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| Living on the Black: Two Pitchers, Two Teams, One Season to Remember | 
 enlarge | Author: John Feinstein
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Category: Book
List Price: $26.99
Buy New: $10.78
You Save: $16.21 (60%)
New (35) Used (18) Collectible (1) from $10.65
Avg. Customer Rating:  10 reviews
Sales Rank: 11253
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 544
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.7
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.9
ISBN: 0316113913
Dewey Decimal Number: 796.3570922
EAN: 9780316113915
ASIN: 0316113913
Publication Date: May 1, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: New - Has remainder mark. Fast shipping from trusted wholesaler with many exclusive publisher contracts.
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| Customer Reviews:
| Showing reviews 6-10 of 10 | | « PREV | | |
 Good Book But A Little Too Detailed August 21, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
John Feinstein is a very good sports author. I love most of his books. I thought this was an interesting concept for a book. I enjoy both pitchers, Mike Mussina and Tom Glavine, that he chose to follow. Mr. Feinstein showed a different side of both pitchers. He had a great season to follow with the New York Mets collapse and the New York Yankees fighting to make the playoffs. I really enjoyed Mike Mussina's breaking down of what a pitcher truly is and what they do.
Now the bad, I hated that Mr. Feinstein went through game by game giving the highlights that someone could have gotten from the boxscores. He left me asking questions as I read about what the two pitchers thought or how it effected them that I wish he would have answered. The first part of the book where Mr. Feinstein goes through each of their careers to date was fascinating. However he couldn't sustain that pace and the critical analysis after he started with the 2007 season. I really did enjoy this book but wish he would have had a better editor that would have made the book flow a little tighter.
 Great insight to the art of major league pitching June 20, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
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.
For baseball lovers everywhere June 30, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
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
Inside Pitch September 28, 2008
What I love about John Feinstein is his ability to take the sports fan into a world we don't normally see. In "Living on the Black" he uses his journalistic credibility and his extraordinary story telling powers to create a "behind the scenes" story of two veteran pitchers, Mike Mussina and Tom Glavine. Each pitcher is struggling to eek one more season out of his "ancient" body. Mr. Feinstein approaches his story with the same pacing of the baseball season itself (this may put off some readers). His detailed approach gives us tremendous insight into the art of pitching. This book is a fine addition to your collection of Baseball Literature.
Decent book but could have been better October 5, 2008
As someone who has read John Fienstein's books for more than ten years now I can say that I have seen some of his books that are good to great and some that are poor to lousy. This one sadly rates in the second category. Overall it is a weak and overwrought story and essentially a 500 page plus book that could be half that length with a good editor.
The book also contains a number of errors that a good editor would have caught along with the long winded phrases. Plus the fact that he dwells so long on the prep of two pitchers when focusing on either Glavine and the Mets or Mussina and the Yankees would have sufficed. Basically this book is too much information and too little strength. I hope his next work is better!
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