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K av Tyler Kepner
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MedlemmarRecensionerPopularitetGenomsnittligt betygOmnämnanden
19910135,414 (3.86)6
The baseball is an amazing plaything. We can grip it and hold it so many different ways, and even the slightest calibration can turn an ordinary pitch into a weapon to thwart the greatest hitters in the world. Each pitch has its own history, evolving through the decades as the masters pass it down to the next generation. From the earliest days of the game, when Candy Cummings dreamed up the curveball while flinging clamshells on a Brooklyn beach, pitchers have never stopped innovating. In K: A History of Baseball in Ten Pitches, Tyler Kepner traces the colorful stories and fascinating folklore behind the ten major pitches. Each chapter highlights a different pitch, from the blazing fastball to the fluttering knuckleball to the slippery spitball. Infusing every page with infectious passion for the game, Kepner brings readers inside the minds of combatants sixty feet, six inches apart. Filled with priceless insights from many of the best pitchers in baseball history including twenty-two Hall of Famers--from Bob Gibson, Steve Carlton, and Nolan Ryan to Greg Maddux, Mariano Rivera, and Clayton Kershaw--K will be the definitive book on pitching and join such works as The Glory of Their Times and Moneyball as a classic of the genre.… (mer)
Medlem:JackSweeney
Titel:K
Författare:Tyler Kepner
Info:
Samlingar:Ditt bibliotek
Betyg:*****
Taggar:Baseball

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K: A History of Baseball in Ten Pitches av Tyler Kepner

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Summary: A New York Times sportswriter writes about ten different pitches in the repertoire of pitchers, how they are thrown, what they do, the pitchers who threw them, and how they worked or didn’t in famous games.

When I first saw the title of this book, I thought the book would recount ten pitches thrown in pressure situations in important games that made the difference between a win and a loss. I wondered how one would do that. Instead, the book tells the story of baseball in terms of ten different kinds of pitches various pitchers have used with greater or lesser success.

In truth, this is at the heart of baseball, the duel between a hitter, often quite skilled at “reading” a pitch and a pitcher whose success rides on fooling the batter enough that the ball either makes it into the catchers mitt or is hit as a playable ball for an out. So much depends on what the ball does in the last 15 feet of its 60 foot 6 inch journey. Over the history of baseball, pitchers have developed different ways of throwing the ball to make it do different things, and if they are good at it, not giving it away in their motion or the way the ball comes out of the pitcher’s hand.

The ten pitches Tyler Kepner discusses are: slider, fastball, curve ball, knuckleball, splitter, screwball, sinker, changeup, spitball, and the cutter. It all comes down (except for the spitter) to the placement of fingers in relation to the seams of the baseball, and the action of fingers and wrist in the release of the ball. Kepner walks us through how each pitch was thrown and famous pitchers who used it. One of the stories that comes up over and over is how mastery of a particular pitch either elevated an average pitcher to greatness or prolonged the career of a pitcher who had lost his blazing fastball.

The slider was what turned Ron Guidry into a Cy Young winner. For Don Sutton and Bert Blyleven, it was the curveball. The knuckleball kept Hoyt Wilhelm and Phil Nierkro in baseball forever. Bruce Sutter couldn’t throw a slider without hurting his arm. The splitter, which looked like a fastball until the bottom dropped out, turned him into a dominant pitcher and saved his arm. Warren Spahn, who won 363 games, the most for a lefty, pitched into his forties using the screwball. The sinker saved the career of Dan Quisenberry. A coach’s advice to not give up on the changeup turned Frank Viola into a winner. For Mariano Rivera, the cutter was the out pitch that was key to his record 652 career saves.

Kepner combines stats and stories with enough of each to lure in any baseball afficionado from the stats geek to the one who loves remembering Bill Mazeroski’s home run in game seven of the 1960 World Series making the Pirates World Champions. [Ralph Terry recalls the pitch as a high cutter]. We learn that the record fastball is 105 mph and in years to come, pitchers will need to throw 97-98 and touch 101-102. Yet hitters adapt to the fastball, no matter how fast. That’s why movement, and other pitches are crucial.

We’re also reminded of the brutal toll pitching takes on many arms (unless you are Steve Carlton, who learned to pitch without hurting his arm). That’s why figuring out how to deceive batters without burning out one’s arm is so crucial to success and longevity. Of course there is the spitter or the scuffed ball, making the ball’s trajectory unpredictable–as long as the pitcher doesn’t get caught. We learn that most pitchers stay mum about how they did it because one shared his secrets lost a chance at the Hall of Fame.

All of this is great fun, and it is great to understand how a particular pitch works when a sports announcer talks about it. Kepner’s book takes us into the incredible combination of athleticism, mental discipline, and training that makes a major league pitcher. We even learn how pitchers use strings to learn how to throw a particular pitch to a particular location. Tyler Kepner has done what the great baseball writers do–to deepen our love for the game. I wondered who would take up the mantle of Roger Angell. It just might be Tyler Kepner. I was delighted to learn that this was not his most recent book, which was The Grandest Stage published in 2022. That just might be my baseball book for next summer! ( )
  BobonBooks | Sep 11, 2023 |
New York Times baseball columnist Tyler Kepner found an interesting way to present a brief history of baseball, and about some of baseball's best pitchers, in his book "K: A History of Baseball in Ten Pitches". By writing about the significant pitches used over the years, from the fastball to the change up, from the hard slider to the fluttering knuckle ball, from the curve to the cutter, from the legal to the illegal, he looks at how baseball has evolved over the years. Kepner describes each pitch, it's origins, how the ball is held and thrown, and the early proponents and masters of each pitch. He also includes stories about some of the best hitters in the game, and how even the best of hitters could be fooled by each pitch. As you read the book, you should enjoy hearing about a few players you may never have heard of, about players from your childhood you may have forgotten, about a number of Hall-of-Fame players, and about some of today's best players.

My only regret was in selecting the audiobook format for this book. Because I was out and about while listening, I didn't have the opportunity to hold a ball in my hands as Kepner described how the pitchers held the ball, or to have illustrations to see what he was describing. Listening to the words without the images left me wanting more.
( )
  rsutto22 | Jul 15, 2021 |
I was hoping for something else. There's good stuff here, but the presentation's a letdown, and I'm not sure why. It's just kind of formless. ( )
  joeldinda | Mar 7, 2021 |
Cool way to tell some baseball history. Really liked having interviews from the different players. ( )
  mbeaty91 | Sep 9, 2020 |
Tyler Kepner explores ten different pitches in baseball, describing how they're thrown, how they move, and the history of how they originated and developed. The ten pitches include standard pitches like the fastball, curveball, and slider.

But Kepner also explores pitches that only an elite cadre of pitchers can master (the knuckleball) and a pitch that only one pitcher can really handle (Mariano Rivera and the cutter). He also explores pitches that had peaks of popularity in the past but are all but absent in the present-day game (the screwball and the splitter). Kepner even devotes a chapter to spitballs, scuffballs, and other modifications to the ball that affect pitches and the gamesmenship of pitchers known to use them.

The book is written in an oral history style, relying on Kepner's interviews with current and retired pitchers and coaches as well as quotes from earlier works that covered now deceased pitchers. The book is a creative way to look at the history of baseball from the perspective of one of its most important facets.

Favorite Passages:
Every pitch is a decision. That is the beauty and the burden of the pitcher. Think there’s downtime in baseball? Tell it to the man on the mound, all alone on that dirt bull’s-eye. The catcher thinks along with him, back behind the plate, but the pitcher rules the game. Nothing happens until he answers these questions: Which pitch should I throw, where should I throw it, and why? It is an awesome responsibility.



I’ve found that most people in baseball tend to be…pretty nice. And of all the subsets of folks in the game, knuckleball pitchers might be the nicest. They are also part of the smallest group, which helps explain it. Almost all knuckleballers were rejected by the game before they could last very long. They earned their living by grabbing the wing of a butterfly and then, somehow, steering it close enough to the strike zone, again and again, to baffle the best hitters in the world.



In the 1930s, the prime of the great Giant lefty Carl Hubbell, “screwball” came to describe a specific genre of Hollywood comedies: battle of the sexes, often with a woman’s madcap antics upending a stuffy man’s world. In his book about Depression-era films, Andrew Bergman wrote that “screwball comedy,” like Hubbell’s famous pitch, was “unconventional, went in different directions and behaved in unexpected ways.”



“Have I ever told you about my agreement with the ball?” Quisenberry asked Angell, who said no. “Well, our deal is that I’m not going to throw you very hard as long as you promise to move around when you get near the plate, because I want you back. So if you do your part, we’ll get to play some more.”



After two chaotic decades or so, the spitball was banned for 1920, the same year the country went dry under Prohibition. The rule simply turned the mound into a speakeasy, with many pitchers going undercover to get the same slippery edge as their predecessors.
( )
  Othemts | Jun 6, 2020 |
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The baseball is an amazing plaything. We can grip it and hold it so many different ways, and even the slightest calibration can turn an ordinary pitch into a weapon to thwart the greatest hitters in the world. Each pitch has its own history, evolving through the decades as the masters pass it down to the next generation. From the earliest days of the game, when Candy Cummings dreamed up the curveball while flinging clamshells on a Brooklyn beach, pitchers have never stopped innovating. In K: A History of Baseball in Ten Pitches, Tyler Kepner traces the colorful stories and fascinating folklore behind the ten major pitches. Each chapter highlights a different pitch, from the blazing fastball to the fluttering knuckleball to the slippery spitball. Infusing every page with infectious passion for the game, Kepner brings readers inside the minds of combatants sixty feet, six inches apart. Filled with priceless insights from many of the best pitchers in baseball history including twenty-two Hall of Famers--from Bob Gibson, Steve Carlton, and Nolan Ryan to Greg Maddux, Mariano Rivera, and Clayton Kershaw--K will be the definitive book on pitching and join such works as The Glory of Their Times and Moneyball as a classic of the genre.

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