Bigger Than the Game

The Toronto Blue Jays pitcher recounts his fateful season of injury, rehab, and reinvention in a memoir by “the best writer in a baseball uniform” (Tyler Kepner, The New York Times).

After nearly a decade in the minors, Dirk Hayhurst defied the odds to climb onto the pitcher's mound for the Toronto Blue Jays. Newly married, with a big league paycheck and a brand new house, Hayhurst was ready for a great season in the Bigs.

Then fate delivered a crushing hit. Hayhurst blew out his pitching shoulder in an insane off-season workout program. After surgery, rehab, and more rehab, his major-league dreams seemed more distant than ever. And from there things only got worse, weirder, and funnier.

In a crazy world of injured athletes, autograph-seeking nuns, angry wrestlers, and trainers with a taste for torture, Hayhurst learned lessons about the game—and himself—that were not in any rulebook. Honest, soul-searching, insightful, hilarious, and moving, Bigger Than the Game is an indisputable baseball classic.