Off Speed
Baseball, Pitching, and the Art of Deception
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Longlisted for the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing
The lively and fascinating story of baseball’s 150-year hunt for the perfect pitch
In August 2012, Felix Hernandez of the Seattle Mariners pitched a perfect game against the Tampa Bay Rays in what Terry McDermott calls “one of the greatest exhibitions of off-speed pitches ever put on.” For McDermott, a lifelong fan and student of baseball, the extraordinary events of that afternoon inspired this incisive meditation on the art of pitching.
Within the framework of Hernandez’s historic achievement, Off Speed provides a vibrant narrative of the history and evolution of pitching, combining baseball's rich tradition of folklore with the wealth of new metrics from a growing legion of statisticians who are transforming the way we think about the game. Off Speed is also the personal story of a fan’s steadfast devotion, first kindled in McDermott by his father at the local diamond in small-town Iowa and now carried forward with the same passion by his own daughters.
Approaching his subject with the love every fan brings to the park and the expertise of a probing journalist, McDermott explores with irrepressible curiosity the science and the romance of baseball.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Blending memoir with a baseball fan's musings, McDermott (Perfect Soldiers) offers entertaining and wistful notes on the craft of pitching. Focusing on one pitcher, Seattle Mariners hurler Felix Hernandez, and one game between the Mariners and the Tampa Bay Rays on August 15, 2012, McDermott discusses various pitches including the spitball, curveball, fastball, sinker, and knuckleball and how they developed. He introduces pitchers who invented and excelled at certain pitches, such as Arthur "Candy" Cummings, who first developed the curveball, and R.A. Dickey, today's most active knuckleball pitcher. McDermott deftly points out that the best pitchers are so practiced at the art of deception that they're able to hide from a batter which pitch is coming even after the pitch has been released. He writes that the most common way for pitchers to throw a fastball that moves differently than the batter expects is to throw one that sinks. McDermott demystifies baseball, illustrating the game's "secret beauty" from being built over a very long time. The chapters are sometimes repetitive and he refers to the New York Yankees as "Yankee." These are enjoyable fan's notes that might have been better published as a series of articles.
