Nine Innings

Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1994. First Printing thus [Stated]. Trade paperback. Very good/No DJ issued. xv, [1], 272 pages. Index. Signed with comment on half-title page by Tony Kornheiser! Daniel Okrent (born April 2, 1948) is an American writer and editor. He is best known as the first public editor of The New York Times newspaper and for writing several books. In November 2011, Last Call won the Albert J. Beveridge prize, awarded by the American Historical Association to the year's best book of American history. Okrent invented Rotisserie League Baseball, the best-known form of fantasy baseball, in 1979. The name comes from the fact that he proposed the idea to his friends while dining at La Rôtisserie Française restaurant in New York City. Okrent's team in the Rotisserie League was called the "Okrent Fenokees", a pun on the Okefenokee Swamp. He was one of the first two people inducted into the Fantasy Sports Hall of Fame. His exploits of inventing Rotisserie League Baseball were chronicled in Silly Little Game, part of the ESPN 30 for 30 documentary series, in 2010. Okrent is credited with inventing the baseball stat, WHIP. At the time he referred to it as "Innings Pitched Ratio". In May 1981, Okrent wrote and Sports Illustrated published "He Does It by the Numbers". This profile of Bill James launched James's career as baseball's foremost analyst. In 1994, Okrent was filmed for his in-depth knowledge for the Ken Burns documentary Baseball. Okrent delivered an analysis of the cultural aspects of the national pastime, including a comparison of Game 6 of the 1975 World Series between the Boston Red Sox and Cincinnati Reds to the conflict and character development in Russian novels. Foreword by Wilfred Sheed. Using one particular moment in baseball history--a June 10, 1982 game between the Milwaukee Brewers and the Baltimore Orioles--Dan Okrent explains the facets of our national pastime that are crucial to its nature but invisible to the uninitiated fan, such as catcher's signals, pitching physiology, club owners' balance sheets, and scores more. Derived from a Kirkus review: From the co-author of The Ultimate Baseball Book: a mind-boggling blowup of the June 10, 1982 game between the Milwaukee Brewers (9-14-0) and the Baltimore Orioles (7-17-2). Apart from those 31 hits, the game had a fair amount of back-and-forth drama, culminating in Ben Ogilvie's two-run, two-out double in the bottom of the eighth; it gave the Brewers a big lift by thwarting a sweep of the four-game series by the Orioles; and it counted heavily when the Brewers nipped the Orioles for the division title on the last day of the season. But Okrent really wants to present the game as a microcosmic view of the whole baseball world, and he succeeds admirably. He recreates every inning, every pitch, every swing, every defensive move in precise detail. This could lead to total tedium, except that Okrent is fabulously informative. He tells how a pitcher throws a fork-ball and a "slurve"; just how much of a jump a curveball, as opposed to a fastball, gives a base-stealer (only .07 second, but curves land lower to the ground and are harder for catchers to release quickly); why pitchers bag their arms in ice after a game (to stop the hundreds of tiny capillary hemorrhages that have "warmed up" the arm in the first place). Explaining all this, and sketching out little bios of the players (stars like Yount and Ripken, journeymen like Gantner and Dauer), naturally requires time. If Okrent can't cram everything about baseball into one book, he comes close: a tour de force in slow motion.