A Pitcher's Story: Innings with David Cone

For the four decades he's been writing about baseball for The New Yorker, Roger Angell has led all shortlists of the game's most astute and elegant chroniclers. With A Pitcher's Story: Innings with David Cone, he attempts, with thrilling command, something he's never tried before--devoting a whole volume to one player by spending an entire season at his heels. In pitcher David Cone, a cerebral student of his game and articulate practitioner of his craft, Angell finds a subject as perfect as the perfecto Cone hurled against the Expos on Yogi Berra Day at Yankee Stadium in 1999. Better still, he finds in Cone a partner unwilling to shrink beneath the hot light of what would prove to be an agonizing and introspective year.

One of the game's premier pitchers, Cone came unglued in 2000; his 4-14 season was a disaster. The "wizardly old master" Angell had intended to extol was suddenly "Merlin falling headlong down the palace stairs." There's gold to be spun from that, though, and Angell, the essayist as deft alchemist, spins away. The more Cone struggles--the more he battles age, doubt, injury, and the various curves baseball fate can throw--to regain what he's lost, the more valiant he seems. It gives A Pitcher's Story its depth, its heart, its spirit, and its honor. If Angell entered into the project with the intention of getting a grip on the delicacies of pitching, he does, but he comes away with so much more. Like good battery mates, Cone and Angell work with, and off of, each other. Together, they evoke a canny portrait of a career at the crossroads, and a meditation on the powers of an elite athlete's pride. --Jeff Silverman