Product Description

The 1975 World Series between the Boston Red Sox and the Cincinnati Reds is generally considered the best of all time, and baseball historians often rank its sixth game as the greatest single game ever played. In this resoundingly acclaimed bestseller, Tom Adelman tells the story of the season that led up to that classic Series and then delivers the inside pitch on those amazing seven games.

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Product Details

Publisher	Back Bay Books
ISBN	0316796441
Format	Paperback
Author	Tom Adelman
EAN	9780316796446
Label	Back Bay Books
Dewey Decimal Number	796.357646
Studio	Back Bay Books
Number Of Pages	384
Title	The Long Ball: The Summer of '75 -- Spaceman, Catfish, Charlie Hustle, and the Greatest World Series Ever Played
Publication Date	2004-04-01
Manufacturer	Back Bay Books

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Customer Reviews

Interesting Approach Hurt By Many Errors

Review by D. S. Fenkel, 2009-06-27

Despite my rating, I actually enjoyed reading this book. Adelman's literary license notwithstanding, the anecdotes he included and the wide array of characters mentioned in this book make you want to keep turning the pages. His description of the events on and off the field are well written. The book suffers, however, due to the numerous factual erros that I found distracting. For example:

Page 4: Adelman describes the Red Sox signing of Carl Yastrzemski and "other local ethnic boys" like Tony Conigliaro. The problem with that theory is that Yaz is from Long Island, not New England.

Page 15: Adelman describes Catfish Hunter's reluctance to sign with New York, in part, due to the fact that "the Yankees haven't won a World Series since firing Casey Stengel in 1960." Any baseball fan knows that Mantle & Maris led the Yankees to championships in 1961 and 1962.

Page 18: Adelman claims that Washinton, DC and Seattle has each "lost a franchise to Minnesota." The original Senators did move to Minneapolis in 1961, but the Seattle Pilots moved to Milwaukee in 1971 to become the Brewers.

Page 86: Adelman notes that the Red Sox integrated in 1961 with the signing of Pumpsie Green, when, in fact, Green joined Boston in 1959.

Page 170: Adelman notes that the A's were seeking their "fifth consecutive AL championship." In 1975, the A's were the three-time defending champs, seeking their fourth title in a row.

These and other factual erros - where was the editor? - diminish an otherwise enjoyable summer read.

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Baseball With a Little Saccharine

Review by T. Karr, 2009-02-16

This is a good baseball book that covers the 1975 season that culminated in a World Series battle between Cincinnati's Big Red Machine and the Boston Red Sox. While the focus is on the Reds and Red Sox, Mr. Adelman does spend some time with a few other players (Catfish Hunter, George Brett), former players (Casey Stengel and Billy Martin) and future players (Rickey Henderson, Ken Griffey, Jr.)

I think most baseball fans would enjoy this book. I wish there was a book this well written for every season. Having said that, there were some things that really bothered me about "The Long Ball."

Mr. Adelman sometimes reminds me of a cranky 80-year-old man who lived in our neighborhood when I was a kid; everything was better before the present. Mr. Adelman seems to see 1975 as the pinnacle of baseball and it has all been downhill from there. Free agency ruins the sport. Players move around too much. Baseball has become just business. You get the picture.

At other times Mr. Adelman's writing is so treacly it almost begs to be read aloud as part of an SNL skit. If you can get past the passages full of saccharine and the occasional paragraph that overstates the importance of the 1975 season to the survival of baseball you will thoroughly enjoy this book.

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Tough call

Review by Brian, 2008-11-28

This book might be enjoyable for the very casual fan or someone who prefers their stories told like a soap opera; sprinkled with un-necessary or unconnected emotion and drama that provides the filler until the season cliff-hanger. There was probably a lot of material to be mined here (and he did touch on a lot of it) about the torch-passing nature of the season, but that flow never really got into as good a groove as it could have...

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Good concept, bad execution

Review by reenum, 2007-10-28

Sports books, to be interesting, need to take the reader behind the scenes of a team or event. Adelman succeeds in accomplishing this task, but this book is still unfulfilling.

Adelman tries to cover too many of th events of the 1975 season. It is an admirable goal, but the book ends up reading more like a survey or overview. Adelman does not succeed in providing the reader a sufficient amount of underlying detail for each storyline. This overview style makes the book as a whole feel disjointed. Just when the reader gets comfortable reading about Pete Rose in Cincinnati, the book shifts to Billy Martin becoming the Yankees' manager. If the book had discussed maybe 5 to 6 main storylines of the season, this book would have been more successful in accomplishing its goal.

There are too many extensive game summaries. I read sports books to understand the dynamics of how a team operates, how the players relate to each other, and to get behind the scenes information that I cannot get anywhere. Game summaries are OK if they are used to break up the storylines. But Adelman makes them another main focus of the book, which adds to the overall muddled feeling I got when reading this. It's OK to spend a couple of pages on game summaries, but not 5 or 6. This is probably the main reason I could not finish the book.

Free agency was given extremely short shrift. There was a brief discussion of Curt Flood, Catfish Hunter and Dave McNally. To give an accurate portrayal of the 1975 season, a lengthy discussion of free agency's birth needs to be present. This issue hung over the season, and was much talked about. This is the one area where Adelman was brief. But, the fact is that free agency was a major story. It deserved more of a look.

The concept of this book is great, but it fails in the execution.

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An entertaining read

Review by Bflo, 2007-05-12

"The Long Ball" is definitely an entertaining read. There were laugh-out-loud moments as the author described some of the plays in the '75 World Series. The first half of the book covers the regular '75 season, many of its players and teams, while the second half concentrates on the post-season. The only reason I didn't give this book 5 stars is because the author's slant in favor of the Boston Red Sox eventually emerges as an unmistakable bias. I would have liked to see the book's approach be more even-handed between the Reds and Red Sox, especially since it was the Reds that won the World Series, not Boston. Still, a very enjoyable read. Recommended.

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