About the Author

Widely acclaimed as the greatest baseball writer of his generation, Roger Kahn is most famous for his modern classic, The Boys of Summer, which James Michener called the finest American book on sports. Kahn is the author of 16 books, including The Head Game, Baseball Seen from the Pitchers' Mound. His magazine articles won five Dutton Best Magazine Story Awards and his book The Era: When the Yankees Dodgers and Giants Ruled the World was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Born in Brooklyn, he now lives in Stone Ridge, N.Y. with his wife, the psychotherapist Katharine Colt Johnson.

Reviews

"Engrossing portraits of pitching masters . . . This book is Kahn at his best, _which is pretty damn good."-SPORTS ILLUSTRATED

"Everything a baseball book should be."-KIRKUS REVIEWS (STARRED REVIEW)

"Roger Kahn reveals something new about the most important part of the game. In "The Head Game" he puts a fresh and original twist on the battle between the pitcher and the hitter, and I thoroughly enjoyed it."--Tim McCarver

Adult/High School-Nonbaseball fans must wonder what it is about this game that can support such a large industry: 30 major league teams, each one playing 162 regular season games, followed by an extensive postseason, not to mention the exhibition season. From March to October, year after year, that's a lot of baseball. Kahn has seen his fair share. He wrote his first baseball story for the New York Herald Tribune in 1952, played the game for years before that, and has written about it off and on ever since. He likens the sport to a chess game at 90 miles per hour. Beyond winners and losers, beyond statistics, beyond the hoopla and hype, there is the "essential core of the game"-the pitcher-hitter duel. The author delves into the long and storied history of those battles, examining along the way the development of various pitches, the metaphysics of pitching, the enduring controversy of the brushback or knockdown pitch, and the role of the pitching coach, and gives an assessment of the great hurlers, past and present. Christy Mathewson gets Kahn's vote as the best of all time. Like most baseball books, this one is for the lover of the game, whether young or old. And the nonfan might turn to The Head Game for an answer to the question: What's all the fuss about?-Robert Saunderson, Berkeley Public Library, CA Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Bigger hitters, smaller parks, league expansion, and some plain bad pitching have contributed to the booming epidemic of major-league home runs. Kahn (The Boys of Summer; A Flame of Pure Fire) pleads that the great spectacle of baseball is not, in fact, the crowd-pleasing trajectory but the psychological battle between pitcher and batter, what Brooklyn hurler Clem Labine once called "the head game." Kahn elegantly traces the art of throwing across the years and through its many evolving gripsDthe curve ball from the Civil War days of Arthur "Candy" Cummings; Whitlow Wyatt's hitter-taming hard slider in the early 1940s; the Reagan-era advances in the split-fingered fastball and the circle change; up to the modern age, visiting with pitching coach Leo Mazzone's peerless staff of arms on the Atlanta Braves. There is enough memoir here (of Kahn's father teaching him his wrinkle pitch and of old Dodger days) to please readers who believe in Golden Ages and enough clear-eyed observation of the current game to satisfy fans who still believe that baseball can be beautiful, no matter how its owners tinker with it. Highly recommended for lovers of literate sports history and for bruised pitchers needing inspiration.DNathan Ward,"Library Journal" Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

"Engrossing portraits of pitching masters . . . This book is Kahn at his best, _which is pretty damn good."-SPORTS ILLUSTRATED

"Everything a baseball book should be."-KIRKUS REVIEWS (STARRED REVIEW)

"Roger Kahn reveals something new about the most important part of the game. In "The Head Game" he puts a fresh and original twist on the battle between the pitcher and the hitter, and I thoroughly enjoyed it."--Tim McCarver