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Perfect
Perfect

Perfect

The Inside Story of Baseball's Twenty Perfect Games
By James Buckley

SPORTS & RECREATION

336 Pages, 6 x 9

Formats: Trade Paper, EPUB, PDF, Mobipocket

Trade Paper, $16.95 (CA $18.95) (US $16.95)

ISBN 9781600786761

Rights: WOR

Triumph Books (Apr 2012)

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Overview

The last word on the rarest achievement in pitching
Among baseball achievements, the perfect game—one in which no runners reach base—remains the greatest. Though many have come close, only 20 pitchers have achieved such perfection in more than a century of baseball. This exhaustive compendium examines the fascinating story behind every perfect game and uncovers details both great and small, illuminating the majesty of these titanic achievements. The faithfully narrated record of all 20 games—punctuated by statistics, trivia, little-known anecdotes, and personal memories from both witnesses and the pitchers themselves—gets inside the minds of the players who made baseball history. In addition to profiling some of the game’s greatest pitchers, such as Cy Young, Sandy Koufax, and Randy Johnson, or others including Charley Robertson who had otherwise unremarkable careers, this updated edition features new chapters devoted to Dallas Braden, Mark Buehrle, and Roy Halladay, the three latest pitchers to throw a perfect game, and a comprehensive appendix profiles several pitchers who almost achieved perfection.

Author Biography

James Buckley
See Author
James Buckley Jr. is the author of more than 25 sports-related books for adults and children, including Spider-Man's Amazing Powers; Home Run Heroes: Big Mac, Sammy & Junior; and The World of Baseball. Currently an editorial director of Shoreline Publishing Group, he is a former senior editor for NFL Publishing and an editorial projects manager for Sports Illustrated. He lives in Santa Barbara, California.

Press Releases

Perfect: The Inside Story of Baseball's Twenty Perfect Games

By James Buckley Jr.

 

Contact: Bill Ames, Independent Publishers Group, 312.337.0747, ext. 326, bames@ipgbook.com

 

It's a small club whose members span 132 years: twenty pitchers who have played that one glorious game sans glitch, sans hitch. Such a game is called "perfect" and is unique to baseball.

 

A pitcher's job is to get people out; in a perfect game, he gets them all out, all 27 in a row with nary a single blemish. No hits. No walks. No errors (thanks to his teammates). No hit batsmen. Nothing but perfection.

 

The stories of how those "nothings" happened are really something and in Perfect: The Inside Story of Baseball's Twenty Perfect Games, author James Buckley, Jr., retells in great detail - and with great insight - the inside stories of those 20 perfect performances. Using historical research and original interviews with more than 50 pitchers, players, fans, broadcasters, writers, historians, and others, Buckley examines the fascinating history of baseball's 20 perfect games in this newly updated second edition volume.

 

Elite members of the Perfect Club include:

 

  • Don Larsen of the Yankees: the only pitcher to throw a perfect game in the World Series
  • Mark Buehrle: who helped the White Sox join the Yankees and Indians as the only teams with more than one perfect game
  • U.S. Senator Jim Bunning: who wrote the foreword to this book
  • Newbie Harry Leroy "Doc" Halladay: the most recent member to the club (May 2010)
  • Old-timer John Richmond: the first pitcher to ever throw a perfect game (June 12, 1880)

 

Perfect is for baseball fans and fans of peak performance in all walks of life. This book is a continuing celebration of players (and teams) who reach the pinnacle of success, capturing "lightning in a bottle" for nine innings that shines for the whole world to see.

 

About the Author:

James Buckley, Jr., is the author of more than 25 books on baseball and other sports, including The Visual Dictionary of Baseball and Baseball: A Celebration and Play Ball: The Official Major League Baseball Guide for Young Players. He formerly worked at both Sports Illustrated and NFL Publishing, hosted a sports interview radio show in Santa Barbara, and today is the editorial director of the Shoreline Publishing Group. He is also the publications director for the California state-champion semipro baseball team, a former youth baseball coach, and a consistently disappointed, yet hopeful, fan of the Boston Red Sox. Buckley lives in Santa Barbara, California, with his wife Patty, son Conor, and daughter Katie.

 

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