CLOSE
Perfect
Perfect

Perfect

The Inside Story of Baseball's Sixteen Perfect Games
By James Buckley, Foreword by Jim Bunning

SPORTS & RECREATION

320 Pages, 6 x 9

Formats: Cloth

Cloth, $24.95 (US $24.95) (CA $27.95)

ISBN 9781572434547

Rights: WOR

Triumph Books (Apr 2002)

Sorry, this item is temporarily out of stock
Google Preview
9781572434547
Media Copy

Overview

Only 16 pitchers in the past 122 years have completed the most rare feat in all of sports—the perfect game. Each perfect game is examined individually with firsthand accounts from the pitcher, his teammates, opponents, coaches, managers, and sportswriters who were there that day. In addition to the 16 record setters, Buckley has researched all the other pitchers who were one pitch from history.

Author Biography

James Buckley
See Author
James Buckley Jr., is the editorial director of the Shoreline Publishing Group and the author of more than 25 books on baseball and other sports, including Baseball: A Celebration, Play Ball: The Official Major League Baseball Guide for Young Players, and The Visual Dictionary of Baseball. He formerly worked at both Sports Illustrated and NFL Publishing and hosted a sports interview radio show in Santa Barbara. He lives in Santa Barbara, California. Jim Bunning is a former Hall of Fame Major League Baseball pitcher and US Senator from Kentucky.

Press Releases

It\'s a small club whose members span 119 years: sixteen pitchers who have played that one glorious game sans glitch, sans hitch. Such a game is called \"perfect\" and is unique to baseball.

A pitcher\'s job is to get people out; in a perfect game, he gets them all out, all 27 in a row with nary a single blemish. No hits. No walks. No errors (thanks to his teammates). No hit batsmen. Nothing.

But the stories of how those \"nothings\" happened are really something. In Perfect: The Inside Story of Baseball\'s Sixteen Perfect Games, author James Buckley, Jr., retells in great detail - and with great insight - the inside stories of those 16 perfect performances. Using historical research and original interviews with more than 50 pitchers, players, fans, broadcasters, writers, historians, and others, Buckley has created the first-ever one-volume history of all 16 perfect games.

Members of this elite fraternity include U.S. Senator Jim Bunning (who wrote the foreword to the book), J. Lee Richmond who pitched the first perfect game in 1880, and Don Larsen who pitched the only World Series perfect game in 1956. Buckley also tells the stories of pitchers who have come oh-so-close only to have fate mimic Lucy\'s football cruelty to Charlie Brown.

Perfect is for baseball fans and fans of peak performance in any walk of life. This book is a continuing celebration of players (and teams) who reach the pinnacle of success, capturing \"lightning in a bottle\" that shines for the whole world to see.

About the Author
James Buckley, Jr., is the author of more than 25 books on baseball and other sports, including The Visual Dictionary of Baseball and Baseball: A Celebration and Play Ball: The Official Major League Baseball Guide for Young Players. He formerly worked at both Sports Illustrated and NFL Publishing, hosted a sports interview radio show in Santa Barbara, and today is the editorial director of the Shoreline Publishing Group. He is also the publications director for the California state-champion semipro baseball team, a former youth baseball coach, and a consistently disappointed, yet hopeful, fan of the Boston Red Sox. Buckley lives in Santa Barbara, California, with his wife Patty, son Conor, and daughter Katie.