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The Head Game : Baseball Seen from the Pitcher's Mound
Inside the great expanse of a ballgame is the essential core of what Roger Kahn, one of the national pastime's most esteemed chroniclers, calls "chess at ninety miles per hour." That core, of course, is the duel between pitcher and hitter.
At its best — which is where Kahn wants to play - it's as cerebral, complex, and psychological a contest as exists in sports, hence the title of this fascinating exploration of how baseball's basic confrontation, told from the pitcher's perspective, has evolved over time. |
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"A fresh and original twist on the battle between the pitcher and the hitter." - Tim McCarver on The Head Game : Baseball Seen from the Pitcher's Mound
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| Description |
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Drawing from his vast knowledge and long experience, Roger Kahn parses the battle from every angle, dissecting the wizardry of hurlers both ancient - Candy Cummings, Old Hoss Radbourn, Cy Young, Christy Mathewson, Walter Johnson - and modern - Bob Gibson, Sandy Koufax, Bruce Sutter, Tom Glavine.
It is vintage Kahn and he manages to mix personal memoir with astute analysis. He examines tangibles, such as the height of the mound, and intangibles, such as the fear factor carried by every pitch, without ever taking his eye off the ball. And he's not above a few laughs and surprises. When he makes out his subjective list of the best pitchers of all time, he naturally includes Matty, Koufax, and Warren Spahn, but he also throws in a guy named Jerry Solovey. Jerry who? Kahn tells us he played in the low minors. So why's he here? "He could," Kahn admitted, "almost always get me out." Like an able hurler, Kahn knows how to mix it up.
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| Celebrity Reviews |
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Ron Fimrite, Sports Illustrated, September 11, 2000: "This book is Kahn at his best, which is pretty damn good."
Kirkus Reviews, August 1, 2000: "A hot-stove league ramble...by a baseball writer who has seen it all...everything a baseball book should be."
Tim McCarver: "...a fresh and original twist on the battle between the pitcher and the hitter."
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| Customer Reviews |
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 Do you think you know baseball? Well, read Kahn's latest gem to really learn the game. Why are baseball's greatest pitchers so effective? They've learned the "head game" and use it to perfection. Kahn uses his great writing ability to pen the greatest book ever written about the most important part of baseball - the battle between pitcher and batter. As Kahn so well relates through his profiles of some of baseball's great hurlers, the battle transends the physical and is just as much a mental challenge. If you love baseball and think you really understand the game, then you MUST read this book by one of America's premier writers.
Once again Roger Kahn has written the best baseball book of the year.The combination of his innate ability to write and the subject matter make this a worthy companion to his previous successes.The many. many stories and vignettes, especially those pertaining to the turn of the 20th century, are fascinating and entertainingly presented. One can almost see Christy Mathewson and John McGraw together at the Polo Grounds. Close your eyes and you are there among the baseball pitching greats of yesteryear when the games were played in daylight, on grass, before crowds of knowledgeable fans who had to be restrained by ropes in the outfield. Mr. Kahn's alluding to the writings of John R. Tunis shake the cobwebs from the older fan. Just the title, "The Kid From Tompkinsville" conjures up all sorts of memories. There wasn't the hype then, only the game. This book is a gem, a must for the true fan, the historical fan of Baseball.
As a pitcher through my college years I read this book with great interest. I am not a baseball historian so the look back at the early pitchers in the game of baseball was very interesting. As a pitcher with an average fastball, I had to rely on "The Head Game" to survive.
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Baseball Book Shelf: The Head Game
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