Product Details
Pitching in a Pinch: or Baseball from the Inside

Pitching in a Pinch: or Baseball from the Inside
By Christy Mathewson

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Product Description

Christy Mathewson (1880–1925) was the greatest baseball pitcher of his day, a hero with appeal reaching beyond sports. A college-educated player from Pennsylvania farm country, he restored respectability to a game tarnished by the rowdies who had dominated baseball in the 1890s.

Pitching in a Pinch, originally published in 1912, is an insider’s account blending anecdote, biography, instruction, and social history. It celebrates baseball as it was played in the first decade of the twentieth century by famous contemporaries like Honus Wagner and Rube Marquand, managers like John McGraw and Connie Mack, and many others. Always sensitive to psychology as well as technique, Mathewson describes the “dangerous batters” he faced, the “peculiarities” of big-league pitchers, the “good and bad” of coaching, umpiring, sign-stealing, base-running, spring training, and the importance of superstition to athletes. Matty, as he was called, makes the reader feel that tense moment when a player in a pinch must use his head.

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #1561255 in Books
  • Published on: 1994-03-01
  • Original language: English
  • Dimensions: .85 pounds
  • Binding: Paperback
  • 320 pages

Editorial Reviews

From Amazon.com
One of baseball's more enduring classics and earliest memoirs, Christy Mathewson's primer, first published in 1912, has also become one of the game's foremost anthropologies. Mathewson was one of baseball's first immortals: he was a star on the field, winning 373 games between 1900 and 1916--all but one as a Giant; an educated gentleman off the field; and a legitimate war hero who died from the effects of being gassed in World War I. Pitching in a Pinch passes on Mathewson's substantial knowledge of the game in general, and the intricacies of the mound in particular. The book's continuing delight and value rests in Mathewson's facility for capturing--from the inside--the game's ethos in the early 20th century, and the generous combination of anecdote and insight with which he shares it.

From Library Journal
Better known for his many history titles, Gerlach in 1980 took a look at America's favorite pastime's most unfavorite people-the umpires. Gerlach profiles a dozen National and American Leaguers who together umped the game from 1920 to 1970. Steamboat Johnson's 1935 volume offers a more personal glimpse at umping as the author recalls his 25 years of "standing the gaff"-enduring the fury of fans and players. Mathewson's star-studded 1912 volume offers anecdotes on then-famous players as well as tips on playing the game that he picked up as a star pitcher for the New York Giants and several other teams in the early 1900s.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author

Introducing this Bison Books edition is Eric Rolfe Greenberg, whose acclaimed novel The Celebrant (1993), also a Bison Book, portrays the immortal Christy Mathewson.