Intentional Balk: Baseball's Thin Line Between Innovation and Cheating
Description
From the moment of its inception, the quintessentially American sport of baseball has included cheating. Sometimes that rule-skirting is embraced as ingenious hijinks; other times, reviled as an unforgivable trespass. But what exactly is the difference? Why is skipping bases less egregious than signing underage players? Is sign-stealing evidence of ingenuity, or does it fundamentally change the nature of the game?
In Intentional Balk, nationally-recognized baseball historians Dan Levitt and Mark Armour examine cheating in baseball as the pursuit of a competitive edge that in other endeavors might be heralded as innovation. Wherever you come down on the question, Intentional Balk offers an engrossing chronicle of America's pastime and the players, coaches, groundskeepers and management who for more than 150 years have sought any advantage to win at all costs.
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About the Author
Mark Armour is an award-winning writer living in Corvallis, Oregon. He is the author or co-author of several previous books on baseball, including Paths to Glory; Joe Cronin: A Life in Baseball; Pitching, Defense and Three-Run Homers; The Great Eight; and In Pursuit of Pennants. For SABR, he founded the Baseball Biography Project and the Baseball Cards Committee, and currently serves as the President of the Board of Directors. More on Mark can be found at www.mark-armour.net/
Reviews
"From fake foul tips to dugout disguises, sign stealing to sticky stuff, Mark Armour and Daniel Levitt don't miss a trick -- and that's saying something when the subject is baseball, where rule-bending has always been part of the game. Armour and Levitt teamed up for the definitive history of the baseball front office with In Pursuit of Pennants, and now they've written the definitive history of cheating in our national pastime. With meticulous research and a gripping narrative, Armour and Levitt give us a deeper understanding of the nuances between clever gamesmanship and an unfair edge -- and, more broadly, between right and wrong."--Tyler Kepner
