Head Game: Baseball Seen from the Pitcher's Mound Book

Roger Kahn, along with Thomas Boswell, is probably one of the top living baseball writers working today. His The Boys of Summer stands next to Boswell's Why Time Begins on Opening Day as one of the best explorations of baseball's appeal, its uniquely American identity and the kind of philosophical speculation that it can inspire among its fans given to thinking about such things.

In 2000, a couple of years after Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa chased down Roger Maris' single-season home run record but before steroid use and doping marred their achievements and brought many others into question, Kahn explored the history and some of the thinking behind the sport's primary competitive relationship: That between pitcher and hitter. His The Head Game takes a look at that relationship and its effect on the game from the pitcher's point of view, since it is his throw towards home plate that drives the subsequent actions.

Kahn takes a look at what the game's top pitchers said about their work, digging all the way back to its earliest days as a national-level sport at the hinge of the 19th and 20th centuries. For those men, he relies on published interviews or biographies, but he conducted his own interviews among those still living who date from later eras.

Although Head Game could be summed up as a "what's the pitcher thinking?" book, the diverse personalities, understandings and strategic visions of the different men involved give it a much greater depth. It suffers from the exclusion of Negro League giants such as Wilbur "Bullet" Rogan and Satchel Paige, but since Kahn is focusing on the American and National League's top pitchers, the fault for that exclusion lies mostly with the owners, players and managers who supported the segregated system from the 1880s to 1947.

Original available here.