27 Men Out; Baseball's Perfect Games

New York: Atria Books, 2004. First Atria Books hardcover Edition [Stated], First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. xiv, 306 pages. Illustrations. Appendix I. Perfect-Game Curios. Appendix II: Perfect-Game Box Scores. Bibliographical Notes. Index. Foreword by Bill James. Michael Coffey, formerly the co-editorial director of Publishers Weekly, is the author of several books of poems, a book about baseball's perfect games, and another about Irish immigration to America--which together paint a fairly good portrait of his central interests. Recently, he has begun publishing his fiction, and his new book, The Business of Naming Things, is being published in early 2015. He lives with his wife in Manhattan and in upstate New York, where he was raised. At the time this was written there had been only fifteen perfect games pitched in the modern era of baseball: The great Cy Young fittingly hurled the first one, in 1904, and Randy Johnson pitched the last one in this book, in May 2004. In between, some great and famous pitchers -- Sandy Koufax, Catfish Hunter, Jim Bunning, and Don Larsen -- performed the feat, as did those lesser-known, like Charlie Robertson and Len Barker. Fifteen in 160,000 games: The odds are staggering. In 27 Men Out, Michael Coffey offers an expansive look at these unsurpassable pitching performances. You'll find play-by-play accounts of each of the fifteen perfect games and assessments of those who pitched them. Coffey goes beyond the box scores to provide fascinating details about how these games unfolded, as well as compelling anecdotes about all of the key players -- from Koufax's holdout with Don Drysdale to Mike Witt's victimization by the commissioner. 27 Men Out is a new benchmark in sports literature.