Going, Going, Gone...: The History, Lore, and Mystique of the Home Run

by Inc. Major League Baseball Properties and Brian Silverman

Baseball, our national pastime. The home run: our deepest passion electrified. The long ball is the stuff myths and legends: from the emergence of a Bunyanesque figure named Babe Ruth at the dawn of... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0061051659
• ISBN13: 9780061051654
• Release Date: September 2000
• Publisher: William Morrow & Company
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 2.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 9.3" x 12.2"

Customer Reviews

An Unheralded Baseball Gem

A friend of mine told me about this book and I'm glad he did otherwise I would never have known it was a available. This is the most comprehensive and as far as I know, the only book devoted solely to the home run. Not only is that a great subject, but the book has writing by some of the best baseball writers in the business. David Halberstam wrote the introduction and it's another classic from him. Leonard Koppett, who probably knows more about baseball history than anyone else, has a chapter on the origins of the home run. The late Ed Linn does a great job writing about great Home Run Derbies. Ray Robinson's essay is on the most dramatic home run's of all time. And Brian Silverman's essay on tape measure homers is both funny and informative. There are also great stats by the Elias Sports Bureau, off beat sidebars, and fantastic photos, many of which I had never seen before. All in all, an excellent package that would make any baseball fan very happy. Why there has been little fanfare about this book, I have no idea. This is the perfect Christmas present.

Going the distance

As someone whose earliest sports recollections germinated with the passions aroused by the vagaries of the Brooklyn Dodgers - the closest "home team" team available in my small New England town at the time - this book goes the distance for me by honing in on what is the essence of the baseball dream, the elusive and tantalizing home run. Although I was but a mere toddler during the Dodgers heyday and then waning, vivid, nearly audible memories of older cousins, uncles and generally sedate neighbors going wild with Dodgers fever are forever ingrained in my personal history. It didn't seem to matter that few of us had ever been to Brooklyn, and that only a select few drove their big American cars to the occasional game (a day trip regarded with the same sanctity as a pilgrimage to any religious shrine). The "bums" stirred up a little something we all needed after beautiful but dreary winters puncuated by the bleak landscape of frozen baseball fields. They gave us something beyond the promise of daffodils and bike rides. There was the longing to see one hit over the stands, or to hear, on your little transistor radio, the fervor of the unseen announcer as the home run ball ascended beyond our ken, where in our mind's eye it attained grandeur before plummeting into the hands of some lucky so-and-so who got to take it home to Flatbush or maybe across state lines to Jersey, wherever that was anyway.There were stats. There were umps. And there were hotdogs. But for us, it was always about the homers. Going, Going, Gone brings it all home again, in the introduction by David Halberstam, and in Brian Silverman's "Tape-Measure" take on just how far we really soared, and maybe how far we'll soar again.