THE GRANDEST STAGE

New York Times sportswriter Kepner hits a lively history of baseball’s premier event out of the park.

The author modestly writes that his book is “a history, not the history,” of “the most wonderful time of the year.” It decidedly isn’t wonderful for some players who figure in his pages, such as Dodgers catcher Mickey Owen, who flubbed a breaking ball during the 1941 Subway Series and cost his team the whole shebang. “The fans never forgot the error,” writes Kepner, while Owen allowed, “I was just dumb. I should have been ready for it.” Still, there are second acts in life, and Owen started a baseball camp from which a certain Michael Jordan graduated in 1976. An aging Casey Stengel was unceremoniously fired for not starting Whitey Ford against the Pirates in the 1960 World Series, something no Yankees coach would ever again do as long as Ford played. Chalk some of it up to the yips, as when MVP Mike Schmidt “let himself fail repeatedly off a soft-tossing Scott McGregor, an ancient Jim Palmer, and a rumpled middle reliever named Sammy Stewart.” Crises of confidence aside, Kepner serves up plenty of solid counterexamples, such as the aforementioned Jim Palmer, who, when he was 20, “earned a distinction that will probably stand forever: youngest pitcher to throw a World Series shutout.” There’s plenty of agony and ecstasy for all baseball lovers and a few surprises as well. Only the most trivia-masterful readers will know, for example, that country singer Charley Pride once pitched in the Negro League; or that President George W. Bush pitched a perfect strike to open the 2001 World Series, just after 9/11, as if to say to the terrorists, as Yankees catcher Todd Greene recalls, “You’re not going to intimidate us and make us crawl in a hole.”

A grand entertainment for every baseball fan.