The dramatic story of a legendary 1979 slugfest between the Chicago Cubs and the Philadelphia Phillies, full of runs, hits, and subplots, on the cusp of a new era in baseball history It was a Thursday at Chicago’s Wrigley Field, mostly sunny with the wind blowing out. Nobody expected an afternoon game between the Philadelphia Phillies and Chicago Cubs on May 17, 1979, to be much more than a lazy early-season contest matching two teams heading in opposite directions—the first-place Phillies and the Cubs, those lovable losers—until they combined for thirteen runs in the first inning. “The craziest game ever,” one player called it. “And then the second inning started.” Ten Innings at Wrigley is Kevin Cook’s vivid account of a game that could only have happened at this ballpark, in this era, with this colorful cast of heroes and heels: Hall of Famers Mike Schmidt and Bruce Sutter, surly slugger Dave Kingman, hustler Pete Rose, unlucky Bill Buckner, scarred Vietnam vet Garry Maddox, troubled relief pitcher Donnie Moore, clubhouse jester Tug McGraw, and two managers pulling out what was left of their hair. It was the highest-scoring ballgame in a century, and much more than that. Cook reveals the human stories behind a contest the New York Times called “the wildest in modern history” and shows how money, muscles, and modern statistics were about to change baseball forever.
Tom Verducci, twice named National Sportswriter of the Year and co-writer of The Yankee Years with Joe Torre, will have full access to team president Theo Epstein, manager Joe Maddon, and the players to tell the story of the Cubs' ...
The various pieces of this book could not have come together as they did without the heroic efforts of Todd Portnowitz at Knopf assistant to my editor, Ann Close. Todd was unfazed by the demands of organizing hundreds of pages of text ...
Kevin Cook brings the ’47 Series back to life, introducing us to men whose past offered no hint they were destined for extraordinary things. For some, the Series was a memory to hold onto.
Only one other Cub wore #28 for more than four seasons, and his gentle nature was quite the opposite of the volatile Williams and the hard-throwing Myers. Jim Hickman, known as “Gentleman Jim,” had crossed paths with the Cubs in a ...
That's what this book is about: the way fathers and sons talk baseball as a way of talking about everything—courage, fear, fun, family, morality, mortality, and how it's not whether you win or lose that counts, it's how you share the game ...
Other astronauts called her “J.R.,” a tip of the Stetson to J. R. Ewing, the oil-mogul antihero of the TV show Dallas. To Christa, Resnik was just about everything an American woman could be. It was strange to think that she would have ...
During the first half of the 1974 season, Robinson (then playing for the Angels) had clashed repeatedly with Angels skipper Bobby Winkles, often bad-mouthing Winkles to the press. Angels ace Nolan Ryan would later claim that Robinson ...
When we reached thelobby, wesaw Dadwalking ahead ofus.I rushed tocatchup with him,andheput hisfingers tohislips, then pointed five feet forward. Ahead, it was Ozzie Smith andhisson Osborne Jr.,thena small child, later acontestant on ...
The first biography of the beloved entertainer who broke the prime-time color barrier When The Flip Wilson Show debuted in 1970, black faces were still rare on television and black hosts nonexistent.
Describes how baseball appreciation can lead to a transcendental experience that borders on the spiritual and discusses the shared connection between the sport and religion and the path to enlightenment.