Heartbreakers: Baseball's Most Agonizing Defeats - Epic MLB Playoff Losses & Championship Disappointments for True Baseball Fans | Perfect for Sports Debates & Baseball History Enthusiasts
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Product Description
Bobby Thomson’s home run in the ninth to beat Brooklyn and give the Giants the 1951 National League pennant. Bill Mazeroski’s ninth-inning homer for Pittsburgh to beat the Yankees in the 1960 World Series. The Mets’ amazing 1969 stretch drive. It’s the winners we remember in baseball’s most dramatic episodes. But baseball being a game of inches, it's often a fine line between victory and defeat. Losing is unexpected, unpredictable, frequently a consequence of fickle fate. The game is designed to break your heart, Bart Giamatti said. In Heartbreakers, veteran baseball writer John Kuenster recalls fifteen of the game’s most painful “disasters” of the last half-century and looks at them from the losers’ point of view. With a reporter’s skill and a fan’s enthusiasm, he sets the scene for these memorable matchups, surveys the players who led each team to the big moment, and tells the story of the game and the emotions that can’t be erased. He has interviewed key players who suffered the defeats, providing personal insights and sometimes surprising perspectives on the game action that snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Heartbreakers offers a box seat for―and a fresh slant on―the replay of baseball’s most thrilling games. With 50 black-and-white photographs.
Customer Reviews
Anybody can write a book about a championship sports team. Try writing a book about the heartbreak of defeat and what it does to a mere mortal. Especially to a professional, highly-paid sports hero. John Kuenster did that. John wrote about what defeat does to grown men playing a kid’s game, top athletes who have enjoyed accolades almost all their lives. Baseball books about winners, about Hall of Famers, are a dime a dozen. Heartbreakers reveals how some defeats become so huge, not only to the public but to the individual, they result in suicide.If you’ve ever played ANY sport, you realize how a singular defeat stuck in your mind for a long time. Now imagine how that defeat sticks around in the National Consciousness for what seems forever. Imagine you’re NOT the hero but the goat of the so-called Big Game. Professional pride matters but so does civic pride and especially personal pride. Doesn’t matter if it’s called a kids game, like baseball, played by athletic adults. Heartbreakers takes you back to that exact moment when the championship game was lost. Then the reader will flash forward into the future. The disastrous moment for that person (or persons) who “blew the Big Game” is revealed by the player or his teammates many years later. Truly a wonderful book, written by longtime sports editor John Kuenster. Whether you’re just a young athlete or an old duffer reliving painful nostalgic moments, you will enjoy this book immensely.
