Sixty Feet, Six Inches: A Hall of Fame Pitcher & a Hall of Fame Hitter Talk about How the Game Is Played

by Lonnie Wheeler, Bob Gibson, Reggie Jackson, et al.

Book Overview

Reggie Jackson and Bob Gibson offer a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to understand America's pastime from their unique insider perspective. Legendary. Insightful. Uncompromising. Candid. Uncensored.... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0385528698
• ISBN13: 9780385528696
• Release Date: September 2009
• Publisher: Doubleday Books
• Length: 273 Pages
• Weight: 1.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.4" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

Old School Winner

If you were a baseball fan from 60's, 70's, & 80's this is a must read! Great insights from a great picher and great hitter from overlapping era's gives some detailed insight into the game of Baseball. If you are a younger fan then this book will really give you a feel for the purist generation before the lower mound, the designated hitter and the other protections given the batters in the "Modern" game. Excellent!

Sixty feet, Six inches

Book in fine condition and comments from both Gibson and Jackson isightful, even for Old Timers. Would encourage young lads read the book as they can learn about the History of Baseball played in that era....

a great addition to baseball history

How much fun would it be to read an account of Cy Young sitting down and talking about the pitcher/hitter battle with Ty Cobb? Or Warren Spahn with Ted Williams? We don't have any such account, but we do have Bob Gibson talking with Reggie Jackson! This book will only grow in importance over the years. For those of us who remember Reggie's and Bob's playing career, this is a wonderfully vivid reminder. For those who do not, it will paint a detailed portrait of who they are and show why, even among vastly talented athletes, intelligence and will power decide true excellence. The final pages on current issues is the weakest part of the book, showing that even these guys don't have much light to shed on steroids, pitch counts or the current gut of statistics. I suppose these issues had to be discussed, in the interest of full coverage. The battle between hitter and pitcher is the ultimate baseball battle. These two warriors share with the reader how they survived the war so long and with so many victories.

Excellent training or fan manual

I am a casual fan. I like the game, but don't care much which team is playing. This book is an excellent training book that gives you the inside scoop on what the pitcher is trying to do and how he does it and how the batter plans his attacks against the pitcher. Understanding their plans makes watching a game much more enjoyable. This book should be required reading for any aspiring player. The two retired players share their thoughts about specific players in occasionally brutal detail. I don't rate it at a five level because sometimes the two guys go on and on and on. Sometimes I wished they would just take the walk instead of repeatedly fouling off their ideas. But overall, I strongly reccommend it to anyone who wants to more deeply understand what they are seeing during the game.

WORTH EVERY PENNY

This book may be a little too technical for the casual baseball fan, but if you know and love the game, and want to learn a little more about the nuts and bolts of pitching and hitting, this is a great read. It's not great baseball literature like Roger Angell, or the best of Roger Kahn, more of an informal conversation between two hall-of-famers and World Series greats. It's a wealth of information about how the game is played, and more importantly, how it should be played. What makes it great is that there are a lot of fascinating anecdotes from both Bob Gibson and Reggie Jackson interspersed with the technical stuff. Both men talk at some length about their early years in the game, and what they had to go through coming up as young black players in the 50's (Gibson) and 60's (Jackson). I already had great respect for Gibson, but have even more after reading this book. I wasn't as enamored of Reggie Jackson, but after reading Sixty Feet, Six Inches, I have new respect for him as well. Any serious student of baseball and baseball history would thoroughly enjoy this book.