Day 26: 30 baseball books in 30 days of April
The book: "Living on the Black: Two Pitchers, Two Teams, One Season to Remember"
The author: John Feinstein
How to find it: Little Brown and Company, 544 pages, $26.99.
Where we'd go looking for it: Powell's has it, as does Amazon.
The scoop: You the benefit of the doubt to Feinstein, author of gobs of these kinds of heavy analysis sports books -- "A Season on the Brink," going back to '87, and up through "The Last Amateurs" to "The Majors" to "Last Dance: Behind the Scenes at the Final Four" to ... you get the picture. Most of those books carry Feinstein's name almost as big, if not bigger, than the title themselves.
Few of them, however, as as thick as this tome, or carry as many pages. You decide if there's a payoff when you finally swim to the deep end and can't go back.
Feinstein says in his introduction that he wanted the book to be an examination of a pitcher's year through the eyes of David Cone in 2000. Instead, Cone allowed famed author Roger Angell to do it -- "A Pitcher's Story: Innings With David Cone" in 2001 -- and it wasn't all that gripping, since Cone was injured for most of it. Feinstein readjusted his gameplan and settled on both Tom Glavine -- a lefty who was no college educated, playing his entire career in the National League -- and Mike Mussina -- a righty who went to Stanford and graduated a half-year early, playing his entire career in the American league -- who both pitched in New York. And both, as the title said, lived on the black edge of the plate to get hitters out.
"They're like scientists out there. They don't beat you with their arm so much as they beat you with their minds," says Detroit Tigers manager Jim Leyland about the two.
Glavine and Mussina were both in pursuit of the 250th career win in 2007, and both got it, despite some less-than-stellar statistics. Glavine (13-8, 4.45) faltered at the end of the season, as did the Mets; Mussina (11-10, 5.15) came out of the Yankees' rotation at one point.
"What I got to see and hear and learn up close," Feinstein writes, "had little to do with wins and losses ... what I set out to do was give people a sense of what went into those numbers."
Was it a season to remember? Maybe, maybe not. Will the book be? It'll be a vital part of the Feinstein Collection once the publisher gets around to making that package come together down the road.
How it goes down in the scorebook: 1, unassisted.
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