Tim Kurkjian - Is This a Great Game, or What?
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Is This a Great Game, or What?: summary, description and annotation
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Is This a Great Game, or What?: From A-Rods Heart to Zims Head--My 25 Years in BaseballTim Kurkjian
ESPNs Tim Kurkjian has spent over twenty-five years covering almost 3,000 Major League Baseball games and interviewing about that many players, coaches, managers and executives.
In Is This a Great Game, or What?, Kurkjian combines his years of experience, uncanny knowledge and deep love of the game, to create a book filled with some of the most fascinating insight into Major League Baseball this side of Jim Boutons bestseller, Ball Four. Whether hes explaining what goes through a ballplayers mind when he faces a fastball in the chapter My Face Was Crushed by a Bowling Ball Going 90mph, detailing bizarre rituals and superstitions performed by some of baseballs greatest players, or taking us into the locker room to see what transpires in the clubhouse of a Major League team, Kurkjians tales are at times hilarious, other times horrifying, yet always entertaining.
Kurkjian has spoken to some of the greatest ballplayers ever over the years and they have revealed details about themselves and the game they love with a candor that readers wont find anywhere else. Filled with anecdotes and fascinating insight, this is an essential book for baseball fans or anyone curious about Americas pastime.
Ebook, 266 pages
ESPNs Tim Kurkjian has spent over twenty-five years covering almost 3,000 Major League Baseball games and interviewing about that many players, coaches, managers and executives.
In Is This a Great Game, or What?, Kurkjian combines his years of experience, uncanny knowledge and deep love of the game, to create a book filled with some of the most fascinating insight into Major League Baseball this side of Jim Boutons bestseller, Ball Four. Whether hes explaining what goes through a ballplayers mind when he faces a fastball in the chapter My Face Was Crushed by a Bowling Ball Going 90mph, detailing bizarre rituals and superstitions performed by some of baseballs greatest players, or taking us into the locker room to see what transpires in the clubhouse of a Major League team, Kurkjians tales are at times hilarious, other times horrifying, yet always entertaining.
Kurkjian has spoken to some of the greatest ballplayers ever over the years and they have revealed details about themselves and the game they love with a candor that readers wont find anywhere else. Filled with anecdotes and fascinating insight, this is an essential book for baseball fans or anyone curious about Americas pastime.
Ebook, 266 pages
Tim Kurkjian: author's other books
Who wrote Is This a Great Game, or What?? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.
Tim Kurkjian
Bryan Soderholm-Difatte
Rocco Constantino
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To Pop. This is in honor of my father.
Table of Contents
T he day I graduated from Walter Johnson High School in Bethesda, Maryland, in 1974, I decided I wanted to be a baseball writer, a decision made easier by two unavoidable factors ( a ) I was seventeen years old, five foot three, 120 pounds, which meant my playing days in baseball and basketball were over, and ( b ) I went to a high school named after the greatest pitcher in baseball history, where I wrote for the school newspaper ( The Pitch , how clever). Really, what else would a little guy, hopelessly dependent on baseball, do with his life?
I was certain of my decision six years later when I was working as a utility infielder, a Tony Graffanino if you will, covering all sports for The Dallas Morning News . Id been in Dallas about a week when we got a tip that Ron Meyer, the football coach at Southern Methodist, was going to be the next coach of the New England Patriots. Our SMU guy wasnt to be found, so I had to do the story. No one answered the phone at Meyers house, so I was dispatched to his North Dallas home to find him. Mind you, I didnt know how to get to my house, let alone his house, and I didnt know Ron Meyer from Oscar Mayer.
I knocked on the door. Remember, this was 1981, I was twenty-four, I looked about thirteen, and I wasnt much bigger than when I graduated from high school. Meyer answered the door.
Hi, I said. Im Tim Kurkjian from The Dallas Morning News .
OK, he said. Ill get you your money.
I didnt know whether to laugh or cry.
Youre collecting, arent you? he said.
That did it. To be twenty-four and mistaken for the paperboy while doing a football story about a coach Id never heard of, and a college Id never been to, drove me back to my favorite game, the best game. That is where Ive been the last twenty-five years. It has been a good friend, this baseball.
The game has been challenging. It has tried to run me off several times. I covered the 1982 Rangers, who lost thirteen in a row in May, fired the general manager, held the press conference in the dugout, and briefly named owner Eddie Chiles the GM. I covered the 1988 Orioles, who demolished the record for consecutive losses (21) at the start of a season. I wrote, by my unofficial count, the second-most losing-game stories of any beat man in America in the 1980s.
Life on the road has been a challenge, also. On Opening Day in 1982, I sent my laundry out during a snowstorm in New York, the first time I had ever done that. The nasty man from the New York Hilton returned that evening with my underwear folded and my socks on hangers.
That will be one eighty-four, he said.
I thought it was a delivery fee. I gave him $5 and told him to keep the change.
Its a hundred and eighty-four , he screamed.
In 1983, Dave Smith, my sports editor, screamed at me for flying commercial instead of on a Rangers team charter that nearly crashed. But if it had crashed, I would be dead, I said. And he said, But what if you were the only survivor? Imagine the story you would have.
The writing has been challenging. In 1984, Rangers outfielder Larry Parrish became a father and missed a game. What is the babys name? I asked Doug Rader, the manager. Buford, he said. What? No one names his son Buford. I swear on my mothers grave, thats his name, Rader said. So I wrote it. Parrish returned to the team the next day, found me, pulled me aside, and said, gently, Tim, the boys name aint Buford.
I asked Rader how he could do that to me. I didnt think you believed me, he said.
The players have been a challenge. In 1986, I went to spring training as the new baseball beat writer for the Baltimore Sun . On the plane ride to Florida, Richard Justice of The Washington Post introduced me to Oriole infielder Floyd Rayford.
Eddie isnt going to like you, he said, referring to star first baseman Eddie Murray.
Why?
Your head is too big, he said.
With a head thats too big and a body thats too small, I stayed with baseball because I knew it was the only game for me for a million reasons, many of which will become clear in the chapters ahead. Over the last twenty-five years, I have covered every World Series game, every All-Star game, Mark McGwires sixtieth, sixtyfirst, and sixty-second home runs, Cal Ripkens 2,131st consecutive game played, two no-hitters and a perfect game, and the only game in history in which one team hit ten home runs. I have met people that I never thought I would meet, I have been to places I never thought Id go, and I have seen things that I will never, ever forget.
The game has changed dramatically since 1980, but it remains the best game. It has always been so for me. I grew up in a baseball house with a father who loved the game more than anyone I know and could still hit in his late sixties, with two brothers who are now in the Catholic University Hall of Fame for baseball, and with a mother who took me to every game I played in my pedestrian career. When I wasnt playing baseball, I was playing tabletop baseball games, APBA with my brothers, or Strat-O-Matic alone, while my friends went drinking. I did ten years on the baseball beat, eight years of baseball at Sports Illustrated, and the last nine years at ESPN. It has been a great job and a great life, thanks to a great game.
And, for me, it officially started with The Pitch at Walter Johnson High School.
My Mom Was My Catcher
I t is the best game. Ask anyone who follows it. Ask George Will; he says, Baseball is the background music in my life. Ask Billy Crystal; he got chills the first time he met Ted Williams. Ask Jon Miller, the best broadcaster in the game today. I once went to his room at midnight in Minneapolis after he had called an Orioles-Twins game. He was playing Strat-O-Matic by himself. I love the Blue Jays bullpen, he said. Ask the president of the United States. As I went through the receiving line at the White House in 2003, Mr. Bush whispered in my ear, Who hit the home runs for the Yankees today? Did Ruben hit one?
It is the best game because once it grabs you, it never lets go; it is so seductive, it really is important for some to know whether Ruben Sierra hit a home run today. I am so incurably hooked by my passion, I check Sierras batting line first thing every day for a far more important reason: to see if he was hit by a pitch. He has not been hit by a pitch since 1990. How pathetic am I? The daily ritual of devouring box scores at the breakfast table is a rite reserved only for baseball, and intriguing box score lines dont just appearsuch as Ben Petricks 3004 or Curtis Grandersons 5050they fly off the page and hit me in the face. And to be sure I absorb them, I have cut out every box score from every game for the last seventeen years, like a seven-year-old doing a current events assignment with scissors and tape.
You know you can get all that on the Internet, said my wife, Kathy.
I know, I said, but I remember it better when I do it by hand.
It is the best game because the players look like us. They are not seven feet tall, they dont weigh 350 pounds, and they dont bench-press 650. We can relate to them. We can see themtheyre not obscured by some hideous face mask, and they dont play behind a wall of Plexiglaswe can touch them and we can feel them. I see Greg Maddux with his shirt off, with his concave chest and no discernible muscles, and I marvel: This is one of the six greatest pitchers in the history of the game? I see Tony Gwynn with his shirt off and I see a short, fat guy with the smallest hands Ive ever seen on an athlete, and I wonder: This is the best hitter since Ted Williams? This game is open to all shapes and sizes, including the Cardinals David Eckstein, who is five feet six; he cant throw, he gets hit by a pitch thirty times just to get on base, and he was the shortstop for the World Champion Angels in 2002 and the World Champion Cardinals in 2006. Pedro Martinez told me that when he was in the minor leagues, he weighed 138 pounds and threw 93 mph. How can that be? Mets reliever Billy Wagner is five feet nine and throws 100 mph. The first time I met him, said six-ten pitcher Randy Johnson, I thought, This guy is a foot shorter than me, and he throws harder than I do.
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