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WORK TITLE: The Year of the Pitcher
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1976?
WEBSITE: http://www.sridharpappu.com/
CITY: Brooklyn
STATE: NY
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
http://www.sridharpappu.com/contact-1/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1975, in Oxford, OH.
EDUCATION:Graduate of Northwestern University.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Writes “Male Animal” column for New York Times. Has been feature writer for Chicago Reader, columnist at New York Observer, correspondent for Atlantic, and staff writer at Sports Illustrated and Washington Post.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including New York Magazine, Fast Company, Mother Jones, and Men’s Journal.
SIDELIGHTS
Sridhar Pappu analyzes a pivotal year in Major League Baseball in The Year of the Pitcher: Bob Gibson, Denny McLain and the End of Baseball’s Golden Age. The year was 1968, and baseball was dominated by pitching. Gibson, the star pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals, set a modern major league record with a 1.12 earned run average, while McLain, the ace for the Detroit Tigers, won thirty-one games; no major league pitcher had won thirty games or more since 1938. Gibson and McLain would eventually face each other in the World Series. There were other standout pitching performances that year as well. The Los Angeles Dodgers’ Don Drysdale pitched a record fifty-eight and two-thirds consecutive scoreless innings. The Cardinals’ Ray Washburn and the San Francisco Giants’ Gaylord Perry pitched back-to-back no-hitters against each other’s team. Jim “Catfish” Hunter of the Oakland Athletics pitched a perfect game. The National League had 185 shutout games, the American League 154. “Hitters were lost, offense nonexistent,” Pappu writes. The lack of scoring disappointed many fans, and baseball seemed to be losing its status as the national pastime to pro football, which some spectators found more exciting. Major League Baseball took steps in 1969 to increase run production, such as lowering the pitcher’s mound and reducing the strike zone. Pappu uses the stories of Gibson and McLain as a lens through which to view all that was going on in baseball in 1968, and indeed in the world. The Vietnam War was ongoing but deeply unpopular. Many American cities suffered from racial tensions, Detroit more than most. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated. In the tumultuous year, Gibson and McLain were a study in contrasts–Gibson African-American, taciturn, known for his intimidating presence on the mound, and seemingly always in control; McLain white, outgoing, cocky, and often out of control. Pappu also looks at the continued influence of the first African-American major leaguer, Jackie Robinson, even though he was long retired by 1968.
“From the very beginning, my focus was to get the baseball right,” Pappu told Rumpus online interviewer Erik Malinowski. “And it does deal with a variety of different things that I never thought I would deal with, but it’s through that baseball lens. Jackie Robinson became such a prominent figure in the book because of his post-baseball life, and it was kind of by accident. I just started exploring his role not only in American politics after his life in baseball, but what his life was really like in 1968.”
Several reviewers thought the author had gotten baseball and much more right. “Pappu tells his clear-eyed story chronologically, carefully situating the shifts of the season against the backdrop of historical events,” David M. Shribman observed in the Boston Globe. “His interests clearly tilt more toward the lives of real people than play-by-play or the propagation of myth.” Pappu’s portraits of those people and their enviroment are incisive, Shribman added, saying: “Seldom does an era, and do sports personalities, come alive so vividly, and so unforgettably.” Diana Nelson Jones, writing in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, remarked that Pappu “brings historical context and fine biographical narrative to baseball’s place in society in 1968.” A Kirkus Reviews critic noted that Pappu “explores so much more than the battle between two pitchers and their teams” and “is especially insightful in his discussions of issues of race.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch contributor Tim Bross called The Year of the Pitcher “a highly engaging look at that ’68 season” that “will appeal not only to Cardinals and Tigers fans, but to everyone interested in good baseball stories and the evolution of the game.” A Publishers Weekly commentator termed the book “exciting,” “sophisticated.” and marked by “skillful writing.” The Kirkus Reviews critic summed it up as “a fine history of a vital period.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Boston Globe, October 20, 2017, David M. Shribman, “When Pitchers Ruled the Earth.”
Kirkus Reviews, August 1, 2017, review of The Year of the Pitcher: Bob Gibson, Denny McLain, and the End of Baseball’s Golden Age.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, September 25, 2017, Diana Nelson Jones,”‘The Year of the Pitcher’: A Pitch-perfect Story of ‘Bob Gibson, Denny McLain, and the End of Baseball’s Golden Age.’”
Publishers Weekly, July 31, 2017, review of The Year of the Pitcher, p. 74.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 14, 2017, Tim Bross, “Gibson’s Pitching, ’68 Series and Baseball’s Golden Age.”
ONLINE
Rumpus, http://therumpus.net/ (October 2, 2017), Erik Malinowski, “The Most Important Thing: Talking Sports and Writing with Sridhar Pappu.”
Sridhar Pappu Website, http://www.sridharpappu.com (May 14, 2018).
Sridhar Pappu is the author of The Year of the Pitcher: Bob Gibson, Denny McLain and the end of Baseball's Golden Age set for publication by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, October 2017.
Pappu currently 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. His work has appeared in numerous publications including New York Magazine, Fast Company, Mother Jones and Men's Journal.
A native of Oxford, Ohio, and graduate of Northwestern University, he currently lives in Brooklyn.
Quoted in Sidelights: from the very beginning, my focus was to get the baseball right. And it does deal with a variety of different things that I never thought I would deal with, but it’s through that baseball lens. Jackie Robinson became such a prominent figure in the book because of his post-baseball life, and it was kind of by accident. I just started exploring his role not only in American politics after his life in baseball, but what his life was really like in 1968.
THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT THING: TALKING SPORTS AND WRITING WITH SRIDHAR PAPPU
BY ERIK MALINOWSKI
October 2nd, 2017
Sridhar Pappu’s path through journalism has taken him from writing features for Chicago Reader in the late 90s to ensuing staff gigs at the New York Observer, Sports Illustrated, the Atlantic, and the Washington Post. For much of the past decade, Pappu has carved out an inspiring freelance career—anchored by his periodic New York Times column, The Male Animal—but there’s been another long-term recurring assignment over that time, one that hasn’t experienced the gaze of any outside attention.
Pappu has spent the past six years reporting, researching, and writing The Year of the Pitcher: Bob Gibson, Denny McClain, and the End of Baseball’s Golden Age, a snapshot of sports and popular culture that is, in truth, about so much more than that. Pappu works his way through 1968, a milestone season in baseball history when pitchers were so dominant that league brass was forced into instituting rule changes to give hitters a fighting chance. Against the backdrop of this bubbling baseball revolution, Pappu deftly weaves in a bevy of non-sports moments that captivated the country, such as the 1968 presidential election, the Civil Rights Movement, and the ever-escalating conflict in Vietnam. The titular pitchers carry the narrative’s heavy lifting, as you might expect, but the true joy lies in Pappu’s interstitial tangents that elevate a stable of secondary characters—a pitching coach likely unbeknownst to many baseball fans plays a critical role throughout, but so does, of all people, a long-retired Jackie Robinson—and the result is a rollicking, fast-paced excursion through one of the most exciting, tumultuous, and significant eras in American history.
I spoke with Pappu shortly before his book was to publish on October 3, which happens to be the same launch day as my book, which explores how science and Silicon Valley helped engineer the Golden State Warriors’ seven-year metamorphosis into a new kind of basketball juggernaut. As a fellow first-time author, I wanted to see where Pappu’s mindset and expectations were before such a momentous day, what he hoped readers would take away from his labor of love, the backstory behind his baseball fandom, and how ready he is to pitch another book idea—whether it requires another six years or not.
***
The Rumpus: As we speak, we’re ten days out from publication and this book has essentially composed the better part of the six years of your life and your career. Being so close to the finish line, what does that feel like? What does it mean to you to finally see this through to publication after such a long road?
Sridhar Pappu: You come to it with mixed feelings, right? Because it is the culmination of all this work that you’ve put in and to see the physical product is pretty remarkable. At the same time, you’ve lived with this for a long time, and it’s your constant companion, whether you want it to be or not. And whether you’re working on it or not, it’s always looming in your mind and you’re thinking about it. So being so close, there are mixed emotions. When I was talking to someone about it, I said, “Well, I assume it’s like letting your toddler go off to daycare.” And he said, “You’ve been working on this so long, this is basically sending your kid off to kindergarten. This is no longer a toddler.”
Rumpus: I imagine you’ve thought about this every day for six years, but have you thought about what it would feel like to not think about it all the time?
Pappu: Once it was out of my hands—which is to say, once it went to the proofs—there was this sense where I was able to have a little bit of remove from it. It’s only now that it’s come roaring back, that it’s become part of my life again. Once everything ends—and I think I know this from having written a lot of magazine stories and newspaper stories and my column—there’s a tremendous stress with all kinds of stuff. With any magazine story or newspaper column or any big project you take on, there’s that combination of stress and then that part of you that says, “Oh, I can’t wait until it’s over.” And then it’s over and part of you feels a little sad. So I can’t imagine what it’s going to feel like when all of this is over, since it’s been six years of my life. The kind of stress that comes from doing shorter pieces of work, I think I’ve missed that a little bit.
Rumpus: I also have my own sports book publishing on the same day as yours. With mine, bits from several years of reporting here and there went into it, but the bulk of the work was done over the last eighteen months, from proposal to publication. You’ve been working on something four times as long as that. I know I had moments—chalk it up to first-time author anxiety or doubt or whatever—where the narrative was going off in unforeseen directions and that freaked me out a little. Did you have those moments along the way? Having worked at this for so long, I can imagine there were unexpected twists and turns. Did any of those pop up and how did you fight through it?
Pappu: Oh, definitely. There were people that I expected would make themselves available for the book who didn’t; that caused a fair amount of stress on my part. And it is a terribly lonely process. It’s just you. I remember on multiple occasions where I had to call people for help reporting. These were authors, but I’m looking for their two cents on reporting or just counsel. There was always invariably a pause on my part and they’ll say, “What’s wrong?” And I’ll tell them about some setback or what have you and they all said the same kind of thing: “Look, I know you feel like you’re by yourself. I know you feel like it’s you against the world. I know that it’s not fun. But this is how it is. You’ve chosen to do this.”
I think that’s the thing that you always have to remember: This was your choice. No one forced you to do this, but it’s something you wanted to do and you thought was worthwhile and you want to see it to completion. And not only that, you want to make a product that people will both enjoy and take something away from.
Rumpus: Perhaps now is a good time to say that your book is sensational. One of the reasons I love it is that you cast a really large net and corral a lot of interesting people and moments into the narrative. That was intriguing to me because the cover says “the year of the pitcher,” so it’s referencing a single year just with its language. Then it specifically references two specific players, and yet it’s really about so much more than just that one year or those players. From the start did you know and perhaps appreciate that your narrative would encompass such a wide scope? Did you know all the little directions you would go in and were you prepared for that, or was this something that grew over time as you did more recording and more research?
Pappu: Yeah, I had no idea. In the original proposal it starts in 1966. And now the book starts with a guy named Johnny Sain throwing a baseball against a wooden table some time after World War II. So I had no idea the directions it was going to take. In my original proposal, there was a lot more about 1968 from a non-baseball perspective. Eugene McCarthy and George Romney were at play heavily in the book, and what I discovered very early on—through some very good counsel—was that if I was going to write that book, I would end up with a half-good baseball book and a half-good history book and not satisfy anyone.
So from the very beginning, my focus was to get the baseball right. And it does deal with a variety of different things that I never thought I would deal with, but it’s through that baseball lens. Jackie Robinson became such a prominent figure in the book because of his post-baseball life, and it was kind of by accident. I just started exploring his role not only in American politics after his life in baseball, but what his life was really like in 1968. I never, ever, imagined that he would become such an important part of the book.
Rumpus: Tell me about your baseball fandom growing up. How did it influence you during your formative years?
Pappu: I was born in 1975, which was the first championship of the Big Red Machine—although they should have won it in 1972 and were robbed of the pennant in 1973. I was given a hand-knit Cincinnati Reds sweater at birth by a family friend and then—
Rumpus: A hand-knit Reds sweater?
Pappu: Yeah. It was blue, though, and there’s only one photo of me in it, but I wore that every day from around the time I was three to five. There are a lot of things from your childhood you find and are like, “Oh, why do I still have this?” That’s the one thing I would really like from my childhood and I don’t have it.
I grew up in Oxford, where Miami University of Ohio is. My father was a philosophy professor. It’s not that he hates sports, but he has a severe disinterest in it. It’s funny, actually. He and I were having coffee with the late David Carr in Washington. Carr asked my dad, “Do you like sports?” My dad shook his head, and then Carr pointed right at me and goes, “Then how do you explain this?” My dad shrugged his shoulders. I want to say my sports fandom really began maybe around sixth grade, right around the time the nucleus of a really good Reds team was coming up around Eric Davis, their center fielder who just captivated me and who I fell absolutely in love with.
In 1990, they won the World Series and I was fifteen years old. If they win another title, it’ll be great and I’ll enjoy it, but when you’re that age and you’ve watched a team come up like that, I don’t think there’s a better experience in the world.
Rumpus: It’s transformative, isn’t it?
Pappu: It is, and you remember every moment. It hits you at a time when you still really love that stuff. Not that I don’t love it still, but it feels like the single most important thing in your life. And then you start to pay attention to girls and then it doesn’t become the single most important thing in your life.
Rumpus: Are you starting to get the itch to do another book, or are you not quite there yet?
Pappu: I am, and I’ve played around with a few topics. There is part of me that wants to really get going again and then there’s a part of me that says, “Maybe you should take some time,” especially after this and really think about what you want to do next. I definitely started exploring topics that I can do and do well. I say it, like, hopefully it’ll take less time to do, but if I can produce a work that I’m proud of and it takes this amount of time, so be it. I will say that I learned so much in terms of process during the course of this, just with the sheer logistics of things but also in terms of all the missteps I made along the way, I think I can sidestep all that now because I know better.
Rumpus: So it might take another six years, but it would be an easier or more productive six years.
Pappu: Well, I don’t want to say that, because I don’t think any of this is easy. Anything you think is going to be easy, any chapter you think is going to be easy, any interview you set up with somebody that you think, “Okay, well, I can get in and out of this,” it usually ends up being really different or ten times more difficult.
***
Author photograph © Nina Subin.
Erik Malinowski is a sports features writer whose work has appeared in Rolling Stone, Deadspin, Slate, BuzzFeed, and others. His first book, Betaball: How Silicon Valley and Science Built One of the Greatest Basketball Teams in History, is out October 3, 2017 from Atria Books/Simon & Schuster. His work has been recognized in three editions of the Best American Sports Writing anthology. He lives near San Francisco. More from this author →
Sridhar Pappu is the author of The Year of the Pitcher: Bob Gibson, Denny McLain and the end of Baseball's Golden Age and for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, October 2017.
Sridhar currently writes "The Male Animal" column for The New York Times. He's interested in and writes about all kinds of things, including national politics, media, and sports. He began his 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 Monthly. In addition he worked as a staff writer at Sports Illustrated and The Washington Post. His work has appeared in numerous publications including New York Magazine, Fast Company, Mother Jones and Men's Journal.
A native of Oxford, Ohio, and graduate of Northwestern University, he currently lives in Brooklyn.
Quoted in Sidelights: “explores so much more than the battle between two pitchers and their teams” and “is especially insightful in his discussions of issues of race.”
“a fine history of a vital period.”
Pappu, Sridhar: THE YEAR OF THE PITCHER
Kirkus Reviews. (Aug. 1, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Pappu, Sridhar THE YEAR OF THE PITCHER Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (Adult Nonfiction) $28.00 10, 3 ISBN: 978-0-547-71927-6
Capturing baseball and its relationship to society in the 1960s on and off the field through the experiences of two teams and their two star pitchers.The year 1968 represented the apex of a decade in which pitchers asserted dominance over hitters in Major League Baseball. In that epochal year, two men were ascendant in what was still America's pastime. Bob Gibson (b. 1935) was the taciturn, intimidating African-American ace for the St. Louis Cardinals. Denny McLain (b. 1944) was the swaggering, self-involved white No. 1 pitcher for the Detroit Tigers. The two led their teams to pennants and a clash in that year's World Series. The Cardinals were the defending champions, while the Tigers were desperate to reach a level that had recently eluded them. New York Times "Male Animal" columnist Pappu tells this story, but he explores so much more than the battle between two pitchers and their teams. The author is clearly building toward 1968 from the beginning, but in reality, that year was the culmination of longer trends, and Gibson, McLain, and the teams represent a lens through which to view baseball in the 1960s more broadly. Refreshingly, Pappu rejects cliches about baseball saving a struggling Detroit or baseball somehow bringing America together. Instead, the sport tended to follow society more than leading it. Furthermore, despite the subtitle, Pappu does not present a "golden age" narrative. If anything, he rejects such romantic thinking. While Detroit emerged as the winner of the 1968 World Series, it hardly brought a city together beyond the fleeting celebrations that any championship brings. Pappu is especially insightful in his discussions of issues of race that pervaded baseball and American society. While he follows a generally chronological narrative, many of the chapters address themes that require him to go backward and forward in time in ways that both muddle the narrative and occasionally lead him to repeat key facts and arguments. But those are minor quibbles in a solid book. A fine history of a vital period in the history of not only baseball, but America.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Pappu, Sridhar: THE YEAR OF THE PITCHER." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Aug. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A499572609/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=1e7361f0. Accessed 15 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A499572609
Quoted in Sidelights: “exciting,” “sophisticated.” and marked by “skillful writing.”
The Year of the Pitcher: Bob Gibson, Denny McLain, and the End of Baseball's Golden Age
Publishers Weekly. 264.31 (July 31, 2017): p74.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Year of the Pitcher: Bob Gibson, Denny McLain, and the End of Baseball's Golden Age
SridharPappu. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $28 (400p) ISBN 978-0-547-71927-6
This exciting work by New York Times columnist Pappu is a sophisticated look at the 1968 baseball season, which he dubs the year of the pitcher. That year, the L.A. Dodgers' Don Drysdale threw 58 and two-thirds scoreless innings and there were 185 shutouts in the National League and 154 in the American League. "Hitters were lost, offense nonexistent," Pappu writes, as he explains why Major League Baseball subsequently made rule changes to benefit batters, such as shrinking the strike zone and lowering the pitcher's mound. Pappu gives a comprehensive look at the careers of the two superstars of that year, Bob Gibson of the St. Louis Cardinals and Denny McLain of the Detroit Tigers. As Pappu moves from their early years to the final legendary World Series battle between their two teams, he skillfully weaves the two players' contrasting styles--McLain's brazenness and "visions of grandeur" and Gibson's steely gaze and "fierce persona"--into a larger story about the pitchers' effect on baseball; changing attitudes about players' rights; and the shadow of politics and race cast over the sport during the year of the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. With skillful writing, Pappu also illuminates the ongoing role of Jackie Robinson as he brings to life the events of this tumultuous year. (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Year of the Pitcher: Bob Gibson, Denny McLain, and the End of Baseball's Golden Age." Publishers Weekly, 31 July 2017, p. 74. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A499863455/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=c64606ba. Accessed 15 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A499863455
Quoted in Sidelights: “Pappu tells his clear-eyed story chronologically, carefully situating the shifts of the season against the backdrop of historical events,” “His interests clearly tilt more toward the lives of real people than play-by-play or the propagation of myth.”“Seldom does an era, and do sports personalities, come alive so vividly, and so unforgettably.”
When pitchers ruled the earth
2
By David M. Shribman GLOBE CORRESPONDENT OCTOBER 20, 2017
This is the autumn of shimmery reminiscences about Red Sox baseball in 1967, occasioned by the 50th anniversary of the Impossible Dream team of Carl Yastrzemski, Jim Lonborg, Tony Conigliaro, and the season that changed Boston forever. So it is somewhat incongruous to encounter yet another reminiscence from the same general era, this one at the inconvenient juncture of 49 years, but a season as remarkable, as memorable — and as transformative.
Nineteen sixty-eight looms large in historical memory for its assassinations of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy, the tumultuous Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the election of Richard M. Nixon, and the breathtaking year-end space flight of Apollo 8. All that plus the unforgettable heroics of a number of baseball pitchers, especially the Cardinals’s Bob Gibson and the Tigers’s Denny McLain, who led their teams to one of the most thrilling World Series ever.
New Englanders can be forgiven if they consider 1968 an afterthought. The rest of the world does not. Instead, let’s consider 1968 a bravura coda, a season never to be surpassed for its virtuoso performances on the mound. In that context, “The Year of the Pitcher,’’ by Sridhar Pappu, stands up and stands out, though baseball fans everywhere, accustomed to investing their hopes in next year, may quibble with the book’s subtitle, which declares 1968 “the End of Baseball’s Golden Age’’ (although it undeniably marked the end of the dominance of pitchers, who were required to throw from a mound five inches lower the following year).
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Consider: Five pitchers finished that year with ERAs below 2.0. Two, the Giants’s Gaylord Perry and the Cardinals’s Ray Washburn, pitched no-hitters on consecutive nights against each other’s teams. (Never happened before, or after.) Don Drysdale pitched 58 2/3 scoreless innings — surpassed only by Orel Hershiser in 1988. Catfish Hunter pitched a perfect game. (There’ve only been 14 in the nearly five decades since.) And that’s without mentioning the accomplishments of the pair at the heart of Pappu’s book: Gibson, who finished the year with a 1.12 ERA, and McLain, who won 31 games.
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Pappu tells his clear-eyed story chronologically, carefully situating the shifts of the season against the backdrop of historical events. His interests clearly tilt more toward the lives of real people than play-by-play or the propagation of myth.
Pappu forswears the temptation to say that Gibson and McLain and their seven-game Series distracted America from its woes. It did not. Their performances did not for a moment ease the hurt of the families of Vietnam dead or that caused by the twin assassinations, racial discrimination, or one of the closest presidential races in history.
Nor does Pappu argue that Gibson and McLain are protagonists representing America. As baseball stars, the two lived American dreams in 1968, but they didn’t represent the American Dream, or much else.
Gibson, the fearless pitcher and master of the slider, was a fan favorite but no clubhouse clown, nor even a soothing locker-room presence. “Being disagreeable,’’ Pappu tells us, “worked for him.’’ However, he “owned the frame to his own story’’ and “had become not only a complete pitcher but one capable of sustained greatness.’’
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McLain, meanwhile, was likewise no day at the beach. “Uncontrollable and bratty,’’ Pappu says. Also “petty and desperately immature.’’ The Detroit pitcher drank more than five dozen Pepsi Colas a week and was capable of spending hours on end at a craps table. He may have been a master on the mound, but at home he was a mess. Later he lost all his money, went to prison, threatened to cut off the ears of his wife and children, and earned his living at a 7-Eleven.
These Cardinals were but one edition in a great collection of St. Louis baseball teams, remarkable mostly for the presence of Gibson. These Tigers are remembered as the team that, in the wake of the city’s riots, saved Detroit — at least in the popular imagination. But Pappu deserves credit for not buying it. “This was not a city on the mend,’’ he writes, for white flight, municipal corruption, and racial tensions have persisted into the present.
One of the unintended but sweet assets of this volume is that it answers the lingering question, posed in movies and at sports bars, of the importance of those time-consuming conferences on the mound. Once, when catcher Tim McCarver approached Gibson for a consultation, the hurler hurled this:
“What the hell are you doing out here? Get the hell back behind the plate where you belong. The only thing you know about pitching is that you can’t hit it.’’
Of such gems is this book constructed. Seldom does an era, and do sports personalities, come alive so vividly, and so unforgettably.
THE YEAR OF THE PITCHER:
Bob Gibson, Denny McLain, and the End of Baseball’s Golden Age
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By Sridhar Pappu
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 381 pp., illustrated, $28
David M. Shribman, executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, can be reached at dshribman@post-gazette.com.
Quoteed in Sidelights: “brings historical context and fine biographical narrative to baseball’s place in society in 1968.”
‘The Year of the Pitcher’: A pitch-perfect story of ‘Bob Gibson, Denny McLain, and the End of Baseball's Golden Age’
Photo of Diana Nelson Jones
DIANA NELSON JONES
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
djones@post-gazette.com
SEP 25, 2017 10:59 PM
Many of us remember 1968 as one of the 20th century’s most iconic and turbulent years: the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy; rioting, fires and looting in the streets, the nadir of the Vietnam quagmire and the rising tide of protests against it.
Our astronauts orbited the moon, a flare in the Cold War, and Olympic track medalists Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised gloved fists during the national anthem, a flare against racism.
Against this backdrop, Sridhar Pappu chronicles the 1968 baseball season, focusing on the lives of Bob Gibson of the St. Louis Cardinals and Denny McLain of the Detroit Tigers, two dominating pitchers who personified another milestone of 1968 — paradoxically one of the quietest years in baseball history, with an average fewer than 3.5 runs per game.
In “The Year of the Pitcher” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $28), Mr. Pappu — who write the “Male Animal” column for The New York Times — brings historical context and fine biographical narrative to baseball’s place in society in 1968.
The game’s executives blamed the deficit of swat on the height of the mound. Average run production had been about four per game throughout the ‘60s, but by ‘68, baseball was losing people’s attention with the ascent of football, and its pastoral nature was in danger of seeming irrelevant in a world of burning trash cans.
To pump up interest in the game, the suits lowered the mound from 15 to 10 inches for the 1969 season, hoping that by cutting down on the pitcher’s trajectory batters would produce more hits and runs. That year, a line-up of nobodies except for a dominant pitching staff, the New York Mets, won the World Series, proof that no year lives in isolation and that no remedy is fixed.
Yet pundits tagged 1968 the year of the pitcher since average runs per game began inching up from that point.
Mr. Pappu pays great attention to society’s larger story in context. At times, you forget you are reading about a baseball season with all the side trips and interpositions -- kind of like an actual game with its time-outs, mound conferences and other delays. But that season was particularly thrilling as these key mound opponents led their teams to the World Series.
Gibson was so dominant, with a stare so withering that he intimidated batters even before he started his wind-up. He was known for being surly with the press and taut in his forbearance with fans, but Mr. Pappu delves into his life, starting with his fatherless childhood in the projects of Omaha, and introduces the reader to a man of valor and great emotional stamina.
Mr. McLain’s gift was that of a prodigy. While Mr. Gibson was the model of a working man, Mr. McLain was soft-looking, self-indulgent and flaunted the rules. He was a flaming egotist, a self-promoter, preening in his desire to become rich, and yet Mr. Pappu delves and gives us an understanding of why Denny was Denny, from his youth in Chicago with strange parents and a great amount of emotional insecurity.
Mr. McLain’s life would spiral out of control from the shady company he kept to the prison time he served for mistreating other people’s money. But not before he set his own milestone, one that still stands. No one since McLain hsas won 31 games in a season, as he did in 1968. Bob Welch came the closest in 1990 with 27 wins for the Oakland A’s.
The Tigers beat the Cardinals in seven games in 1968. Tigers pitcher Mickey Lolich won all three of his starts, all complete games. McLain lost two of his three starts while Gibson won two of his three.
As someone who consumed 1968 in all its clamor and consequence, I enjoyed this great read in part for the nostalgia. It was also part oh my goodness how much I didn’t understand at age 10, but it was familiar.The biggest reward was learning about Johnny Sain.
Before my time, he was part of a rhyme I had heard — “Spahn and Sain then pray for rain.” Warren Spahn and Johnny Sain were the dynamic duo of the Boston Braves of the 1940s. Sain pitched four 20-game seasons, but his greatest gift was coaching pitchers. His pitchers loved him, but he ran afoul of management with unorthodox methods. He would bounce from team to team, hotly sought-after at first then gone in a few years. Jim Bouton, a former Yankees pitcher and author of the classic “Ball Four,” called Sain the greatest pitching coach who ever lived. Sain was a reader, patient, empathetic and wise. He championed his pitchers. He understood them. He was able to rein McLain in and persuade him to listen to advice, apparently the height of his magic.
Sain died in 2006. Mr. McLain and Mr. Gibson are still with us. And so, in many ways, is 1968.
Quoted in Sidelights: “a highly engaging look at that ’68 season” that “will appeal not only to Cardinals and Tigers fans, but to everyone interested in good baseball stories and the evolution of the game.”
BOOK REVIEWS
Gibson's pitching, '68 series and baseball's golden age
By Tim Bross Special to the Post-Dispatch Oct 14, 2017 (4)
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The “golden age” label can be particularly suspect when applied to baseball, as it tends to coincide with one’s childhood. Baseball was always better then, whether it was the ’50s, ’70s or ’90s.
Author Sridhar Pappu, however, is on firm ground in his new book, “The Year of the Pitcher,” in categorizing mid-1960s baseball as “golden.” After all, as former Cardinals catcher Tim McCarver recently noted on radio, the National League outfield for the 1966 All-Star Game at Busch Memorial Stadium was Hank Aaron, Roberto Clemente and Willie Mays. Case closed.
Pappu is also right in writing that 1968, often cited as the Year of the Pitcher, was the end of the era. The focus of Pappu’s book, aces Bob Gibson of the Cardinals and Denny McLain of the Detroit Tigers, did things that year that most certainly won’t be repeated: Gibson’s 1.12 earned run average and McLain’s 31 wins. Baseball brass, worried of the effect of 1-0 and 2-1 scores on attendance, in 1969 lowered the pitching mound by 5 inches and shrank the strike zone. Batting averages, bases on balls, and scoring rose accordingly.
Pappu’s book, despite some rough early innings, is a highly engaging look at that ’68 season, which climaxed with a seven-game Cardinals-Tigers World Series. The book will appeal not only to Cardinals and Tigers fans, but to everyone interested in good baseball stories and the evolution of the game.
The account does have a few flaws, ranging from minor irritants — such as making Sen. Stuart Symington a Montanan and misspelling Gale Sayers’ first name — to some overreaching.
For instance, in describing McLain’s decision to sign with the Chicago White Sox instead taking a scholarship offer from Notre Dame, that institution becomes “the grand epicenter of Catholic education.” Some diversions from the narrative aren’t relevant. Among them: the ’67 Detroit riots and odd recurring references to sports writer George Vecsey’s second-guessing of his career choice.
Other side trips, like those involving Johnny Sain, Jim Kaat and Jim “Mudcat” Grant, are highlights of the book.
Sain, the pre-eminent pitching coach of his day, would be laughed at by current managers. Sain believed the way to build a strong pitching arm was through repetitive use, not by resting it between appearances. Running and conditioning were overrated, he believed. “I’ve never seen a man run the ball across home plate,” Sain said. “In order to pitch nine innings, you’ve got to pitch nine innings.”
His ability to instill confidence made him a favorite coach for multiple pitchers, including McLain.
Game One of the Series, matching the stoic, intense Gibson and the brash, outspoken McLain, was highly anticipated. Both had won their leagues’ most valuable player awards.
Pappu writes: “For all their competitive zeal, the two had grown wary of talking publicly about their matchup. But it was all the press could talk about.”
The drama fizzled. McLain was gone after the fifth inning. Gibson, however, turned in one of the most dominant performances of all time, a record 17-strikeout shutout. (Gibson’s own book, “Pitch by Pitch,” addresses that game. )
The Series would end badly for the Cards. As Cardinals rightfielder Roger Maris had predicted, the team would have trouble not with McLain but with lefthander Mickey Lolich. He was the Series MVP. Pappu lists 75 people he interviewed for his book. One name is conspicuous by its absence: Big No. 45, Bob Gibson.
Pappu recognizes the awkwardness of retired athletes’ being asked, over and over, to relive decades-old events.
“It’s awful,” Pappu writes. “Yet there are many former athletes who oblige, who are willing to spend the time reliving those days for us. Bob Gibson simply isn’t one them.”
Tim Bross is a former Post-Dispatch editor. He lives in Kirkwood.