Product Description

Pitchers are the heart of baseball, and John Feinstein tells the story of the game today through one season and two great pitchers working in the crucible of the New York media market. Tom Glavine and Mike Mussina have seen it all in the Major Leagues and both entered 2007 in search of individual milestones and one more shot at The World Series-Glavine with the Mets, Mussina five miles away with the Yankees. The two veterans experience very different seasons--one on a team dealing with the pressure to get to a World Series for the first time in seven years, the other with a team expected to be there every year. Taking the reader through contract negotiations, spring training, the ups of wins and losses, and the people in their lives-family, managers, pitching coaches, agents, catchers, other pitchers--John Feinstein provides a true insider's look at the pressure cooker of sports at the highest level.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5166 in Books
• Published on: 2008-05-01
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 544 pages

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com

The title of John Feinstein's Living on the Black refers to the area on the outer edges of the strike zone where veteran pitchers whose fast ones have slowed to under 90 mph must consistently place the ball. The term also reflects the precarious situation that the New York Yankees' right-hander Mike Mussina and former New York Mets left-hander Tom Glavine were in at the start of the 2007 season.

Mussina and Glavine, then 38 and 41 respectively, were struggling to hold on to their jobs and keep batters off balance with a guile accumulated during a total of 36 years in the majors. Both men made it, but just barely; their personal milestones -- Glavine passed the 300 mark in total victories, and Mussina reached number 250 -- were overshadowed by their teams' dismal finishes.

The Yankees did their usual postseason fold while the Mets, leading their division by seven games with 17 left to play, crashed and burned in one of the greatest collapses in baseball history. Glavine took the season-ending loss, failing to last through the first inning. One of the game's most articulate players, he was philosophical when asked if he was devastated. "To me, devastating is finding out that a neighbor's eight-year-old is going to lose a leg to cancer." Less philosophical Mets fans were, well, devastated.

A columnist for The Washington Post and author of 22 previous books, John Feinstein must have known that as a writer he was living on the black himself by picking two aging pitchers for his subject. The resulting book is strong on human drama -- both players come across as noble, bloodied warriors -- but extremely short on baseball drama. Like Mussina and Glavine over the last couple of seasons, Living on the Black starts out strong and begins to run out of steam about halfway through. Yankee and Mets fans know how it all comes out, and baseball fans who don't like these two teams may not care.

Feinstein tries to pump up the narrative by reminding us that "they are two of the best pitchers of all time. And they aren't quite done yet." That's debatable, but even if it were true, it's been so long since either pitcher was at his peak that many may have forgotten. That Feinstein captures them artfully in their decline only serves to make their story painful to read. Living on the Black has a hard time living up to its subtitle: for Mussina and Glavine as well as for Yankees and Mets fans, the season was really one to forget.

Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Review
"An absorbing read. Feinstein takes a pair of opinionated veterans and picks their brains all season about the art of pitching, also relying on the thoughts of teammates, coaches, managers and families to present well-rounded, intimate portraits....What makes the book so engaging is that each pitcher faced adversity during the season, creating unexpected drama that helped give an edge to Feinstein's narrative.....another excellent story, told by one of sports' best storytellers." (Tampa Tribune Bob D?Angelo )

"Strong on human drama-both players come across as noble, bloodied warriors...Feinstein captures [Mussina and Glavine] artfully." (Washington Post Book World Allen Barra )

"Feinstein achieves a double play fans should savor for its scrupulous look at what life is like for the 21st-century major leaguer." (Christian Science Monitor Erik Spanberg )

"When Feinstein gets [Glavine and Mussina] talking about the art of pitching, the book comes alive." (New York Daily News David Hinckley )

"As always, Feinstein guides readers into a world with which fans have only surface familiarity, revealing in the process multiple substrata of nuance and meaning. Baseball fans who read this wonderful book will come away with a deeper understanding of the game in addition to having encountered a pair of fascinating men who just happen to play a game for a living." (Booklist (starred review) )

About the Author

John Feinstein is the bestselling author of Let Me Tell You a Story, Caddy for Life, Open, The Punch, The Last Amateurs, The Majors, A Good Walk Spoiled, A Civil War, A Season on the Brink, Play Ball, Hard Courts, and two novels. He writes for Inside Sports, Golf, Tennis Magazine and Basketball America and commentates on NPR and CBS.

Customer Reviews

An interesting and insightful look at two pitching greats
Living on the Black is an interesting and insightful look at Tom Glavine and Mike Mussina, two of the game's greatest pitchers, during the 2007 season. Both pitchers experience frustrating seasons.

Glavine posts a 13-8 record for the Mets while registering his 300th career win. The Mets choke down the stretch, blowing a 7-game lead with 16 to play. Mussina goes 11-6 for the Yankees, who capture the wild card and lose to the Cleveland Indians in the first round of the playoffs.

Although I'm sure author John Feinstein would have preferred for the Mets and Yankees to have met in the World Series, or at least advanced farther in the playoffs, the book still delivers.

Feinstein devotes the first 125 pages to the careers of Glavine and Mussina prior to the 2007 season. I found that part of the book more interesting than I would have thought, particularly since I was fairly familiar with the careers of both players.

Feinstein's discussion of spring training pitching philosophy and workout routines is the best I've read.

Glavine and Mussina share a number of traits: They're intellectual, physically talented, reliable, push themselves to keep improving and constantly make adjustments.

Living on the Black gives readers a better appreciation of pitching and its challenges. You will better understand a pitcher's psyche, frustrations and ups and downs. The value each pitcher puts on his family also comes through strongly.

As Glavine pursues his 300th career win, Mussina attempts to deal with being dropped from the Yankees rotation after not missing a start in 498 turns.

Feinstein is as smooth a writer as Glavine and Mussina are pitchers. Despite its 500-plus pages, the book never lags. And, you don't have to be a Mets or Yankees fan to enjoy this book.

For baseball lovers everywhere
John Feinstein's latest tome considers two veteran major leaguers plying their craft during the 2007 season search of major milestones in the magnifying glass of the media frenzy that is New York. Tom Glavine won his 300th game with the Mets last year, while Mike Mussina, a member of the cross-town Yankees, won his 250th.

Feinstein painstakingly chronicles these athletes as they inch towards their lofty accomplishments. Glavine has since returned to the Atlanta Braves, for whom he won more than 240 of 305 regular season games (as of this writing) and two Cy Young Awards, indicative of the best pitcher in the league.

After brief recaps of their journeys through the school and amateur ranks, minor league apprenticeships, and careers prior to 2007, Feinstein settles in for the long, detailed process for which he has become famous in such books as TALES FROM Q SCHOOL, LET ME TELL YOU A STORY and A SEASON ON THE BRINK, among many others. No detail is too small, no scrap of information unimportant. The breadth of the book --- more than 500 pages --- can seem daunting, but for baseball fans, it's never boring. Feinstein's access earned him heretofore unknown insights into each man's habits and the social structure of a professional sports team, with all the disparate personalities and quirks.

Glavine won his landmark game on August 5th in a nationally televised affair against the Chicago Cubs, with the added emotion of his family on hand to share in the event as he became just the 23rd major league pitcher to do so. On the other end of the celebratory spectrum, Mussina notched win number 250 in his last victory of the season on September 23rd (just over 50 have accomplished that). He didn't even return to the dugout to watch the final out, having been relieved some innings earlier. "Two hundred isn't three hundred," Feinstein quotes him as saying, giving a nod to Glavine. "I understand that."

On the periphery of the individual milestones are the disparate fortunes of the Mets and Yankees, eternally at odds as they struggle for the hearts and minds of fans from within and without New York's borders. The Mets, odds-on-favorite to win at least the National League pennant, blew a comfortable lead for the Eastern division with a late-season collapse of historic proportion. That Glavine had one of the worst games of his life when the Mets needed him most dampens the love that the team's fans will hold for him for years to come.

The Yankees, on the other hand, struggled mightily before rallying to capture the American League wild card slot (they subsequently lost to the Cleveland Indians in the first round of the playoffs).

Despite a few glitches --- major or minor, depending on the reader's demand for accuracy --- Feinstein's thoughtful treatise of two thoughtful craftsmen at the tail end of their careers rank high on the list of such books. Acolytes of the teams will relive sorrow and elation, respectively.

--- Reviewed by Ron Kaplan

Great insight to the art of major league pitching
This book is a great read for those who happen to be fans of the cerebral aspects of baseball, and in particular pitching, as Feinstein picks the brains of two of the most successful major league pitchers of the past two decades while chronicling their 2007 seasons. The biographies of the two guys, Mike Mussina of the Yankees and Tom Glavine of the Mets (now again with the Braves in 2008) offers insights not only to how to get batters out, but on the relationships in the clubhouse between players, coaches, and the press, as well as the 1994 baseball strike and the role of the baseball players' union (of which Mussina and Glavine are player representatives for their respective teams).

The drama of the season is followed in two strands: In plot A: Glavine chases baseball immortality by capping a Hall of Fame career with 300 wins as the Mets appear to be cruising to a division title. In plot B, Mussina faces a career crisis as he battles injuries and ineffectiveness, hitting a nadir when he is removed from the starting rotation for the first time in his life while the Yankees pursue the wildcard. At the season's end, however, the tables have turned, and it's Glavine who faces a hostile press when he pitches one of the worst games of his career to end the Mets season as they suffer a historic collapse and miss the playoffs, while Mussina recovers sufficiently to reinvent his style and earn his 250th win, although not enough to regain the trust of Yankee management to start in the postseason, and he can only watch as his team loses in the first round of the playoffs again.

Overall, the book is enjoyable, with nuggets of pitching wisdom and funny anecdotes sprinkled throughout. The chapters do get a little tedious once the narrative begins detailing the 2007 season game by game (and there are some typos), but you will definitely learn a lot about pitching and baseball.