Living on the Black: Two Pitchers, Two Teams, One Season to Remember | John Feinstein

Living on the Black: Two Pitchers, Two Teams, One Season to Remember | John Feinstein | Great insight to the art of major league pitching

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Living on the Blac...

	Living on the Black: Two Pitchers, Two Teams, One Season to Remember John Feinstein Little, Brown and Company, 2008 - 544 pages average customer review:based on 5 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Pitchers are the heart of baseball, and John Feinstein tells the story of the game today through one season and two great pitchers working in the crucible of the New York media market. Tom Glavine and Mike Mussina have seen it all in the Major Leagues and both entered 2007 in search of individual milestones and one more shot at The World Series-Glavine with the Mets, Mussina five miles away with the Yankees. The two veterans experience very different seasons--one on a team dealing with the pressure to get to a World Series for the first time in seven years, the other with a team expected to be there every year. Taking the reader through contract negotiations, spring training, the ups of wins and losses, and the people in their lives-family, managers, pitching coaches, agents, catchers, other pitchers--John Feinstein provides a true insider's look at the pressure cooker of sports at the highest level.

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Very insightful

Reading the sports section of the newspaper will give you the results of yesterday's games. There will be some in-depth articles on how the home team fared, and there may even occasionally be a human-interest story on a particular athlete. But to truly understand how a professional athlete thinks or feels, to comprehend the psychology of the game, and to know what separates them from the talented high school or college star - you have to read a sports book.

John Feinstein has made a career following teams and athletes in various sports through a typical season, so that the reader can experience vicariously the life of a professional athlete. In Living on the Black, he follows two great pitchers in the twilight of their careers as they both play in the media-crazy hothouse of New York, albeit for different teams.

In this insightful book, Feinstein follows Tom Glavine of the New York Mets as he struggles to reach 300 wins, which all but ensures his eventual election to the Baseball Hall of Fame. Simultaneously, the author traces the key events in the 2007 season of Mike Mussina of the New York Yankees as he approaches 250 career wins, a stellar accomplishment for any pitcher. These men struggle with injuries-physical and psychological, as they deal with both personal and team expectations.

The book is appropriately titled Living on the Black. The black refers to the inside and outside edges of the plate where control or finesse pitchers must throw to be successful in this most demanding game. Glavine had always been a control, rather than a power pitcher, and Messina having been forced to become one due to age and the decreasing speed of his once dominant fastball.

Although these two share many common experiences of having had a highly successful and lengthy career in baseball, they come from decidedly different backgrounds and exhibit very different personalities. What they do share in common is a strong belief in themselves and their ability to constantly fine-tune their mechanics, as well as their thought processes, which allows them to stay at the top of their game.

John Feinstein is an American sportswriter and commentator. He is a columnist for the Washington Post, an author, is a guest commentator on NPR.

Armchair Interviews says: You can learn how players stay at the top of their game with this up-close-and-personal story.

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Great insight to the art of major league pitching

This book is a great read for those who happen to be fans of the cerebral aspects of baseball, and in particular pitching, as Feinstein picks the brains of two of the most successful major league pitchers of the past two decades while chronicling their 2007 seasons. The biographies of the two guys, Mike Mussina of the Yankees and Tom Glavine of the Mets (now again with the Braves in 2008) offers insights not only to how to get batters out, but on the relationships in the clubhouse between players, coaches, and the press, as well as the 1994 baseball strike and the role of the baseball players' union (of which Mussina and Glavine are player representatives for their respective teams).

The drama of the season is followed in two strands: In plot A: Glavine chases baseball immortality by capping a Hall of Fame career with 300 wins as the Mets appear to be cruising to a division title. In plot B, Mussina faces a career crisis as he battles injuries and ineffectiveness, hitting a nadir when he is removed from the starting rotation for the first time in his life while the Yankees pursue the wildcard. At the season's end, however, the tables have turned, and it's Glavine who faces a hostile press when he pitches one of the worst games of his career to end the Mets season as they suffer a historic collapse and miss the playoffs, while Mussina recovers sufficiently to reinvent his style and earn his 250th win, although not enough to regain the trust of Yankee management to start in the postseason, and he can only watch as his team loses in the first round of the playoffs again.

Overall, the book is enjoyable, with nuggets of pitching wisdom and funny anecdotes sprinkled throughout. The chapters do get a little tedious once the narrative begins detailing the 2007 season game by game (and there are some typos), but you will definitely learn a lot about pitching and baseball.

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99% perfect

This was an excellent book, with the notable exception of a few errors - typos on last names, mistaking the Trenton Thunder as the AAA Yankees affiliate (it's the AA team), and biggest of all, stating that the Mets and Nationals (it was the Phils) were in a first place tie on the last day of the season.

Other than those things, this book was fantastic, giving timely insight into what goes on in the pitchers' minds throughout the season. I highly recommend it for any fan of Moose, Glavine, the Mets or Yanks, or any baseball fan in general.

Not for the Casual Fan

Sports writers tend to specialize in one sport or another, but John Feinstein writes about different sports, and does every one equally well. However, his latest book, Living on the Black: Two Pitchers, Two Teams, One Season to Remember, is definitely for readers who are more than just casual baseball fans. It's for those readers who are passionate enough to want to read about the 2007 season, following each pitch made by Tom Glavine and Mike Mussina. I'm one of those baseball fanatics.

When Feinstein picked Tom Glavine of the New York Mets and Mike Mussina of the New York Yankees, he selected two experienced pitchers who were very different. He knew if one was injured during the year, he still had another pitcher to follow. Glavine, a lefty, who never went to college, is a future Hall of Famer who spent his career in the National League. Mike Mussina, a righty, went to Stanford, and pitches in the American League. By selecting these two men, Feinstein could also examine the culture of the two New York baseball teams.

Feinstein sets the scene for his book by telling about the careers for these two masterful pitchers. Since Glavine and Mussina both cooperated with the author, it makes for a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the lives and careers of the two players. And, then 2007 proved to be an interesting year. Tom Glavine went for his 300th win, and the Mets went down to the wire in their Division. Mike Mussina struggled to find his pitches after spending time on the Disabled List, and the Yankees' woes jeopardized Joe Torre's career. Feinstein's writing is so good that even those of us who remember how 2007 turned out are left hanging on every pitch.

John Feinstein's Living on the Black: Two Pitchers, Two Teams, One Season to Remember is one book for baseball fans to savor, and remember.

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