Catcher
Regular price
€19.99
Today's baseball catcher stolidly goes about his duty without attracting much attention. But it wasn't always that way, as Peter Morris shows in this lively and original study. In baseball's early days, catchers stood a safe distance back of the batter without protective gear. Then the introduction of the curveball in the 1870s led them to move up directly behind home plate, even though they still wore no gloves or other protection. Extraordinary courage became the catcher's most notable requirement, but the new positioning also demanded that the catcher have lightning-fast reflexes, great hands, and a throwing arm with the power of a cannon. With so great a range of required skills, a special mystique came to surround the position, and it began to seem that a good catcher could single-handedly make the difference between a winning and losing team.
Peter Morris's most recent book is But Didn't We Have Fun?, a widely praised informal history of the early days of baseball before it turned professional. His A Game of Inches, a compendium of baseball's innovations, was called 'magisterial' by the Boston Globe and was the first book ever to win both the Seymour Medal and the Casey Award as the best baseball book of the year. A former national and international Scrabble champion, Mr. Morris lives in Haslett, Michigan.