What Baseball Means to Me

A Celebration of Our National Pastime

Contributors

By Curt Smith

By The National Baseball Hall of Fame

Formats and Prices

Price

$16.99

Price

$21.99 CAD

Format

ebook (Digital original)

Format:

ebook (Digital original) $16.99 $21.99 CAD

This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around February 28, 2009. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.

Funny, moving, and each one a diamond in the rough of the American consciousness, the essays in this book are the ultimate baseball conversation that pays homage to the perfect sport, in this perfect companion for all our personal baseball journeys.

For some people baseball means a memory-of a certain dusty ball field on a certain summer day, or the first time they walked into a major league park and saw the perfect emerald playing field. For some, baseball means one heartbreaking or heroic moment. And for others, it means a father, a friend, or an old flame who shared a game for a day or for a lifetime. To create this marvelous book, more than 150 writers, athletes, celebrities, politicians, presidents, and pundits were asked what baseball means to them. The answers came back with richness, wonder, insight, and poetry. A fascinating portrait of baseball’s beautiful nuances, What Baseball means to me marks the greatest collection of original essays ever written about the game. Accompanied by more than 200 classic baseball photographs, the voices in this book bring alive the game in all its venues-in the past and present, in wartime and hard times, in Cuba, in Wrigley Field or Yankee Stadium.

We meet players in a different light: including Paul Molitor returning a baseball to a trusting boy named Dan Jansen, Derek Jeter as depicted by his dad, the Toledo Mud Hens as seen through the eyes of Christine Brennan, and Pedro Martinez talking about baseball as a way of life in his native Dominican Republic. Most of all, we meet ordinary Americans, like the kids Rudy Giuliani grew up with in Brooklyn, or the man in Philadelphia who transforms himself for every home game from mild-mannered Tom Burgoyne to the Phillie Phanatic.

Genre:

On Sale
Feb 28, 2009
Page Count
288 pages
ISBN-13
9780446556989

Curt Smith

About the Author

Curt Smith is widely regarded as America’s foremost sports broadcasting historian. His previous books include What Baseball Means to Me; Voices of the Game; and Storied Stadiums, which is available from Carroll & Graf. He wrote two State of the Union addresses as a speechwriter for President George H. W. Bush and is now a senior lecturer in English at the University of Rochester.

Learn more about this author