The Last Nine Innings: Inside the Real Game Fans Never See [Hardcover]

Euchner (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 2006

“The Last Nine Innings is the last word on the inside of baseball. It’s full of wonderful revelations and perceptions that help us understand the game in ways that we might never have imagined. Charlie Euchner has done a marvelous job in getting players to talk, simply, about how they play, and we’re the wiser for it.”
-Frank Deford

“Charlie takes an unorthodox approach to an emotional week and succeeds at finding the heart of both the tension of the World Series and the technical foundations of the baseball profession. This is a different book, in a very good way.”
-Howard Bryant, the Washington Post, and author of Juicing the Game: Drugs, Power and the Fight for the Soul of Major League Baseball

“The lengthy description of game 7 makes for dramatic reading, and the interviews with key players from that game add a human dimension.”
-Booklist

“I enjoyed Charles’s book. It’s an interesting read, rich in thought-provoking detail and context, in the manner of Malcolm Gladwell. He deftly pulls off a difficult double play: educating the serious fan while entertaining the casual one.”
-Tom Verducci, Senior Writer for Sports Illustrated

“The Last Nine Innings is entertaining, engaging and enlightening. You’ll never watch a baseball game the same way.”
-Andrew Zimbalist, author of Baseball and Billions: A Probing Look Inside the Big Business of Our National Pastime and Robert A. Woods Professor of Economics at Smith College

“Memo to ESPN analysts, FOX color announcers and daily baseball scribes: stop telling us about who had a haircut, who didn’t have a haircut and who collects stamps. Rip out the red thread on the baseball, peel back the cowhide and talk about all the stuff that’s wound up inside the game. That’s what Charles Euchner does in The Last Nine Innings and it’s fascinating.”
-Leigh Montville, author of Ted Williams, Biography of an American Hero and Why Not Us?: The 86-Year Journey of the Boston Red Sox Fans from Unparalleled Suffering to the Promised Land of the 2004 World Series


The Great American Pastime has changed. For the first time in the history of the game, the three major forces that drive the evolution of modern pro baseball-The Triple Revolution-is revealed:

The Triple Revolution:
(1) Globalization of Recruiting and Business
(2) Scientific Analysis & Reduction of Physical Baseball Movements
(3) Evolution Effect of Modernized Stat-Crunching

Charles Euchner uses a dramatic moment-by-moment narrative of the seventh game of the 2001 World Series between the Yankees and the Diamondbacks to display the Triple Revolution; and to reveal the hidden dimensions of the “game within the game”: From pitching motions to batting styles, from fielding and base-running, to training and strategy.

Euchner uses extensive interviews with all the players from this modern classic to produce a comprehensive view of the game that will fascinate casual fans, and stimulate baseball experts. The insider narrative includes Mariano Rivera, Jorge Posada, Derek Jeter, Tino Martinez, Luis Gonzalez and Curt Schilling, along with the game's coaches, managers, support staff, even medical researchers and top game stats experts.

Among the questions answered: What is the ideal pitching motion? How can we judge defensive performance? What makes managers succeed and fail? What changes the odds over the course of the game? And much more. Whether a recreational fans, or serious student of the game, The Last Nine Innings enlightens; as baseball author Andrew Zimbalist writes, “You'll never watch a baseball game the same way.”

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Ted Williams, who made baseball look easy, once remarked that it is actually the hardest game to play. Euchner shows just how difficult and complex this "kids' game" is, marshalling an impressive array of interviews with players, coaches, managers, umpires, former players, statisticians and broadcasters to describe the inner workings of the national pastime and the changing ways insiders and outsiders approach the game. He presents all of this via game seven of the 2001 World Series, an emotional contest played against the backdrop of 9/11 in which the Arizona Diamondbacks defeated the New York Yankees. Each play of this game provides a jumping-off point for a discussion of some aspect of 21st-century baseball: the thought processes that guide a pitcher as he decides what to throw, the split-second calculations that fielders make to track batted balls, or the thinking of the managers as the contest unfolds. Unfortunately, Euchner's approach makes the book read like a series of digressions, and the drama of the World Series game dissipates amid the author's extended ruminations and interviews (it takes three pages for the first pitch to reach the plate). Nevertheless, readers will come away from this book with a good overview of the trends driving the game today and renewed appreciation for just how tough a game baseball is.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

"(Charles Euchner) deftly pulls off a difficult double play: educating the serious fan while entertaining the casual one." -- Tom Verducci, Senior Writer, Sports Illustrated

"You’ll never watch a baseball game the same way." -- Andrew Zimbalist, Author of Baseball and Billions

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Sourcebooks, Inc. (March 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1402205791
• ISBN-13: 978-1402205798
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,801,031 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Charles Euchner, the author or editor of nine books, is the owner and operator of The Writing Code.

Euchner's newest book is Nobody Turn Me Around (Beacon Press, 2010), an intimate account of the 1963 March on Washington. Based on more than 100 interviews and thousands of pages of archival materials, Nobody Turn Me Around offers the only complete study of the only moment when all of the factions of the civil right's movement gathered in one place, a day capped by Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" oration.

Euchner is also completing a book called The Writing Code. Building on his experience in colleges and universities -- at institutions such as Yale, Harvard, Holy Cross, and Northeastern -- Euchner offers a sure-fire system to improve writing for high school and college students, journalists and academics, and corporate and nonprofit professionals.

Euchner's latest books -- both published in 2006 -- explore baseball from its highest to lowest levels. The Last Nine Innings provides a dramatic narrative of the seventh game of the 2001 World Series between the Arizona Diamondbacks and the New York Yankees.Little League, Big Dreams looks at the revolution in youth sports through a portrait of the 2005 Little League World Series.

Until June 2004, when he stepped down to satisfy the demands of his writing career, Euchner was the executive director of the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. In that capacity, Euchner coordinated a wide-ranging research agenda on urban and regional politics and policy, conferences and other events, training programs for public and public service fellowships for graduate and professional students.

Euchner edited the Governing Greater Boston Series, served on numerous advisory committees, and contributed to newspapers and magazines on issues facing the region.

Euchner has written widely on public affairs. His most recent book on politics and policy, coauthored with Stephen McGovern of Haverford College, is Urban Policy Reconsidered: Dialogues the Problems and Prospects of American Cities (2003). That book has won praise for its comprehensive and even-handed approach to complex issues. The book has been praised not only by scholars of urban affairs but also by practitioners as diverse as Michael Dukakis, the three term Massachusetts governor and 1988 presidential nominee, and Steve Goldsmith, the former Indianapolis mayor and domestic policy advisor to George W. Bush.

Euchner's research has focused on the grassroots level of politics. His book Extraordinary Politics: How Protest and Dissent Are Changing American Democracy (1996) provides a critical analysis of the causes, strategies, tactics, and effects of outsider forms of politics in the U.S. Playing the Field: Why Sports Teams Move and Cities Fight to Keep Them (1993) was the first book to question the economic and political arguments for building sports stadiums.

Prior to entering academe, Euchner was a staff writer for Education Week, the nation's newspaper of record for elementary and secondary education. At Education Week, Euchner covered the federal government, teachers unions, state education policy, and computers in education.

Euchner received his B.A. from Vanderbilt University and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Review: "The Last Nine Innings", March 27, 2006

By 

Stephen Lombardi - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Last Nine Innings: Inside the Real Game Fans Never See (Hardcover)

In his book, "The Last Nine Innings: Inside the Real Game Fans Never See," Charles Euchner uses the final game of the 2001 World Series as an operating platform - where he takes the events of the game, by inning, and by each plate appearance (and sometimes by each pitch) and then uses those particular events to segue into narrative examination on the details behind copious key elements of Major League Baseball today.

These topics include sports training and conditioning - both for the mind and body, defensive technique and skill throughout the diamond, pitch selection, pitching and batting mechanics, manager decisions, the impact of the baseball statistical revolution, and the globalization of the baseball talent pool.

To be candid, as I started reading "The Last Nine Innings," being someone who has listened to professional commentary from parts of over 3,000 big league baseball games and who has read nearly 150 books on baseball, my impression (about roughly 10% into the book) was "I'm not seeing much that I don't already know." However, that reaction quickly changed - within minutes - as I began to continue reading. In fact, the further that I went into this book, I became increasingly (at what seemed like an exponential rate) more impressed with Euchner's storytelling and the amount of detail provided therein.

I especially enjoyed the passages concerning Steve Finley's work with chiropractor Edythe Heus, the role of the brain's rostromedical prefrontal cortex in body movement, the elements of a batting swing, the research performed at the American Sports Medicine Institute on pitching motions, the impact of particular game events on the change of win probability, the advantages of veteran players, the development of the Athletic Desire Index, and how Chuck Knoblauch taking Randy Johnson deep in the count during an 8th inning At Bat actually helped the Arizona Diamondbacks.

Having read "The Last Nine Innings," in its entirety, I can submit that this book is one of the best available encapsulations of everything inside and behind the scenes of modern baseball. This is not to imply that it is just a cold collection of facts. It is quite the opposite. In addition to being a robust collection of "everything you need to know," Euchner's book is very entertaining. (And, this is coming from a Yankees fan who always imagined that nothing but pain would come from ever revisiting Game Seven of the 2001 World Series.) When you consider all the interesting players and personalities involved in this particular game, just the numerous and insightful interviews (alone) that Euchner provides with several of these participants make this book worth the price of admission. When you tack on the plethora of other information that "The Last Nine Innings" provides, it's a great experience obtained at a bargain.

To summarize the benefit from reading "The Last Nine Innings," I would offer that this book is the perfect primer for the neophyte baseball fan who wants to expeditiously learn everything that is essential to the game today while also serving as an effective multipurpose reference tome for the more experienced baseball enthusiast.

To be fair, I did notice two small faux pas in the edition that I read. When describing the fan salute that Paul O'Neill received during Game Five of the 2001 World Series, it refers to him as the "Yankees' left fielder." And, when mentioning Tony Womack's hit during the 9th inning of Game Seven of the Series, Euchner states "Womack hits the ball hard to left field." When, in reality, O'Neill was a right fielder in Game Five and Womack's hit in Game Seven was to right field. But, in the grand scheme of things here, these are just two minor nitpicks and do not change my recommendation on "The Last Nine Innings."

"The Last Nine Innings: Inside the Real Game Fans Never See" should be considered as an essential element of any worthwhile baseball library and is highly recommended.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars In the tradition of great narrative nonfiction writers, April 26, 2006

By 

John Martin "madmartha" (Stamford, CT USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Last Nine Innings: Inside the Real Game Fans Never See (Hardcover)

Some of my favorite books are narrative nonfiction, such

as Tracy Kidder's "Soul of a New Machine" and "House", or

Michael Ruhlman's great books about cooking and building

wooden boats. When done well, these sorts of books are

interesting whether or not you know about or care about

the underlying topic. The reader is entertained, and

learns a topic in great depth.

Charles Euchner's book is in the same league (no pun intended)

as these gold standards of narrative nonfiction. The dust

jacket reviews are true... I will never watch a baseball game...

even my son's Little League game...in the same way again.

The book covers topics such as the physics of the game, the

international supply chain of talent, and the physical

punishment that the game brings to players.

Definitely a cool read whether you know alot about baseball

or just want to learn something new in an entertaining way.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Good for baseball fans as well as fanatics, April 4, 2006

By 

Tony V "TV" (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Last Nine Innings: Inside the Real Game Fans Never See (Hardcover)

I love all kinds of sports, but am only "technically knowledgeable" in football. While I had some notion of the science behind athletes training, I had no idea that baseball involved so many intricacies, with every pitch, hit, and fielding play. That's the great surprise I had with Last Nine Innings.

I thought I'd like it because I really enjoyed the 2001 World Series between the Yankees and Diamondbacks, but I found discovering the "inside world" of baseball even more enjoyable; the author wrote about it in an easy to understand way. What I'm trying to say is: As an Average Joe fan, this book helped me appreciate intricacies of the game which I would have never known about, and never would have bothered to study about in an almanac or reference book. A very good read!