily and gracefully, Barry works out his Easter themes of hope and redemption, providing, of course, an account of the game, but most memorably capturing the atmosphere of the city and the stories of the people who shared this weird moment in baseball’s long history: the players, two headed for the Hall of Fame, a few who would establish substantial major league careers, scrubs who would never make it, others only on their way to or back from the proverbial cup of coffee in the bigs; the dutiful umpires and the team managers, baseball lifers both; the hardy double-handful of fans who stayed the course, including a father and son bound by their promise never to leave a game; the clubhouse attendants, batboys and devoted player wives; the makeshift radio broadcasters and jaded newsmen sentenced to cover the game; the millionaire, blue-collar PawSox owner and the dismal team and decrepit stadium he inherited; the burned-out but still-defiant city of Pawtucket, where baseball would, indeed, eventually rise from the dead. When play resumed two months later, the entire baseball world descended upon the stadium, eager to participate in the historic game’s conclusion, prefiguring the enthusiastic attention Barry’s wonderful story richly inspires.
Destined to take its place among the classics of baseball literature.Pub Date: April 12, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-201448-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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