Baseball: The Fan's Game

by Mickey Cochrane and Gordon S. Cochrane

Book Overview

This Society For American Baseball Research (SABR) paperback edition of "Baseball: The Fan's Game" by Mickey Cochrane is an unabridged replication of the original 1939 edition published by Funk &... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0910137471
• ISBN13: 9780910137478
• Release Date: January 1993
• Publisher: Society for American Baseball Research
• Length: 190 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.0" x 7.0"

Customer Reviews

SABR rattles off a magnificent reprint!

The Society of American Baseball Research (SABR) is to be commended for reprinting his marvelous baseball artifact.Sixty-three years after this book originally came out to celebrate baseball's 100th anniversary, a strong case can still be made that Gordon S. Cochrane of Bridgewater, Massachusetts, dubbed "Mickey" by a Pacific Coast League owner who wanted a Boston Irishman for promotional purposes, was the greatest catcher of all time.Never mind the inebriated Cochrane-sucker ingrate who spurned Ty Cobb's generosity during the 1960 Hall of Fame ceremonies in the Tommie Lee Jones movie. In 1939, he appears to have been very much in love with the game and with life, if this book is any indication (though, in fact, he had already suffered a nervous breakdown and from a wild pitch that had fractured his skull). He couldn't have known it at the time, but when Mutt Mantle's son was born eight years earlier, his father already had a baseball future in mind for him, and young Mantle was indeed named after the Philadelphia A's star catcher.This book will teach you almost all of what you need to know to be a successful major league catcher-manager. Almost? Well, as the author informs us, he could always hit, and he always knew that he could hit, no matter what league he was playing in. So there's not a tremendous amount of hitting instruction contained in this book, and the reader will gain more from it, if, like the author, he is ALREADY naturally able to hit .300 against big-league pitching (Cochrane's lifetime batting average was .320).Such hitting instruction as there is in this book might be more entertaining than helpful. On the one hand, he urges, "Take a strike. Take two strikes to get the ball you want to hit.". But at another point, he remarks that when you are facing a pitcher with good control, first-ball swinging, rather than allowing oneself to fall behind on the count, sometimes produces rallies.He's mildly contradicting himself with his hitting advice, certainly, and that's to be expected when someone tries to give instruction on something that he can do naturally and instinctively.But we are reminded that all hitters, even the greatest, will have bouts of sustained failure."Batting slumps are about as pleasant as an income-tax threat or the threat of a truant officer over a small boy's head. At some time or other, all ball players meet `Miss Slump' in person. Base hits become as alien as beef stew in the tropics."Damn, if only we still lived in a world where people in general and ballplayers in particular talked like this!But in an era that preceded the designated hitter, Cochrane had to play some position in the field that would get his bat in the lineup, even though he also suggests that if you can hit, they will always find a place for you. Still, long hours of hard work to turn himself from a hopeless catcher to a great one show in his detailed instruction.Catcher was always my favorite position because the catcher guards t