"A day like that can make your week," said baseballer Pete Rose when it was all over. "A slugfest — it even sounds good, doesn't it? Except to the pitchers, who were pissed."
It was the craziest game played in major league baseball over the past 100 years. And then the second inning started.
They came out of the gates like two teams with their collective hair on fire. The score was 7-6 at the end of the first inning. Fifteen to 6 after the top of the third. Twenty-one to 16 at the seventh inning stretch. After the regulation nine innings, it was all tied up at 22 apiece.
The Philadelphia Phillies and the Chicago Cubs were in the midst of a slugfest the likes of which hadn't been witnessed since 1922, when it was the same two teams hammering away at each other, also at Chicago's historic Wrigley Field.
These smoking bats are at the heart of Kevin Cook's jazzy "Ten Innings at Wrigley," but first there will be some scene setting and then there will be some tidying up after. Along the way, Cook will treat readers to all manner of baseball nuggets, like the kind of color commentator you like to have in the broadcast booth. Plus, there will be a soupçon of baseball patois to keep readers on their toes: "Kingman went into his home-run trot while bleacher bums went Borneo."
The year is 1979. It's late spring and it feels as if the Cubs were born to lose. What distinguishes them from other major league franchises is "how consistently and entertainingly they stunk," writes Cook. At least they were bad in interesting ways, like their slugger Dave Kingman, who clocked the most homers that year as well as the most strikeouts.
The Phillies didn't smell like a bed of roses, either. Their inaugural year, 1883, they came in last, 46 games behind the Boston Beaneaters. By 1979, they had racked up 7,705 losses on their way to zero World Series championships. This year, however, they had added Pete Rose to the lineup to complement Mike Schmidt, Larry Bowa and Garry Maddox.
The game itself gets blow-by-blow coverage. There is early season promise in the air and Cook adds enough chatter from the announcers to convey an atmosphere of 1970s radio. "Oh boy, here we go again. Long drive — oh! Way out of the ballpark, way across the street. Oh brother! Oh boy! That one's in Milwaukee."
The tempo, the color, the tension all combine to make manifest the excitement as each batter came to the plate.
Cook finishes the story with legacies of a handful of the players, and even a taste for die-hard Cubs fans of things to come: the sign at Wrigley Field that reads "World Series Champs 1907, 1908, 2016." But the soul of the book is the 97 total bases, 11 homers, 45 runs, the at-bat fireworks. Oh boy!
Peter Lewis is a book critic in New York.
Ten Innings at Wrigley
By: Kevin Cook.
Publisher: Henry Holt, 253 pages, $28.
