27 Men Out
Baseball's Perfect Games
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The first in-depth look at baseball's nirvana -- a lyrical history of pitching perfection.
There have been only fourteen perfect games pitched in the modern era of baseball; the great Cy Young fittingly hurled the first, in 1904, and David Cone pitched the most recent, in 1999. In between, some great pitchers -- Sandy Koufax, Catfish Hunter, Jim Bunning, and Don Larsen in the World Series -- performed the feat, as did some mediocre ones, like Len Barker and the little-known Charlie Robertson. Fourteen in 150,000 games: The odds are staggering.
When it does happen, however, the whole baseball world marvels at the combination of luck and skill, and the pitcher himself gains a kind of baseball immortality. Five years ago, Michael Coffey witnessed such an event at Yankee Stadium, and the experience prompted this expansive look at the history of these unsurpassable pitching performances. He brings his skills as a popular historian and poet to an appraisal of both the games themselves and of the wider sport of baseball and the lives of the players in it. The careers of each of the fourteen perfect-game pitchers are assessed, not only as to their on-the-field performances but with a regard for their struggles to persevere in an extremely competitive sport in which, more often than not, the men and women who run the game from the owners' boxes are their most formidable adversaries. Along the way, Michael Coffey brings us right into the ballparks with a play-by-play account of how these games unfolded, and relates a host of fascinating stories, such as Sandy Koufax's controversial holdout with Don Drysdale and its chilling effect on baseball's owners, Mike Witt's victimization by the baseball commissioner, and Dennis Martinez's long struggle up from an impoverished Nicaraguan childhood.
Combining history, baseball, and a sweeping look at the changing face of labor relations, 27 Men Out is a new benchmark in sports history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
More than 150,000 major league games have been played in the modern era, Coffey (The Irish in America, etc., and PW's senior managing editor) tells us in this marvelous book, but only 14 have been "perfect games." A game is perfect when "a pitcher pitches at least nine innings of a complete game victory and allows not a single runner to reach first base." The 14 men who have thrown perfect games from Cy Young in 1904 to David Cone in 1999 provide the focus for Coffey's lively history. But it takes more than a pitcher to create a perfect game: superb fielding plays a part, as necessarily does some winning-team offense, and Coffey elucidates these factors in his colorful game-by-game commentary. More notably, Coffey, like other great baseball writers (Angell, Kahn), realizes that the sport, despite its embrace of eternity (in theory a baseball game can last forever) and inward gaze (all runs are scored at home plate), is played within the larger context of players' lives and the ever-evolving socioeconomic climate. So Coffey frames each pitcher's life and perfect game within the larger picture. Addie Joss's 1908 gem, for instance, occurred inside a sport that, like America, was transforming from rude ruralism to greater urbanity. Sandy Koufax's 1965 feat perhaps the most perfect of perfect games, as Koufax struck out 14 and triumphed despite his team recording only one hit is configured against the changing economics of the sport, driven by new media revenues. Throughout the book, baseball holds the center, with each remarkable game springing to roaring life via Coffey's diligent research and vivid prose (Coffey is a poet as well as journalist: 87 North, etc.). The rarest achievement in baseball has here gained a rare companion: a brilliant book that's about baseball but also about life, one told with such care and passion that it, too, gives a glimpse of perfection.
