Tyler Kepner started his own baseball magazine in 1988 as a kid in suburban Pennsylvania. In 2010, he was named national baseball writer for The New York Times. In “K,” his delightfully nerdy first book — a study of the history, psychology and physics of 10 pitches, from the fastball and curveball to the spitter and splitter — he brings both a child's giddy enthusiasm and a beat reporter's diligence to questions of pitch velocity, the legend of the rising fastball, and which pitches cause injury. He interviewed more than 300 people to get into the heads of players armed with nothing but “those precious pitches, loaded with cork, yarn and possibility.”
If pitchers and hitters constitute a two-party system, Kepner is no independent. “The pitcher is the planner, the initiator of action,” he writes. “The hitter can only react. If the pitcher, any pitcher, finds a way to disrupt that reaction, he can win.” Kepner compares changeup throwers to artists and knuckleballers to Jedi knights. “A major-league pitcher is part boxer and part magician; if he's not punching you in the face, he's swiping a quarter from behind your ear. If you ever square him up, you'd better savor it.”
Kepner believes the best pitch in baseball is “a well-located fastball,” but he offers vivid descriptions, telling anecdotes and shrewd historical context for all the pitches he discusses. Throwing a changeup is like bringing “a feather duster” to a cage match. A slider's action, according to one pitcher, is like “a car skidding on ice.” Knuckleballers, Kepner reports, are typically the nicest players, and brave enough “to bring Silly String to a battlefield.”
The chapter on the spitball — a pitch out of fashion, Jason Giambi tells Kepner, because TV cameras make it harder to cheat — is especially charming. Woebegone Rick Honeycutt saw a thumbtack on the way to the bullpen and decided to use it to mark up a ball. He immediately gave up two hits, was caught scuffing and earned a 10-game suspension — talk about a “cheaters never prosper” poster child.
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