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The Greatest Game: The Yankees, the Red Sox, and the Playoff of '78
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The Greatest Game: The Yankees, the Red Sox, and the Playoff of '78
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by Richard Bradley
Sales Rank : 17370
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Hardcover: 304 pages
Publisher: Free Press March 18, 2008
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1416534385
ISBN-13: 978-1416534389
Product Dimensions:
9.1 x 6 x 1.3 inches
Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
From Publishers Weekly
Major league baseball was vastly different 30 years ago when free agency and the designated hitter were relatively new concepts, and most games were not televised. But one thing was the same: the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox were fierce rivals. In the 1978 season, it all came down to a roller-coaster ride of a pennant race that culminated in one Monday afternoon playoff game to decide the winner of the American League East. Bradley (American Son: Portrait of John F. Kennedy, Jr.) scores a solid hit with his first baseball book, recounting the sudden-death game and the season leading up to it. He deftly staggers chapters, alternating a pitch-by-pitch account of the playoff innings with the backstory of the season and most of the players and coaches. Two of the many compelling plot threads include the dramatics of meddling Yankees owner George Steinbrenner and the feisty, hard-drinking manager Billy Martin, and the touching son-finds-lost-father saga of Bucky Dent, the light-hitting infielder who hit a three-run home run that made him a hero. Many other heavyweight names in baseball lore move across these pages, including Lou Piniella, Don Zimmer, Reggie Jackson, Goose Gossage, Catfish Hunter, Mike Torrez, Ron Guidry and Thurman Munson. The latter chapters of the book are filled with vivid description, particularly of Dent's classic at bat and the slow advance of the evening shadow across the Fenway Park grass. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Product Review
"The Greatest Game is a rare and much-needed addition to the Yankee-Red Sox catalog. Richard Bradley's reporting is full of emotion but nonpartisan, precise but passionate. He transforms the story of a game, and the men who played in it, into the best kind of history lesson, as meticulous as it is entertaining." -- Mark Kriegel, author of Pistol: The Life of Pete Maravich; national columnist, FOXSports.com
"I thought I already knew everything about this game, but Richard Bradley has mined the mountain of Yankee-Red Sox lore and found new gold." -- Dan Shaughnessy, author of Senior Year: A Father, A Son, and High School Baseball; sports columnist, The Boston Globe
"We've seen it, the implausible Bucky Dent home run. Now we get to live it. Such is Richard Bradley's mastery of biography and baseball that I found myself hoping Dent's fly ball fell into Yaz's glove even as I hoped it disappeared behind the Green Monster. This is baseball history at its vivid best." -- Dave Kindred, author of Sound and Fury: Two Powerful Lives, One Fateful Friendship, a dual biography of Muhammad Ali and Howard Cosell
"As The Great Rivalry intensifies, the legends are reborn and the heroes come alive again, especially in Bradley's vivid retelling of the amazing finale to a thrilling season." -- Robert Lipsyte, author of Heroes of Baseball: The Men Who Made It America's Favorite Game
"The Greatest Game is a spellbinding, page-turning re-creation of a great rivalry, a great season, and a great game, which makes it a great sports book. But it is also on a micro level an often moving exploration of the men who played the game and on a macro level an incisive examination of baseball in the 1970s and, to the extent that baseball is the national pastime, of America generally at a time of change -- which makes it a terrific cultural history." -- Neal Gabler, author of Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination
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