* Review: Living on the Black

This one on John Feinstein’s most recent baseball title comes from the DailySkew Baseball blog.

Upshot:

Overall, a good modern baseball book about how cerebral the game of pitching is, and how pitchers work out in-between starts. Also, an inside look into the Mets 2007 collapse (so you can read about Willie Randolph, Jose Reyes, Lastings Milledge, Billy Wagner, David Wright, Paul Lo Duca and more). On the Yankees side, you get to see how Joe Torre managed one of the great comeback seasons, and read about such players as Chien-Ming Wang, Joba Chamberlain, and Roger Clemens.

It’s a great tribute to two future Hall of Famers.

* Now hear this: Living on the Black

Mel Foster narrates this unabridged version of Feinstein’s latest baseball title. That’s almost 19 hours of listening to what sounds very much like a computer-generated voice. Which is a shame, because the book — which considers the approach to the game by two veteran pitchers (Tom Glavine and Mike Mussina) — albeit long and with perhaps a bit too much attention to (some) detail, is an interesting look into the strategic inner sanctum.

Hear for yourself:

* National Pastime Radio

On the June 21 edition of Only a Game, Bill Littlefield offered this interview with John Feinstein, author of Living on the Black. (Sorry, but you have to listen to the preceding stories before you get to the Feinstein segment.)

Read an excerpt from Living on the Black.

The Leonard Lopate Show of June 24 featured this chat with Nicholas Dawidoff, author of The Crowd Sounds Happy, a memoir about his childhood with a mentally ill father.

Those of you reading this in a timely manner and geographically available might be to know that Dawidoff will be speaking and signing books tonight at 8 p.m. at the Happy Ending Bar, 302 Broome Street (between Eldridge and Forsyth Streets).

Read an excerpt from The Crowd Sounds Happy.

* Fathers, sons, sports

From Bloomberg.com, this piece featuring Feinstein’s Living on the Black and Halberstam’s Everything They Had.

* Author Q&A: John Feinstein

Via USA Today

* Review: Living on the Black

A thoughtful examination of Feinstein’s latest.

* RK Review: Living on the Black

Two Pitchers, Two Teams, One Season to Remember, by John Feinstein (Little, Brown and Company)

John Feinstein’s latest tome considers two veteran major leaguers plying their craft during the 2007 season search of major milestones in the magnifying glass of the media frenzy that is New York. Tom Glavine won his 300th game with the Mets last year, while Mike Mussina, a member of the cross-town Yankees, won his 250th.

Feinstein painstakingly chronicles these athletes as they inch towards their lofty accomplishments. Glavine has since returned to the Atlanta Braves, for whom he won more than 240 of 305 regular season games (as of this writing) and two Cy Young Awards, indicative of the best pitcher in the league.

After brief recaps of their journeys through the school and amateur ranks, minor league apprenticeships, and careers prior to 2007, Feinstein settles in for the long, detailed process for which he has become famous in such books as TALES FROM Q SCHOOL, LET ME TELL YOU A STORY and A SEASON ON THE BRINK, among many others. No detail is too small, no scrap of information unimportant. The breadth of the book — more than 500 pages — can seem daunting, but for baseball fans, it’s never boring. Feinstein’s access earned him heretofore unknown insights into each man’s habits and the social structure of a professional sports team, with all the disparate personalities and quirks.

Glavine won his landmark game on August 5th in a nationally televised affair against the Chicago Cubs, with the added emotion of his family on hand to share in the event as he became just the 23rd major league pitcher to do so. On the other end of the celebratory spectrum, Mussina notched win number 250 in his last victory of the season on September 23rd (just over 50 have accomplished that). He didn’t even return to the dugout to watch the final out, having been relieved some innings earlier. “Two hundred isn’t three hundred,” Feinstein quotes him as saying, giving a nod to Glavine. “I understand that.”

On the periphery of the individual milestones are the disparate fortunes of the Mets and Yankees, eternally at odds as they struggle for the hearts and minds of fans from within and without New York’s borders. The Mets, odds-on-favorite to win at least the National League pennant, blew a comfortable lead for the Eastern division with a late-season collapse of historic proportion. That Glavine had one of the worst games of his life when the Mets needed him most dampens the love that the team’s fans will hold for him for years to come.

The Yankees, on the other hand, struggled mightily before rallying to capture the American League wild card slot (they subsequently lost to the Cleveland Indians in the first round of the playoffs).

Despite a few glitches — major or minor, depending on the reader’s demand for accuracy — Feinstein’s thoughtful treatise of two thoughtful craftsmen at the tail end of their careers rank high on the list of such books. Acolytes of the teams will relive sorrow and elation, respectively.

(This review appears on Bookreporter.com)

* Review: Living on the Black

From a more diverse post on Chapelhillnews.com:

‘Living on the Black’ ‘Two Pitchers, Two Teams, One Season to Remember”, $26.99 (Little Brown, 526 pp.), by John Feinstein

Pitching is one of the most difficult jobs on the planet. So, pitching
well is reserved for only an elite few athletes. John Feinstein’s
“Living on the Black” chronicles the 2007 season of two of the most
successful pitchers in baseball history: Mike Mussina of the New York
Yankees and Tom Glavine of the New York Mets. Glavine started that
season 10 wins away from his 300th victory. Mussina had to overcome an
early-season injury and a mid-season slump that knocked him out of the
starting rotation for the first time in his career.

“Living on the Black” lays out in great detail the physical ingredients of
pitching — the workouts, the bullpen sessions, the actual innings, the
post-game routines. The book also gets into the mental aspect of the
game — the hardest part of pitching, according to Mussina. Feinstein
reports Glavine’s emotions poignantly as he edges closer to his 300th
win, or as the superstitious pitcher repeatedly refers to it, The
Number That Must Not Be Named.

The book delves into all the baseball arcana that goes on behind the scenes: pitching styles,
scuffed balls, slumps, umpires, triumphs and defeats. Glavine and
Mussina are crafty pitchers who must rely on their control and the
ability to throw the ball on the corners of home plate or the edges of
the plate. When they can’t hit their spots, hitters generally light
them up, hence the importance of an umpire who gives them the corners.

As for scuffed balls, the pitchers tell Feinstein that a ball that is
scuffed during play is like gold and that a pitcher should hold onto it
for as long as he can. Mussina says the scuff can make a ball, when
properly gripped, dive an extra 3 to 4 inches to the outside, good
enough maybe for a quick out.

The book provides a wealth of other
information about such topics as what the coach and the catcher and
pitcher talk about during those mound visits (it’s mostly just to give
the pitcher a chance to catch his breath); how a pitcher prepares for
his next start; and how crucial the network of coaches and players and
family are to the players, who rely upon those sources for advice and
moral support when things get tough.

One of America’s top writers, Feinstein takes an extensive tour of the background of
baseball in the book, and his close relationships with the pitchers
show through. This inside look at pitching will fascinate fans and
perhaps inspire casual readers to take a closer look at America’s
favorite pastime.

* Review: Living on the Black

Today’s Publisher’s Weekly ran this starred review of Feinstein’s latest:

Though the season-long profile—in which a sportswriter follows a player, team or coach through a single season—grows increasingly familiar, this entry from Feinstein, one of the genre’s pioneers (Next Man Up: A Year Behind the Lines in Today’s NFL;The Punch: One Night, Two Lives, and the Fight That Changed Basketball Forever), delivers rare insight into the minds of two of baseball’s most cerebral (and successful) pitchers. Veteran sportswriter Feinstein follows the Yankees’ Mike Mussina and the Mets’ Tom Glavine during the 2007 season, as they pursue personal milestones and try to pitch their teams back into the postseason. Although they each reach some of their goals (Mussina to 250 wins, Glavine 300), neither team reaches its ultimate goal. The main narrative, of personal and team struggle, is compelling, but the true enjoyment of books like these are in the details, and Feinstein does not disappoint. Not only does he exhaustively chronicle the season on-field, he reveals tidbits of inside ball that even hardcore fans will find enlightening: Who knew that Mussina’s best friend on the Yankees is the bullpen catcher, Mike Borzello, or that Glavine helped avert a likely player strike after the 2003 season? This smart season tour makes a treat for both casual and die-had fans.

* Nitpick of the day: Living on the Black

(Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be a regular feature.)

Reading the new book by John Feinstein. I’ve always enjoyed his work, especially on baseball and golf, but I came across this paragraph and it got my eyes rolling:

On page 155, Feinstein writes:

Joe Torre, who came up to the majors as a catcher, can still remember Birdie Tebbets starting for the Braves twice on two days’ rest in the 1957 World Series [emphasis added], a team his older brother Frank Torre played on.

There are problems on several levels (Thanks, again, Neyer!).

First off, by 1957, Tebbets, a catcher for 14 major league seasons, had been retired as an active player for five years. He was, at that point, manager of the Cincinnati Reds. (He later served in that capacity for the Braves for part of 1961 and all of 1962.)

So let’s assume that the player in question was actually Lew Burdette. You say Birdie, I say Burdette. Sounds similar, so maybe Feinstein misheard Torre, assuming that he actually interviewed him for this passage and wasn’t getting the info anecdotally (there’s no direct quote from the Yankees skipper). If that’s the case, a sportswriter of Feinstein’s caliber should have either pricked up his ears at the gaffe or checked its validity.

To continue…

Burdette was the MVP in the ‘57 Series, which was played against the Yankees. He won Game Two, which was played on Oct. 3. His next appearance, another win, was Oct. 7, which meant he had three days off. He won the finale on Oct. 10, the only occurrence of two days’ rest. (By the way, the scenario almost repeated the following year: Burdette pitched in Game Two on Oct. 2, Game Five on Oct. 6 (three days’ rest), and Game Seven on Oct. 9 (two days).

So someone got both the personnel and temporal facts wrong. The question is, who?

Who is responsible for getting the information right? Torre? Feinstein? After reading Neyer’s Big Book of Baseball Myths, it could be simply a case of Torre misremembering rather than embellishing. But, again, shouldn’t the author have checked? Did he think Torre would have been insulted to have his recollection doubted?

Perhaps it is the editor’s responsibility to fact-check? Did she or he think Feinstein — based on his best-selling author reputation — couldn’t have made such a mistake or would be insulted by being questioned about the discrepancy?

The problem I always have in such situations: if I caught this one glitch, are there others I missed?