
Enjoy fast, FREE delivery, exclusive deals and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime
Try Prime
and start saving today with Fast, FREE Delivery
Amazon Prime includes:
Fast, FREE Delivery is available to Prime members. To join, select "Try Amazon Prime and start saving today with Fast, FREE Delivery" below the Add to Cart button.
Amazon Prime members enjoy:- Cardmembers earn 5% Back at Amazon.com with a Prime Credit Card.
- Unlimited Free Two-Day Delivery
- Instant streaming of thousands of movies and TV episodes with Prime Video
- A Kindle book to borrow for free each month - with no due dates
- Listen to over 2 million songs and hundreds of playlists
- Unlimited photo storage with anywhere access
Important: Your credit card will NOT be charged when you start your free trial or if you cancel during the trial period. If you're happy with Amazon Prime, do nothing. At the end of the free trial, your membership will automatically upgrade to a monthly membership.
Buy new:
$22.91$22.91
FREE delivery: Friday, June 9 on orders over $25.00 shipped by Amazon.
Ships from: Amazon Sold by: PrimestoreUS
Buy used: $8.48
Other Sellers on Amazon
& FREE Shipping
82% positive over last 12 months
+ $5.25 shipping
100% positive over last 12 months

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required. Learn more
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.


Summer of '98 Hardcover – April 5, 1999
Price | New from | Used from |
Purchase options and add-ons
- Print length209 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPutnam Adult
- Publication dateApril 5, 1999
- Reading age18 years and up
- Dimensions5.82 x 0.88 x 8.82 inches
- ISBN-100399145141
- ISBN-13978-0399145148
The Amazon Book Review
Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now.
Customers who viewed this item also viewed
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
Review
Product details
- Publisher : Putnam Adult (April 5, 1999)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 209 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0399145141
- ISBN-13 : 978-0399145148
- Reading age : 18 years and up
- Item Weight : 15.2 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.82 x 0.88 x 8.82 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #650,589 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,379 in Baseball (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Mike Lupica is one of the most prominent sports writers in America. His longevity at the top of his field is based on his experience and insider's knowledge, coupled with a provocative presentation that takes an uncompromising look at the tumultuous world of professional sports. Today he is a syndicated columnist for the New York Daily News, which includes his popular “Shooting from the Lip” column, which appears every Sunday. He began his newspaper career covering the New York Knicks for the New York Post at age 23. He became the youngest columnist ever at a New York paper with the New York Daily News, which he joined in 1977. For more than 30 years, Lupica has added magazines, novels, sports biographies, other non-fiction books on sports, as well as television to his professional resume. For the past fifteen years, he has been a TV anchor for ESPN's The Sports Reporters. He also hosted his own program, The Mike Lupica Show on ESPN2. In 1987, Lupica launched “The Sporting Life” column in Esquire magazine. He has published articles in other magazines, including Sport, World Tennis, Tennis, Golf Digest, Playboy, Sports Illustrated, ESPN: The Magazine, Men's Journal and Parade. He has received numerous honors, including the 2003 Jim Murray Award from the National Football Foundation. Mike Lupica co-wrote autobiographies with Reggie Jackson and Bill Parcells, collaborated with noted author and screenwriter, William Goldman on Wait Till Next Year, and wrote The Summer of '98, Mad as Hell: How Sports Got Away from the Fans and How We Get It Back and Shooting From the Lip, a collection of columns. In addition, he has written a number of novels, including Dead Air, Extra Credits, Limited Partner, Jump, Full Court Press, Red Zone, Too Far and national bestsellers Wild Pitch and Bump and Run. Dead Air was nominated for the Edgar Allen Poe Award for Best First Mystery and became a CBS television move, “Money, Power, Murder” to which Lupica contributed the teleplay. Over the years he has been a regular on the CBS Morning News, Good Morning America and The MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour. On the radio, he has made frequent appearances on Imus in the Morning since the early 1980s. His previous young adult novels, Travel Team, Heat, Miracle on 49th Street, and the summer hit for 2007, Summer Ball, have shot up the New York Times bestseller list. Lupica is also what he describes as a “serial Little League coach,” a youth basketball coach, and a soccer coach for his four children, three sons and a daughter. He and his family live in Connecticut.
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
Engaging this reader to LOVE THIS BOOK!
The story of the gift of the game, creating rituals between Father and Son, shared enthusiasms both on the field and listening to the radio to hear the plays and the scores = PRICELESS. Favorite Fathers Day gift for all Father’s or about to be Fathers. Girls can play too!
And yet (or, as Lupica would say: "And yet."), there is something that compels one to read on. I think that reading this, one gets the same feeling one would have gotten reading the Southhampton newspaper accounts of the departure of the Titanic, or a biography of Bernie Madoff before the curtain came down. That is: one senses a feeling of impending doom. Summer of '98(I am also angry that the author stole the title from David Halberstam's masterful work, Summer of '49) holds up as saviors of baseball the very swine that almost brought it down: McGwire, Sosa, Bonds, Clemens. And Lupica is blithely unaware of all this, even when it happens right in front of him...and he notices it! Take, for example, when he talks about McGwire's rookie card and the 1998 version of that same player: "He's bigger than on his rookie card, Dad." His son says so cutely and innocently. Then Lupica notes: "He had McGwire with the A's, when McGwire looked to be about half the size he is now." Then, a couple of lines down the page, we read again that "McGwire looked huge at first base" (7)! Gee, I wonder why? Later on, Lupica muses that "physically,he's [i.e. McGwire] ridiculously impressive"(19). Ridiculous is the operative word, of course.
Still, I read on. There is a strange shadow of irony to this entire book. The heros are all bad guys; the records all bogus. The hype is all, well, just hype. Lupica touts that season as the season which saves baseball, when it really is a season to be ashamed of. Aaron, Maris,Mays, Ripken, Kaline...yes, even Ray Oyler have more integrity in their big toe than all the Sosas, McGwires and Clemens with their bloated muscles and fake records. Maris is still the record-holder; he is still there, short-sleeved, no undershirt, on that day in 1961, no crowd to speak of in Yankee Stadium to watch him. He has no fancy baseball gloves, no cameras flash throughout the stands (it's a day game, for heaven's sake, they played baseball in the daytime back then!). His swing is powerful and sure; his shirt billows out from the motion of that swing. It's the matter-of-fact greatness that is baseball's salvation: no victory dances in the endzone, no hoopla, no TV announcers rehearsing what they'll say. After the home run, Maris has to be pushed out of the dugout to wave his cap (thanks, Lupica, for that detail). No little son waiting for him at the plate; no goofy Sosa running in for a show-boating embrace. Maris understood baseball in a way Lupica is incapable of, because Lupica is so pre-occupied with show and pose and hype. The home run "kings" of 1998 are an embarrassment to baseball; Lupica's book is an embarrassment to baseball literature.
As McGwire chases Maris, then as Sosa chases McGwire, Lupica feels their impact most through his sons (for whom he updates the games with notes by their bedsides) and dad (who shared the Roger Maris chase of Babe Ruth when Lupica was nine). It's a refreshing, reassuring story: posters, cards and uniforms decorating a kid's room; the first day of Little League; dad taking kids to baseball games or watching them late on TV, then the chatter at the breakfast table before school; the reaction to McGwire's 62nd homer traveling from son to father back to sons. Despite occassional corny prose, Lupica succeeds by casting the story not in a mythical Iowa cornfield but in the lives of those who saw respite in these successes: a rest from the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, from the cynicism and avarice grown over sports, especially baseball, like Wrigley Field ivy.
Lupica also draws the game's legends back into his narratives. Strawberry and the legendary Joe DiMaggio battle life-threatening illnesses (DiMaggio's two appearances at Yankee Stadium that year provide touching bookends to the story; Strawberry's travails here are made more notable by his recent relapses.) Orlando Hernandez shares a private, then public moment with his daughters as the Yankees march through the playoffs. Tony Gwynn takes his son to the monuments at Yankee Stadium where Lupica took his father. It adds up to what Lupica calls "a love inside a greater love" where news unites and bonds, not divides, generations.
This story could only have been told about winners; it is thus a story Lupica's sardonic, brilliant ESPN colleague, Bill Conlin, could not have written. "Summer of 98" succeeds because ALL its characters are heroes: managers, old players, new players, fathers and sons (and Lupica praises the "baseball moms" too). Like any championship effort, everything had to go right to win. In the summer of 98, as in "Summer of 98," it did.