Pitching in a Pinch: Baseball from the Inside

by Christy Mathewson Narrated by Adams Morgan

Overview

Christy "Matty" Mathewson was one of the most dominant pitchers ever to play baseball. Posthumously inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame as one of the "Five Immortals," he was an unstoppable force on the mound, winning at least twenty-two games for twelve straight seasons and pitching three complete-game shutouts in the 1905 World Series.

Pitching in a Pinch, originally published in 1912, is an insider's account of the world of baseball, blending anecdote, biography, instruction, and social history. Always sensitive to psychology as well as technique, Mathewson describes the game as it was played in the first decade of the twentieth century: the "dangerous batters"; the "peculiarities" of big-league pitchers; the "good and bad" of coaching, umpiring, sign-stealing, base-running, and spring training; and the importance of superstition to athletes. Baseball fans will enjoy first-hand accounts of Mathewson's famous contemporaries, including players Honus Wagner and Rube Marquand, managers like John McGraw and Connie Mack, and many others, and will learn how much-and just how little-has really changed in one hundred years.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Praise for Pitching in a Pinch:

"This book ... bears Matty's mark and the flavor of the age. It is still, after all these years, a good read."
—John Thorn, official historian of Major League Baseball, The Wall Street Journal

"Pitching in a Pinch is the real thing: baseball as it really was in the early years of the game, an on-the-spot record of how it was played and who played it that will be treasured by older and younger fans alike."—Jonathan Yardley, Sports Illustrated
Praise for Christy Mathewson:

"[Mathewson] gripped the imagination of a country that held a hundred million people and held this grip with a firmer hold than any man of his day or time."
—Grantland Rice

“Mathewson pitched against Cincinnati yesterday. Another way of putting it is that Cincinnati lost a game of baseball. The first statement means the same as the second”
—Damon Runyon

"Introducing a reader to Christy Mathewson seems like a superfluous piece of writing and a waste of white paper. Schoolboys of the last ten years have been acquainted with the exact figures which have made up Matty's pitching record before they had ever heard of George Washington, because George didn't play in the same League.
—John N. Wheeler, in his original introduction to Pitching in a Pitch
 

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169660876
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	01/01/2007
Edition description:	Unabridged

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