The Ball
Mark McGwire's 70th Home Run Ball and the Marketing of the American Dream
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
Originally published in 1999, Daniel Paisner's THE BALL: Mark McGwire's 70th Home Run Ball and the Marketing of the American Dream was hailed as "one of the great quirky masterpieces of baseball journalism" by the editors of Sportsjones.com, and named an Amazon.com "Top Ten Sports Book of the Year." THE BALL is a wistful parable about our national pastime. It chronicles the distinctly American path of Mark McGwire's record-setting seventieth home run ball—from the moment it was stitched in a Rawlings factory in Costa Rica and shipped (eventually) to St. Louis; to the moment it left the hands of Montreal rookie hurler Carl Pavano and collided with McGwire's "Big Stick" bat; to the moment it was "caught" by a researcher working on the heralded Human Genome Research Project; to the moment it was won at auction for $3.08 million dollars by a comic-book maven. Shot through with colorful characters, high drama and rich baseball history, it is must-reading for anyone interested in what drove our various marketplaces—and collective fantasies—at the end of the twentieth century. As baseball fans commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the historic home run race of 1998, they look back as well to a more innocent time in the game—a time before the taint of steroids and the reliance on sabermetrics that has transformed the way the game is played and the way it is remembered.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Paisner (The Imperfect Mirror, etc.) believes that Mark McGwire's 70th home run ball just might hold part of the secret to what it means to be American today. From the moment it was stitched in a Rawlings plant in Costa Rica to the moment it sold for just over $3 million to comic book publisher Tod McFarlane, this one particular baseball provides a kind of cultural looking glass. (The idea that a home run ball could carry America's cultural DNA will be familiar to readers of Don DeLillo's Underworld, the prologue to which follows the trajectory of Bobby Thomson's 1951 pennant-winning blast). The ball, as Paisner traces it, infects its possessor and those who wish to possess it with a particularly American kind of greed. Everybody, of course, wants it, but Paisner sees America as having passed a new threshhold in the transmutation of emotional value into market value. McGwire's home run ball is a good example of the phenomenon, but it's an awfully small object to carry all the implications of the cultural criticism with which Paisner tries to stamp it. Paisner is most interesting when he digs behind the scenes with his reporter's pad in clear view--for example, when he talks to regular people who thought they hated baseball but were nonetheless swept up by the 1998 season, or to Major League Baseball officials who were in charge of organizing security details for McGwire and Sammy Sosa.
