Ten Innings at Wrigley
The Wildest Ballgame Ever, with Baseball on the Brink
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3.8 • 10 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The dramatic story of a legendary 1979 slugfest between the Chicago Cubs and the Philadelphia Phillies, full of runs, hits, and subplots, on the cusp of a new era in baseball history
It was a Thursday at Chicago’s Wrigley Field, mostly sunny with the wind blowing out. Nobody expected an afternoon game between the Philadelphia Phillies and Chicago Cubs on May 17, 1979, to be much more than a lazy early-season contest matching two teams heading in opposite directions—the first-place Phillies and the Cubs, those lovable losers—until they combined for thirteen runs in the first inning. “The craziest game ever,” one player called it. “And then the second inning started.”
Ten Innings at Wrigley is Kevin Cook’s vivid account of a game that could only have happened at this ballpark, in this era, with this colorful cast of heroes and heels: Hall of Famers Mike Schmidt and Bruce Sutter, surly slugger Dave Kingman, hustler Pete Rose, unlucky Bill Buckner, scarred Vietnam vet Garry Maddox, troubled relief pitcher Donnie Moore, clubhouse jester Tug McGraw, and two managers pulling out what was left of their hair.
It was the highest-scoring ballgame in a century, and much more than that. Cook reveals the human stories behind a contest the New York Times called “the wildest in modern history” and shows how money, muscles, and modern statistics were about to change baseball forever.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sportswriter Cook (Electric October) takes an exciting look at the 1979 baseball game between the Chicago Cubs and the Philadelphia Phillies, in which the two middling teams scored a combined total of 45 runs over 10 innings. In fast-paced, inning-by-inning descriptions, Cook delivers both a play-by-play (13 runs were scored in the first inning) and an insider's take on key players including Dave Kingman, a powerful home-run hitter who played outfield "with the grace of a falling tree," and pitcher Donnie Moore, who had revived his career by mastering the split-finger fastball, which became "the Pitch of the Eighties." Cook bookends his telling of the game with insightful takes on the idiosyncrasies of the players and teams ("Kingman kind of exemplified the Cubs.... He was bad in interesting ways") and closes with an extended look at the ways baseball has evolved since then especially the changes in pitching styles, which would make the split-fingered fastball and the screwball all but disappear. This is an excellent look at a momentous individual game, and the long view of the ways baseball has changed during the last 30 years is equally rewarding.
