It's only fitting to read and review a baseball book during Super Bowl weekend, correct? Needing a break from all the Bengals and Rams talk, this book was a very good, quick read on some of baseball's best pitchers from the last 50 years. Here is my review of "Pinnacle on the Mound."
Title/Author: “Pinnacle
on the Mound: Cy Young Winners Talk Baseball” by Doug Wedge
Rating: 4 of 5 stars (very good)
Review: Given each year to the
outstanding pitchers in the American and National League, the Cy Young award is
the culmination of an outstanding season and the hard work that goes into achieving
this honor. Ten winners of this award,
spanning a time frame of 50 years, shared their stories and the keys to their
success with author Doug Wedge.
From the two winners in 1967, Jim Lonborg and Mike
McCormick to the 2017 American League winner Corey Kluber, each of these men talk
about the people who helped and supported them on their way to the award as
well as the changes and the particular pitches that each one threw that made
them so tough for the hitters. Each
pitcher’s story is interesting in its own way.
This reviewer was especially riveted to the story of R.A. Dickey, the 2012
National League winner and his use of the knuckleball. Pitchers who use that pitch as the main one
in their arsenal are rare and when he won the honor, Dickey dedicated that award
to all of the knuckleball pitchers before him, such as Hall of Famer Phil Niekro,
Tim Wakefield, and Tom Candiotti.
It should be noted that the pitchers interviewed for the
book had various degrees of career success.
While there are some who only had that one season of greatness (Dickey,
Randy Jones), most of the pitchers portrayed had consistently good major league
careers, with one of them (Dennis Eckersley) becoming a Hall of Fame
inductee. However, there were stages for
all of them when they had a defining moment that either made a mediocre career
better or a good one even better because of that coach, veteran pitcher or
change in their mental games in order to achieve the crowing glory that one can
earn for the course of a season.
While each of these ten men may have earned the Cy Young with
different pitches or different mentors, they all have the same characteristic
of knowing that they had to do something special or something different in
order to become better pitchers and help their teams achieve more success. This is a book that baseball fans will want
to read to gain some nuances into pitching and learning from Cy Young award
winners is a good place to do so.
I wish to thank Rowman and Littlefield for providing a copy
of the book in exchange for an honest review.
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