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Mike Lupica

Summer of '98 Hardcover – April 5, 1999

by Mike Lupica (Author)

4.7 32 ratings

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An entertaining, provocative account of the record-breaking 1998 baseball season chronicles such milestones as the home-run battle between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, the Toms River, New Jersey, Little League champions, David Wells's perfect game, and more.

Print length

209 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Putnam Adult
Publication date

April 5, 1999
Reading age

18 years and up
Dimensions

5.82 x 0.88 x 8.82 inches
ISBN-10

0399145141
ISBN-13

978-0399145148
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Mike Lupica
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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

After several years in the doldrums, baseball recaptured the imagination of fans across the country in 1998. Lupica, a nationally syndicated sports columnist for the New York Daily News, revisits the magic of that season in this feel-great book: "I never thought I would have a better baseball season than the one I had in '61, not just because of the home runs, but because of what I thought was the best Yankee team I would ever see in my life. Now I saw more home runs, and a better Yankee team, the best of all time. I saw the best baseball team. We all did." Lupica intersperses stories about the season's highlights?Mark McGwire's and Sammy Sosa's dramatic pursuit of Roger Maris's home run record, rookie Kerry Wood's 20-strikeout game, the New York Yankees phenomenal campaign?with musings about how baseball provides continuity between his relationship with his father and his own experience with his three young sons. He tells how, in the mornings, he left notes for his sons so that they could learn the results of games that ended after their bedtimes, just as his father did for him when he was young. In his columns, Lupica often deals with strikes, the atrocious behavior of some overpaid athletes and all the tawdriness of sports business and hype. But, in this book, he gives himself completely over to the beauty of baseball as both a game and as an agent of bonding between fathers and children. Fans who want to remember the glory of '98 and get primed for '99 will find this perfect reading for spring training.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

The 1998 season was an exciting one for baseball fans. Lupica, the columnist, TV analyst, and author (Mad as Hell: How Sports Got Away from the FansAAnd How We Get It Back, LJ 10/1/96), tells an enthusiastic story of how he and his three sons followed it. Lupica centers on the Yankees' record drive to their 24th World Series crown, but weaves in the equally fascinating McGwire-Sosa homer duel, David Wells's perfect game, the end of Cal Ripken's streak, and other notable events. While Bernie Miklasz's Celebrating 70 (LJ 12/98) salutes McGwire's feat, Lupica gives both McGuire and Sosa their proper due. This salute to a memorable season is recommended for all popular adult and YA shelves.AMorey Berger, St. Joseph's Hosp. Medical Lib., Tucson, AZ
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

The renowned sportswriter strikes out in this treacly paean to fathers, sons, and America's (presumed) national pasttime. In many respects, it was indeed a great summer: Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa made the hottest home run race ever into a lovefest; 20-year-old pitching phenom Kerry Woods baffled batters with astounding regularity, while another, older pitcher, ``Rocket'' Roger Clemens, remained unhittable; the Yankees turned warm and fuzzy while notching the most formidable campaign since the dead-ball era; hell, even the Cubs and Red Sox contended! As his father had done for him years ago, sports columnist and novelist Lupica (Jump, 1996; Dead Air,1986; etc.) nurtured his sons' relationship with the game during this splendid season. He took them to ``work,'' left recaps on the kitchen table of games that ended past bedtime, and generally mooned over their precocious love of baseball. On the surface, it's the feel-good story of the year. Scratch this facade, however, and one soon realizes that the game looks much rosier when seen from a journalists-eye view, from press boxes, luxury suites, and dugouts; players seem more human when one hobnobs with them in talk show ``green rooms.'' Viewed from the average fans overpriced nosebleed seats, the game arguably looks as petty, cold, and mean as ever. Although the author is generally amiable, his cluelessness seems to say, ``Let them eat $7 hot dogs!''The claim Lupica makes in the subtitle summarizes the books weakness. Yes, records fell, yes, turnstiles whirred at a record pace (although the numbers were padded by league expansion). Nevertheless, in the real world, players and owners aren't ready to ``reclaim'' the fansor claim anything, for that matter, except poverty when contract negotiations or public stadium referendums come around each year. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Review

...he finds fresh ways of telling us history we have already lived through... -- The New York Times Book Review, George Robinson

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)

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4.7 32 ratings

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Mike Lupica

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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

4.7 out of 5

32 global ratings

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Deborah Byrnes

DAD GIVES A LIFETIME OF MEMORIES BY GOING TO THE GAME

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 21, 2022

Verified Purchase

Mike Lupica can really write.
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!

Helpful

Robert Easterling

How baseball unites fathers and sons and families

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 20, 2021

Verified Purchase

Pete Hamill is right on: “a wonderfully lyrical tale of the season that put poetry back into baseball.”

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 21, 2019

Verified Purchase

Very Fast shipping and The Book is what it described thank you

Helpful

Richard S. Dixon Jr.

Is this a Parody of a Baseball book?

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 29, 2011

This is about the worse book on baseball I have ever read. There are several reasons for this, almost all of them have been well-articulated by the reviews already here. The book has a highly annoying, ungrammatical style; it is unnecessarily mawkish and cloying whenever the author starts rambling on about his sons and family (children are like dogs: everyone has them and they are all cute, but all conversations -- and books -- take a nosedive whenever anyone begins to tell me how cute they are). The "sports prose" mentioned elsewhere will drive any half-educated reader up the wall. Sentence fragments abound; incomplete thoughts pretending to be high drama are everywhere. The style alone is enough to make a hockey fan out of me. The book is not just bad, it is stupendously bad, like a parody. It is not mundanely bad like the Washington Senators, but it is grandly bad, like the '62 Mets or Ray Oyler's batting average.

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.

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Anthony G Pizza

Lupica Keeps Memories Of Great Baseball Season In Family

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 1, 2000

"Summer of 98" is sports reporter Mike Lupica's sentimental, fast-read reaction to the heroes restoring baseball (if but for that season) to the forefront of American sports conversation. Lupica writes as father and son, journalist and fan while weaving the season's top stories (Kerry Wood; the New York Yankees and stars David Wells and Darryl Strawberry, most notably the Sammy Sosa-Mark McGwire chase of Roger Maris' home run record) into a seamless, personal account.
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.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 9, 2000

Like many baseball junkies, I ended my long obsession (25 years of attending 30+ games) during the 94 strike, not watching or caring about the game for a couple of years. Gradually my interest returned and I started making trips back to the Oakland Coliseum to see my A's, primarily when a big draw like the Yankees came into town. Luckily, I had been able to closely follow McGwire's career from the start when he hit 49 dingers his first year. It seemed like everytime I'd go to a game, he'd hit one out for the small crowd of only 10,000 or so. Sadly, the inevitable happened and he left in 97. Our loss became St.Louis's and the rest of America's gain. The 98 summer was also marked (no pun intended) for me by the birth of our first son in July. Ironically, I was born in 61, the year of Maris. I really feel a connection to Maris, McGwire and Sosa and am so happy that all of this incredible baseball has been so beautifully recapped and chronicled by the great Mike Lupica. This book is very moving also because it's about fathers and sons and the very special bond brought by this greatest of games. In fact, I am in the process of buying a hardcover copy to be given to my son on his 10th birthday. Summer of 98 is a definite winner for any baseball fan!

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