The Best Game Ever: Pirates vs. Yankees: October 13, 1960 (review)

Reviewed by: The Best Game Ever: Pirates vs. Yankees: October 13, 1960 David Mills Jim Reisler . The Best Game Ever: Pirates vs. Yankees: October 13, 1960. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2007. 280 pp. Cloth, $26.00. The 1960 World Series is the first that I recollect because my favorite team at the time, the New York Yankees, was in it. I have seen Bill Mazeroski's walk-off home run to win the Series many times since, but then I was in the third grade, listening to the game on the radio that my teacher had brought into the classroom. I didn't cry when the Yankees lost, as my hero, Mickey Mantle, did; but I remember being disappointed. After all, my team was supposed to win. How many eight-year-olds outside of Pittsburgh were rooting for the underdog Pirates, who had only two winning seasons during the 1950s while the Yankees were a dynasty, winning six World Series and losing two others? Yet Pittsburgh was victorious, taking three close games, losing big in three others, before the Pirates' second baseman hit a homer on the first pitch in the bottom of the ninth to win the World Series. Jim Reisler was a small boy from Pittsburgh, though only two when Mazeroski hit his famous home run and thus too young to have any of his own memories of the event. A sports journalist and historian, Reisler has written for magazines like Sports Illustrated and is the author of four books on baseball. For this book, he has relied on interviews with twenty-two people, including a number of the players involved, to provide retroactive assessments of the game and add color to the play. He has dipped heavily into the Pittsburgh and New York newspapers of the period, and the book also includes a number of black and white photos which capture the 1960 World Series. Reisler has structured the book around the game itself, like Daniel Okrent's classic, Nine Innings, or, more recently, Jane Leavy's Sandy Koufax: A Lefty's Legacy, describing the action, pitch-by-pitch. He also writes about how the teams were built and the individuals on both squads, both stars and bench warmers. The interviews with Dick Groat, the Pittsburgh shortstop, especially provided interesting insights about the team on and off the field, but this is not the Bucs' version of Ball Four. Reisler writes about the announcers, photographers, and the fans in Pittsburgh, many of whom still meet at what is left of the left field wall every October to listen to a rebroadcast of the game. He builds the story to its inevitable climax and in the end attempts to connect us to another of baseball's "golden ages"-the era of radio, the "Game of the Week" and "Home Run Derby" on black and white television, and baseball cards; the story also connects Reisler to his own father who was at Forbes Field that day, a la Field of Dreams. It becomes "The Best Game Ever." [End Page 160] It is clear that Reisler loves baseball and that this game was important to him and other Pirates fans. The game becomes more than a game-it was "blue collar versus blue blood, as the story line went. Stanwix Street against Wall Street. Pierogies versus filet mignon" (xx). It was the triumph of a very good team of hard-working players like Don Hoak, Bob Friend, Bill Virdon, and Elroy Face over stars like Mantle, Whitey Ford, and Yogi Berra. But Pittsburgh had two future Hall of Famers in the lineup-Mazeroski and Roberto Clemente-and the unlikely upset by the unheralded Pirates seems somewhat clichéd. But the story is interesting and well told, for the most part. But that is not enough to overcome the factual errors and careless assumptions which plague the book and irritate the reader. For example, Pittsburgh fans have identified mistakes about the dimensions of Forbes Field and its seating capacity; a radio broadcaster is misidentified; and places in Pittsburgh are mislocated. Knowing beforehand how the game played out, Reisler speculates that Casey Stengel, the Yankees' manager, considered using Bobby Shantz as his...

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