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NOW YOU KNOW
NOW YOU KNOW
Doug Lennox
DUNDURN PRESS
TORONTO
Copyright © Dundurn Press Limited, 2010
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.
Project Editor: Michael Carroll
Editor: Barry Jowett
Copy Editor: Jennifer McKnight
Design: Courtney Horner
Printer: Webcom
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Lennox, Doug
Now you know baseball / Doug Lennox.
ISBN 978-1-55488-713-2
1. Baseball--Miscellanea. I. Title.
GV873.L46 2010 796.35702 C2009-907455-9
1 2 3 4 5 14 13 12 11 10
We acknowledge the support of The Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and The Association for the Export of Canadian Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program, and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.
Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.
J. Kirk Howard, President
Printed and bound in Canada.
Printed on recycled paper.
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contents
Rules and Lingo
Names
Baseball Media and Popular Culture
Plays, Strategies, and Statistics
Great Moments
Blunders, Jokes, and Not-So-Great Moments
Firsts and Record-Breakers
The Greats and Near-Greats
Traditions and Superstitions
The Best of the Best: Baseball’s Thirty Most Memorable Moments
Champions and Award Winners
Question and Feature List
preface
One of the most remarkable things about baseball is that it is followed passionately by people who are polar opposites. It’s a sport that is loved by poets and statisticians. W.P. Kinsella takes us into fantasy worlds in his novels and short stories, making ghosts, time travel, and prophecy seem not just plausible, but factual. On the other side of the brain, Bill James can examine every minutiae of the game with numeric analysis that convinces legions that anything that happens in the game can have a formula applied to it.
Baseball is also loved by both rich and developing nations. The United States and Japan play and watch baseball with a passion. That passion is equalled or surpassed by nations such as the Dominican Republic.
What is it that draws people to this sport? Perhaps it’s that the game can be so simple, while at the same time so complex. Or maybe it’s the fact that it differs so much from the other major team sports, nearly all of which are played on rectangular playing surfaces and involve moving an object from one end to the other in order to score in a net or other designated area. Baseball is played on a field that fans out from home plate. The defence controls the ball, and the ball never does the scoring — the players themselves do the scoring, and they do so by running a route that brings them back to where they started. And as Kinsella points out, it’s a game about infinity: in theory, a game can continue forever as long as no team holds the lead at the end of an extra inning, or a third out is never recorded in the last inning; and when played on a field without an outfield wall, the foul lines are never ending.
Whatever the appeal, baseball fans are attracted to every nuance of their chosen sport, and that’s why we have such an insatiable appetite for stories and facts about the game. From rattling off statistics to telling anecdotes about players and games we’ve seen or heard about, every fan delights in the ongoing history of baseball.
This book is a small part of that ongoing history. One book can’t hope to capture all the questions and answers that baseball can inspire, but it is my hope that it captures some of the spirit that the game arouses.
