* Sports books mad libs

December 24, 2009

The current issue of ESPN the Magazine includes a cute feature titled “Over the Top,” by Amanda Angel.

The Greatest Story Ever Told is about Jesus himself, but these days you’d half-expect to find that title on a bookseller’s spoets shelves. A quick glance at the genre  shows many true, real and seemingly impossible epic teales of triumph, glory and agony, way too many, actually. Here, our survey of the most hyperbolic sports titles current in print.

Among the baseball titles included on the list:

  • Under the category “Soul Searchers”: Juicing the Game: Drugs, Power and the Fight for the Soul of Major League Baseball
  • Under “Falls from grace”: Where They Ain’t: The Fabled Life and Untimely Death of the Original Baltimore Orioles, the Team That Gave Birth of Modern Baseball
  • Under “World Shakers”: Miracle Ball: My Hunt for te Shot Heard ‘Round the World
  • Under “Redemption songs”: Bottom of the Ninth: Branch Rickey, Casey Stengel and the Daring Scheme to Save Baseball from Itself and Vindicated: Big Names, Big Liars and the Battle to Save Baseball

No current baseball works fall into the article’s “Perfection” category, but a quick look at my library shows the following (That’s a nice thing about Library.com; you can search by key words):

  • Perfect I’m Not: Boomer on Beer, Brawls, Backaches and Baseball, by David Wells
  • Snap Me Perfect, by Darrel Porter
  • I Told You I Wasn’t Perfect, by Denny McClain
  • The Perfect Game: Tom Seaver and the Mets, by Seaver
  • Tomorrow I’ll be Perfect, by David Steib
  • The Perfect Season: Why 1998 Was Baseball’s Greatest Year, by Tim McCarver
  • Perfect Once Removed: When Baseball Was All the World to Me, by Phillip Hoose
  • Baseball . . . The Perfect Game: An All-Star Anthology Celebrating the Game’s Great Players, Teams, And Moments
  • The Perfect Game: America Looks at Baseball, edited by Elizabeth Warren
  • The Perfect Game: A Classic Collection of Facts, Figures, Stories and Characters from the Society for American Baseball Research
  • Perfect : The Inside Story of Baseball’s Sixteen Perfect Games, by James Buckley Jr.
  • The Perfect Game, by Craig Weincek
  • The Perfect Yankee: The Incredible Story of the Greatest Miracle in Baseball History, by Don Larsen

(That’s the nice thing about Library.com; you can search by key words.)

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Tagged as: baseball books, hyperbole, language, Trivia

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