The Year of the Pitcher; Bob Gibson, Denny McLain, and the End of Baseball's Golden Age

Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. xv, [3], 381, [1] pages. Illustrations. Notes. Selected Bibliography. Index. Inscribed by author on title page. Sridhar currently writes "The Male Animal" column for The New York Times. He's interested in and writes about all kinds of things, including national politics, media, and sports. He began his career as a feature writer for the Chicago Reader and has served as a columnist at The New York Observer and as a correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly. In addition he worked as a staff writer at Sports Illustrated and The Washington Post. His work has appeared in numerous publications including New York Magazine, Fast Company, Mother Jones and Men's Journal. He is a native of Oxford, Ohio, and graduate of Northwestern University. In 1968, two remarkable pitchers would dominate the game as well as the broadsheets. One was black, the other white. Bob Gibson, together with the St. Louis Cardinals, embodied an entire generation's hope for integration at a heated moment in American history. Denny McLain, his adversary, was a crass self-promoter who eschewed the team charter and his Detroit Tigers teammates to zip cross-country in his own plane. The nation watched as these two men and their teams swept their respective league championships to meet at the World Series. Gibson set a major league record that year with a 1.12 ERA. McLain won more than 30 games in 1968, a feat not achieved since 1934. The two have come to stand as iconic symbols, giving the fans "The Year of the Pitcher" and changing the game. This is the story of one of the great rivalries in sports and an indelible portrait of the national pastime during a turbulent year-and the two men who electrified fans from all walks of life.