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Summary
Summary
Ron Darling has been beloved by Mets fans since he helped his team win the 1986 World Series. Today he is considered one of the most articulate and insightful broadcasters in baseball, bringing the game to life in ways that few can match. Now he gives us an engaging, sophisticated, practical, and philosophical exploration of the art, strategy, and psychology of pitching.
Darling takes us inside the pitcher's mind, illuminating the subtler aspects of the game and providing a deeper appreciation of what happens on the field. He explains why the position of pitcher is uniquely strategic and complex and explores the various tactics a pitcher uses in different scenarios, including the countless factors in deciding what to throw and how he bounces back from a tough inning. Throughout, we get a glimpse of what it feels like to stand alone on the mound, the center of attention for tens of thousands of fans.
While there are technical books on pitching, there is no other book that examines the position in such compelling depth as The Complete Game. Filled with captivating, real-life anecdotes, it will do for pitching what Ted Williams's The Science of Hitting did for batting--and it will be an essential book for every fan and aspiring player.
Author Notes
Writer and educator Daniel Paisner received a B.A. from Tufts University and an M.A. from Boston University.
He is an adjunct professor of journalism in the communication arts department of Long Island University.
Paisner is the author of Horizontal Hold: The Making and Breaking of a Network Pilot and has collaborated on works with the likes of George Pataki, Montel Williams, and model Emme.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
New York Review of Books Review
RON DARLING, the former pitcher for the great Mets teams of the 1980s (and later for the Montreal Expos and the Oakland A's, but who cares?), has written a thoughtful and lively new book about the art, craft and business of his trade. It's a nuts-and-bolts kind of baseball book - a pitcher's answer to Ted Williams's classic, "The Science of Hitting," to cite the hopeful comparison made on the book's jacket - but it is also, in part, a memoir. A workplace memoir. It tells us not only how Darling pitched, but what being a baseball player felt like to him, and what the game meant to him. That relationship was, of course, a bittersweet one; the game ultimately left him, as it does all players. And so he opens his book with an epigraph from A. Bartlett Giamatti, the former commissioner of baseball and former president of Yale (Darling's alma mater): "It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone." I liked Darling's book a lot, and Major League Baseball would surely have been better off if Giamatti, a strong and wise commissioner, hadn't died of a heart attack in 1989 after only five months in office, but this quotation really annoyed me. For one thing, the manly but melancholy, elegiac view of baseball - the unforgiving verities of its geometry, the fleeting beauty of its playing, blah blah blah - is one of our hoariest sports clichés, the default setting whenever anyone who read Hemingway or Robert Stone or Cormac McCarthy in college sits down to write about the game. But more to the point, baseball doesn't just break your heart in poignant, circle-of-life, seasons-of-love, sunrise-sunset, where-have-you-goneJoe-DiMaggio ways. It also, and more frequently, breaks your heart in crass, grubby, depressing ways. As when the star third baseman of your 10-year-old son's favorite team grudgingly confesses to having used steroids. Or when your own favorite team knocks down its stadium and puts up a pretty taxpayer-supported park named for a taxpayer-financed bank and with 15,000 fewer seats than the old pile, so that when you try to buy tickets to individual games for your family, the only seats available to the general public start at $270 a pop. True, you can find cheaper seats for resale on StubHub, but why, in depression or boom, does such a thing as a $270 baseball ticket even exist? Too often, the taste baseball leaves behind is less bittersweet than just plain bitter. Am I speaking for myself? As a Mets fan, I suspect not. Indeed, while bitterness is itself a baseball tradition of Cracker Jack-like venerability (as fans of the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants are well aware), over the past two decades Mets fans have had a singular purchase on the emotion, beginning in the immediate wake of the 1986 World Series championship. That cocky, glorious team should have gone on to dominate the rest of the decade but instead squandered its promise in a sinkhole of clubhouse friction, management blunders and - no small contributor - epic substance abuse. Somehow, by the early '90s, what had been the most colorful team in baseball became the sourest. (Remember Vince Coleman, of the 1993 Mets, throwing a firecracker at a group of fans and injuring three, including a toddler?) What does the franchise have to show for the present decade? A humiliation by the Yankees in the 2000 World Series, a near miss in the 2006 N.L.C.S. against the Cardinals and, back to back, two of history's most funk-filled and enervating collapses. The boys of bummer: you wouldn't think this would be the basis for a powerful literary tradition (or $270 seats). But the '86 Mets still exert a hold on the collective baseball memory, and Darling is not the only former member of that clubhouse manning the book-signing tables. Darryl Strawberry, the power-hitting right fielder of great talent and great flaws - an emblematic Met - has a new memoir out. Both books take their places on a shelf next to such fondly recalled Metsiana as Lenny Dykstra's "Nails," Dwight Gooden's "Heat," Davey Johnson's "Bats" and Strawberry's previous "Darryl," a muddled, angry, sometimes nasty autobiography that made headlines in 1992 for its suggestion that Gooden may have been using cocaine during the 1986 postseason as opposed to the subsequent spring, when Gooden in fact tested positive for the drug. Darryl Strawberry with the Gulf Coast Yankees in 1995 and Ron Darling in Game 4 of the 1986 World Series at Fenway Park. THANKFULLY, perhaps, "Straw: Finding My Way" isn't much of a baseball book. It's a recovery memoir, detailing Strawberry's journey to self-acceptance and Christian sobriety via multiple arrests, trips to rehab, marriages, divorces, cancers and bottomings-out that never quite were, with his Mets career, and subsequent stints with the Dodgers, Giants and championship Yankees of the '90s, as background music, or maybe bait. Believe it or not - here's an act of expiation - he devotes more space to his 1999 arrest for cocaine possession and prostitution solicitation than to the three World Series he appeared in, combined. But Strawberry (along with his co-author, John Strausbaugh) tends to skate through particulars off the field as well as on, not ignoring his foibles but never digging in too deeply, either as storyteller or as analysand. That said, "Straw" does have the virtue of sincerity and of seeming profoundly felt. Its narrator emerges as a real and complex man: humble in the face of his failures, palpably hungry for redemption, and yet still capable of myopia and self-righteousness. You feel for him in a way you never did - at least I never did - when you were merely cheering and/or booing him at Shea. Darling's book, written with Daniel Paisner, should enjoy a wider readership and a longer shelf life. The former pitcher, an affable, frank and witty guide (though not a gossip), devotes each of his 10 central chapters to picking apart specific innings of specific games he either played in or, in two cases, observed as a sportscaster with the Mets (his current occupation). There's plenty of lefty-righty ballpark wonkery, but "The Complete Game" also illuminates baseball's workaday psychological grind. A nice example: "When a good hitter leads off, he does something as soon as he makes an out, or gets a hit, or scores a run in the first inning and goes back to the bench: he gives everyone the scouting report. . . . This guy's meat. The mood of that bench can tilt, just on the basis of one of these tossed-off comments. Guys who might have been tentative about their at-bats can all of a sudden become confident. That batter will never come back to the bench and say, He's unhittable. But there are certain catchphrases you'll hear. Sneaky: that usually means the pitcher has a good fastball. Tough: self-explanatory. . . . As a pitcher, you start to think about it as if you're launching a marketing campaign for a new product: your stuff. You want it to announce itself and create a certain first impression. You want to engender just the right buzz in that opposing dugout to ensure that no hitter gets too comfortable." Darling has a sense of humor about the game's ups and downs. Befitting his Ivy League education, he also sees its elegiac potential. Echoing Giamatti, he concludes: "It's a good life, a baseball life. It's rich and rewarding and endlessly fascinating. And then, before you know it, it's gone." To which I say: I hear you, Ron! Let me know how that three-figure view looks from Citi Field. Bruce Handy, a frequent contributor to the Book Review, is a writer and deputy editor at Vanity Fair.
Library Journal Review
As any baseball fan can attest, ex-ballplayers who do analysis for game broadcasts remember every play of every game they were ever in. Darling is a perfect example, and here he serves up his keen recollections in a finely shaped memoir with the game-and the task of pitching-at its core. Nine chapters are each named for their respective inning: Darling recalls in detail a game he pitched in which that particular inning served as a kind of crucible. With plenty of anecdotes and asides offered along the way, this is a superior book, highly recommended for all baseball collections. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter 1 Pregame Let's Get It Right Today Give me the damn ball!" That's been the rallying cry of major league pitchers since the turn of the last century. The ball. The pill. The rock. Call it what you want, it's the only equipment we need--our badge of honor, our point of pride. It's basic, as weapons go: a rounded piece of cushioned cork layered with a fine coating of rubber cement and wrapped in a tight winding of gray and tan wools and a thin poly-cotton thread. Then, another fine coating of rubber cement and two strips of cowhide, bound together with eighty-eight inches of waxed red thread-- hand-sewn in the small farming village of Turrialba, Costa Rica, with 108 stitches. But, of course, it's not only about the ball. It's about the act and art of throwing it, and the responsibility that goes with the privilege of doing so for a major league baseball team. For most of us who have taken the pitcher's mound at the professional level, it's the weight of carrying the fortunes of your teammates, the sweet burden of being on point, that sets our role apart. If we don't execute, there's no hiding it out there on that mound. Everyone who plays a sport likes to think he or she is pivotal, but with pitchers this is not an arrogant or self-aggrandizing view. The game rests on our shoulders. We stand apart from our teammates and set the tone. All eyes are on us. The game is in our hands. The hopes of our teammates are pinned to our chest. Sure, the outcome of any one game might turn on a remarkable effort in the field, a mighty swing of the bat, a gutsy play on the bases, but everything that happens on a ball field--everything!--flows in some way through the pitcher. It has every damn thing to do with us. That's how we feel, and the reason we feel this way is because it's been drummed into us over countless starts, countless innings, countless pitches with the game on the line. Tom Seaver, one of the greatest pitchers ever to take the mound, and certainly the greatest to do so in a New York Mets uniform, had a cutting way with words. If he liked you, he was one of the most generous souls in the game. If he didn't ... well, not so much. We played together, briefly, in 1983, when I joined the big club for a late-season cameo. It was Tom's second tour with the Mets, and he was cast as a conquering hero, a favorite son turned elder statesman. He had a not-so-flattering nickname for the Mets trainer, "Fifty-Fifty"; I couldn't figure why. After I'd been in the bigs for a couple weeks, I got up the courage to ask Tom how he came up with the name. "He's not the best trainer, kid," said Tom, who himself was known as "the Franchise." (How's that for a nickname to confirm my point?) "And he's not the worst. He doesn't help you, he doesn't hurt you. Fifty-Fifty." I've thought about that moniker a lot over the years, and early on I hoped it never applied to me as a ballplayer, affectionately or otherwise. Over time, however, I realized there was no avoiding the tag. Sometimes you justify the faith your teammates place in you, and sometimes you don't. If you come through more often than not, you're doing okay. And yet, in success and in struggle, getting the ball on game day has to be the greatest rush in professional sports. The game acknowledges this, in its own way. There's a certain amount of ceremony to the "anointing" or assigning of pitching duties, like a transfer of power. It used to be that pitchers knew they were getting a start only when they arrived at their locker to find that day's pristine game ball sitting in their glove. The first time I heard about that, I was already in the bigs, and it struck me as a fitting tra Excerpted from The Complete Game: Reflections on Baseball, Pitching, and Life on the Mound by Ron Darling, Daniel Paisner All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
