From Publishers Weekly
More than 150,000 major league games have been played in the modern era, Coffey (The Irish in America, etc., and PW's senior managing editor) tells us in this marvelous book, but only 14 have been "perfect games." A game is perfect when "a pitcher pitches at least nine innings of a complete game victory and allows not a single runner to reach first base." The 14 men who have thrown perfect gamesâ€"from Cy Young in 1904 to David Cone in 1999â€"provide the focus for Coffey's lively history. But it takes more than a pitcher to create a perfect game: superb fielding plays a part, as necessarily does some winning-team offense, and Coffey elucidates these factors in his colorful game-by-game commentary. More notably, Coffey, like other great baseball writers (Angell, Kahn), realizes that the sport, despite its embrace of eternity (in theory a baseball game can last forever) and inward gaze (all runs are scored at home plate), is played within the larger context of players' lives and the ever-evolving socioeconomic climate. So Coffey frames each pitcher's life and perfect game within the larger picture. Addie Joss's 1908 gem, for instance, occurred inside a sport that, like America, was transforming from rude ruralism to greater urbanity. Sandy Koufax's 1965 featâ€"perhaps the most perfect of perfect games, as Koufax struck out 14 and triumphed despite his team recording only one hitâ€"is configured against the changing economics of the sport, driven by new media revenues. Throughout the book, baseball holds the center, with each remarkable game springing to roaring life via Coffey's diligent research and vivid prose (Coffey is a poet as well as journalist: 87 North, etc.). The rarest achievement in baseball has here gained a rare companion: a brilliant book that's about baseball but also about life, one told with such care and passion that it, too, gives a glimpse of perfection.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Booklist
Baseball is unique among team sports in that it includes a statistical basis with which the concept of perfection can be defined: 27 batters up, 27 batters out, a "perfect" game. In major-league baseball history, there have only been 14 perfect games. Coffey, the managing editor of Publishers Weekly, reveals his inner baseball-nerd self in this layered, revealing analysis of each perfect game. What will strike the casual baseball fan is that the games seem equally divided between great pitchers from whom one might reasonably expect perfection (Sandy Koufax, Jim Bunning, Cy Young) and a group of fair-to-middling hurlers (David Wells, Mike Witt, and Tom Browning) who seem, well, less than perfect. In wonderfully succinct yet detailed chapters, Coffey provides a pre-perfection professional history of the pitcher, a historical overview of the time, a dramatic account of the game, and a synopsis of the pitcher's post-game career. The accounts are infused with a sense of wonder--from the author and often the pitcher, too--that perfection was achieved, even for one brief moment. Easily the best baseball book of the young season. Wes Lukowsky
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
