The Year of the Pitcher, Sridhar Pappu
The Year of the Pitcher, Sridhar Pappu
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The Year of the Pitcher
Bob Gibson, Denny McLain, and the End of Baseball’s Golden Age

Author: Sridhar Pappu

Narrator: Leon Nixon

Unabridged: 12 hr 56 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 10/30/2018

Synopsis

The Year of the Pitcher is the story of the remarkable 1968 baseball season, which culminated in one of the greatest World Series contests ever, with the Detroit Tigers coming back from a 3–1 deficit to beat the Cardinals in Game Seven of the World Series.

In 1968, two remarkable pitchers would dominate the game as well as the broadsheets. One was black, the other white. Bob Gibson, together with the St. Louis Cardinals, embodied an entire generation's hope for integration at a heated moment in American history. Denny McLain, his adversary, was a crass self-promoter who eschewed the team charter and his Detroit Tigers teammates to zip cross-country in his own plane. For one season, the nation watched as these two men and their teams swept their respective league championships to meet at the World Series. Gibson set a major league record that year with a 1.12 ERA. McLain won more than 30 games in 1968, a feat not achieved since 1934 and untouched since. Together, the two have come to stand as iconic symbols, giving the fans "The Year of the Pitcher" and changing the game.

About Sridhar Pappu

Sridhar Pappu writes "The Male Animal" column for the New York Times. He began his award-winning career as a feature writer for the Chicago Reader and has served as a columnist at the New York Observer and as a correspondent for the Atlantic. In addition he worked as a staff writer at Sports Illustrated and the Washington Post. A native of Oxford, Ohio, and graduate of Northwestern University, he currently lives in Brooklyn.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Joe on August 29, 2022

I have been fortunate in my baseball reading as of late - this and Luke Epplin’s “Our Team” I found excellent. What both authors do extremely well is place the “baseball story” within the context of the times while telling the stories/biographies of the main players - pardon the pun. This book cente......more

Goodreads review by Jill on September 30, 2017

"The Year of the Pitcher: Bob Gibson, Denny McLain, and the End of Baseball's Golden Age", (now that's a mouthful!) is a book about baseball that encompasses so much more than the game and the players. Author Sridhar Pappu looks at the year 1968 - already justifiably famous for non-sports events - a......more

Goodreads review by J.P. on October 27, 2017

For those who want sports in a vacuum and believe the players should simply go to work and not have any interest nor say in the wider world around them, this isn't for you. For those who want to be reminded once again of how divided this country really was in the mid- to late-60s and have that divisi......more

Goodreads review by Mark on March 07, 2018

With 2018 spring training gearing up I decided to read this baseball book hoping that it would provide a good biography of pitchers Denny McLain and Bob Gibson. The author provided a historical perspective, but I was not seeking to read a political book too, as the book jumped around covering not on......more

Goodreads review by Harold on August 24, 2019

Mr. Pappu's book is superbly researched and acutely portrays the transition of baseball and the country in 1968. I found the book made me feel melancholy: not nostalgic, but rather sad. It was a year of immense racial tension in the country especially after the 1967 riots in Detroit. There remained......more

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