The Greatest Game
From SoSH
Author: Richard Bradley
Publisher: Free Press
Date: 2008
Summary: In 1978, the AL East division champion was determined by a one-game playoff, a taut battle between the Sox and the MFY at Fenway. Bradley gives a pitch-by-pitch breakdown of the Boston loss (a three-run homer by Bucky Dent in the top of the seventh cemented the Yankees’ lead), and an account of the volatile season preceding it. At a time when pro baseball was making the transition from homegrown pastime to big business, emotions ran high and outsized personalities clashed; New York’s pugnacious manager, Billy Martin, resigned in tears mid-season. Bradley’s prosaic style and his penchant for statistics sometimes test the reader’s patience, but his portraits of the coaches and players who converged that day in October lend an intimacy and richness to the book.
Best of all, it takes us to that great rivalry, and while it breaks our hearts again,according to Rough Carrigan, "It's told in the form of a recounting of each inning of action with some background info interspersed even in those chapters. And there are also chapters, in between those recounting the action of that game, in which some of the players are described in much greater detail...a lot of nuggets of info that I'd never heard before and found fascinating....And if, like me, you remember that game as an event of immense emotional trauma, you'll want to find out more of the background."
