Nesmith Library

The greatest game, the Yankees, the Red Sox, and the playoff of '78, Richard Bradley

eng

no index present

non fiction

The greatest game

530113166373195

Richard Bradley

the Yankees, the Red Sox, and the playoff of '78

In this spellbinding book, Richard Bradley tells the story of what was surely the greatest major league game of our lifetime and perhaps in the history of professional baseball. That game, played at Fenway Park on the afternoon of October 4, 1978, was the culmination of one of the most tense, emotionally wrought seasons ever, between baseball's two most bitter rivals, the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees. Both teams finished this tumultuous season with identical 99-64 records, forcing a one-game playoff. With a one-run lead and two outs, with the tying run in scoring position in the bottom of the ninth, the entire season came down to one at-bat and to one swing of the bat. It came down, as both men eerily predicted to themselves the night before, to the aging Red Sox legend, Carl Yastrzemski, and the Yankees' free-agent power reliever, Rich "Goose" Gossage. Anyone who calls himself a baseball fan knows the outcome of that confrontation. And yet such are the literary powers of the author that we are pulled back in time to that late-afternoon moment and become filled anew with all the taut sense of drama that sports has to offer, as if we don't know what happened

The Yankee spring -- Top of the first : Torrez's story -- The Boston spring -- Bottom of the first : Guidry's story -- The season begins -- The second inning -- The origins of a rivalry -- The third inning -- Billy Martin feels the heat -- The fourth inning -- Goodbye for now -- The fifth inning -- August -- The sixth inning -- Massacre -- "The pope dies. The Sox live." -- Bucky Dent's inning -- The eighth inning -- Sunday night -- The ninth inning -- Epilogue