Download The Pine Tar Game

The Pine Tar Game: The Kansas City Royals, the New York Yankees, and Baseball’s Most Absurd and Entertaining Controversy Paperback – August 2, 2016
Author: Visit ‘s Filip Bondy Page ID: 1476777187

Review

“In The Pine Tar Game Filip Bondy conjures a seminal moment in baseball history when what passed for controversy was more keystone cops than congressional investigation and illicit substances were sticky rather than addictive. The book is a delightful romp guaranteed to make a baseball lover pine for a more innocent time full of bluster and pique.”
—Jane Leavy, New York Times bestselling author of Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy

“The Pine Tar Game does exactly what writing is supposed to do: It takes a moment in time, one of the craziest in all of baseball history, and makes you understand that you didn’t know nearly as much about it as you thought you did. All this time later, it makes you realize that the moment was even crazier than you remembered. This story could never possibly have been told better than Filip Bondy tells it.”
—Mike Lupica, columnist for the New York Daily News and commentator at ESPN

·“Transforms a minor albeit amusing baseball play into an artful narrative, replete with a great cast of characters.”
—The Daily Beast

“Bondy successfully explores the personalities of those involved in the adventure and its aftermath….entertaining.”
—Bill Littlefield, NPR

“The teenage Yankee fan inside of me is still angry at Lee MacPhail for upholding Kansas City’s protest and wiping out perhaps the most bizarre ruling in baseball history. None of us who watched live will ever forget the sight of George Brett making like Jack Nicholson in The Shining as he charged from the dugout, and none of you who read this book will ever forget how the great Filip Bondy, the perfect chronicler of this imperfect moment, brought a wild and crazy Yankee Stadium day back to life.”
—Ian O’Connor, New York Times bestselling authorof The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter

“An improbably rich and entertaining tale…this one could find a lot of readers.”
—Booklist

“As only Rumpelstiltskin could take straw and turn it into gold, Filip Bondy has turned pine tar into fun, frenzy and foolishness. I had a ball reading about a bat.”
—Frank Deford, Senior Contributing Writer, Sports Illustrated

“Masterfully offers context and a history of the Yankees-Royals’ complicated sports rivalry…[the book] is worthy for devoted professional baseball fans and for its artfulness in creating a narrative focused primarily on just one pitch.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“If you thought you knew the full, sticky story of the most bizarre game in the annals of baseball, you thought wrong. The great Filip Bondy proves it on every page of this fresh and richly reported book, going way beyond the goop on George Brett’s bat to weave a story that is rollicking and revelatory from beginning to end.”
—Wayne Coffey, New York Times bestselling author of The Boys of Winter and coauthor of Mariano Rivera’s The Closer

“In his smart, whimsical New York Daily News columns, Filip Bondy has long projected a big-city voice along with a healthy appreciation and sympathy for small-market challengers. He does it again in The Pine Tar Game, with a richly reported and written account of the Yankees-Royals rivalry that gave us memorable characters and zany circumstances. Bondy was there. With his book, you will be, too.”
—Harvey Araton, author of Driving Mr. Yogi

“A sticky moment milked for all its nutty, head-shaking glory.” —Sports Illustrated

“Filip Bondy craftily tells the story behind the notorious Pine Tar Game…a clever look into the characters that made up the short-lived but angry rivalry between the revived Yankees of the late ’70s and early ’80s and the burgeoning Kansas City Royals of that same period.” —Providence Journal

“A rollicking account of a clutch home run, a marvelous temper tantrum, and an inning that took almost a month to complete….Even those who know [the ins and outs of the story] find something new in The Pine Tar Game….Depict[s] the odd purgatory into which the game itself was plunged, and the sense that just about anyone might become involved in the saga.”
—The Kansas City Star

“[Bondy] writes with a keen eye for character, giving us masterful sketches of Brett, Martin, team owners Ewing Kauffman and George Steinbrenner, and others.”
—Kate Tuttle, Boston Globe

“Bondy’s book fills in all the details I missed, ignored or forgot in all the retellings…[He] weaves together the Yankees’ tradition,swagger and dysfunction with tales of Charlie Finley, Rush Limbaugh, Gaylord Perry, and David Cone to thoroughly document the conditions that led Brett to make his infamous sprint to home.”
—Wichita Eagle

“Long before pro football’s Deflategate controversy over the inflation level of game balls, baseball had an equally mole hill-turned-mountain brouhaha. . . . Filip Bondy witnessed it all as a young sports writer, and now uses this bizarre episode to examine the larger narrative of shifting values in baseball and to rewind the rivalry between the mighty pinstripers and the small-town Royals.”
—Christian science Monitor

“A study in contrasts between the small-market Kansas City team and the Yankees with their huge New York market. . . . Deserve[s] high marks.”
—Washington Times –This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

About the Author

Filip Bondy has been a sports columnist for the Daily News (New York) for more than twenty years, regularly covering the Olympics, World Cup, and Wimbledon. Before that, he was an Olympics writer for TheNew York Times. Some of Bondy’s previous books include a look at the watershed NBA draft (Tip Off) and a lighthearted view of the worst players in Major League Baseball history (Who’s on Worst?).

See all Editorial Reviews

Paperback: 256 pagesPublisher: Scribner (August 2, 2016)Language: EnglishISBN-10: 1476777187ISBN-13: 978-1476777184Shipping Information: View shipping rates and policies
The image is an iconic one in baseball lore. George Brett hits a two-run homer to put his Kansas City Royals ahead of the New York Yankees 5-4 in the ninth inning on July 24, 1983. Yankee manager Billy Martin wants home plate umpire Tim McClelland to measure the pine tar on Brett’s bat, claiming that it extends past the 18 inches allowed by an obscure rule. Lacking a ruler to measure the offending substance, McClelland lays the bat across the 17-inch wide home plate, sees that the pine tar does indeed extend much farther than that width and calls Brett out. Brett then charges out of the dugout with anger, being restrained by another umpire.

That moment when Brett was ready to attack the umpire crew has made what would have been another ordinary baseball game a memorable moment. Author Filip Bondy was able to take that moment and craft a decent full length book around it by sharing not only the events of that day, but the background of both teams and their owners, Ewing Kaufman of the Royals and George Steinbrenner of the Yankees. Add in recollections by other players that day and the almost comical attempts by the Yankees to not complete the game after the American League office upheld the Kansas City protest of the call and an entertaining book is produced.

There is a lot of text that isn’t about the game, as you might expect. In addition to the history and biographies mentioned before, there is a good accounting of how the two teams built a bitter rivalry in the seven seasons before this game. From 1976 to 1980, the Royals and Yankees met in the American League Championship series four times, and to say this was a rivalry with some bad blood would be an understatement.
The early 1980s was a simpler time.

Disco was dissipating, a new wave was beginning, Bill Cosby overtook the airwaves for a different reason and there was only one Batman.
Baseball was simpler too. Baseball cards were still worth something, nobody knew what PED stood for and hitting forty home runs in a season was a rare accomplishment worth celebrating.

There was no social media and the only skeptical sports coverage was what you read in the following morning’s newspaper. But that didn’t stop one incident, one home run turned into an out, from turning one of the game’s most respected players into a raving lunatic and giving us a moment that lives on in infamy.

That one incident, the Pine Tar Game, is the subject of Filip Bondy’s latest creation.

But this work is not just about a bat and a decision. Bondy takes us back to the late 70s and early 80s by setting the tone for that game and what it meant for baseball history.

“The story begins, as all the best ones do, with a bat and a ball,” back when the Yankees payroll was only $13 million, half of what A-Rod makes now.

The rivalry between the Yankees and the Royals is now forgotten but back then it was a heated David and Goliath battle between what Bondy calls “two polar opposite franchises. The smaller-market teams were just freckle-faced kids with no real weaponry… but the upstart Royals were at the time a very real threat to the haughty supremacy of the pinstriped empire.”

Bondy’s book effectively chronicles the competitive buildup between the two clubhouses and a moment in baseball’s history that has stood the test of time. George Brett is accurately portrayed as an all-time great, a likeable guy, just one with a short fuse, “a seething bull in a china shop.
Download The Pine Tar Game: The Kansas City Royals, the New York Yankees, and Baseball’s Most Absurd and Entertaining Controversy – August 2, 2016 Free PDF

SakuraKamandaka444

Tweet

Subscribe to receive free email updates: