The Book On Sports

Search Advanced SearchView Cart   Checkout   
 Location:  Home » Baseball » General » The Greatest Game: The Yankees, the Red Sox, and the Playoff of '78  
Categories
All Sports Books
Baseball
Football
Basketball
Golf
Soccer
Extreme Sports
Fantasy Sports
Gambling
For the best in golf writing, golf reviews, golf news and golf opinion, visit GolfBlogger

Books On Technology, Computers and the Internet

Discount Golf Equipment

Related Categories
• General
20th Century
United States
Americas
History
• New York
State & Local
United States
Americas
History
• History
Baseball
Sports
Subjects
Books
• Sports: Baseball: General
General
Archive
Custom Stores
Specialty Stores
• Sports: General
General
Archive
Custom Stores
Specialty Stores
• Hardcover
Binding (binding)
Refinements
Books
• Printed Books
Format (feature_browse-bin)
Refinements
Books

The Greatest Game: The Yankees, the Red Sox, and the Playoff of '78

The Greatest Game: The Yankees, the Red Sox, and the Playoff of '78

zoom enlarge 
Author: Richard Bradley
Publisher: Free Press
Category: Book

List Price: $25.00
Buy New: $15.63
You Save: $9.37 (37%)



New (28) Used (14) from $13.40

Avg. Customer Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars 12 reviews
Sales Rank: 27481

Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 304
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6 x 1.3

ISBN: 1416534385
Dewey Decimal Number: 796.357640974
EAN: 9781416534389
ASIN: 1416534385

Publication Date: March 18, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Brand new Item. CD, DVD, Book, VHS more than 400 000 titles to choose from. ALL days Low Price !

Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 6-10 of 12
 « PREV  
1 2 3
  NEXT »

5 out of 5 stars Sports as History through a Diamond Classic   May 13, 2008
 1 out of 1 found this review helpful

Richard Bradley provides enough fresh angles on the classic 1978 one-game playoff between the Yankees and Red Sox that it feels like playing caroms off the Green Monster for the first time.

Delving into sports as history, Bradley avoids the cliches like simply retelling box score statistics or relying on rehashed recollections and truly delivers a clutch performance in making the legends come to life.

As great as the ending of the regular season - which led to this stunning climax for supremacy of the East Division (third place Milwaukee would have won the West by one game) - Bradley's account places makes the diamond classic a spectacular gem.



4 out of 5 stars Terrific   April 3, 2008
 2 out of 4 found this review helpful

Longtime Red Sox fan here.I remember all too well the '78 season and that agonizing playoff game.The book is well written and researched and to get Carl Yastrzemski to talk as much as he did is a coup.I did find two mistakes,one factual and one grammatical.Reggie Cleveland of the Red Sox was a pitcher,not an outfielder (p.51),and on page 253 when writing about the death of Thurman Munson the text reads "to low" when of course it should be too low.Beyond that though I loved reading this book,even if the end was not to my satisfaction. :)


4 out of 5 stars The Last Great Pennant Race   March 31, 2008
 5 out of 6 found this review helpful

This is a very enjoyable book which all baseball fans will find gripping and thrilling, much the way the 1978 race shaped up. The book does a very good job at shaping the cultures and idiosyncrasies of both the Red Sox and Yankees and how that helped to shape a tumultuous pennant race. The author does a great deal of painting baseball's changing landscape and how this was impacting both teams as well as the game at large. Also, the book does a great job of shaping the final game around these events as the Red Sox /Yankees playoff game was as dramatic and exciting as the season, coming down to the final batter.

Obviously Red Sox & Yankees fans will find this book more interesting then other fans but regardless the book is worth the read for the moments of excitement and the feelings of nostalgia it is bound to bring up for a simpler time in the national pastime.



5 out of 5 stars how did you miss.....   March 31, 2008
 1 out of 4 found this review helpful

the fact that the game was played on the holiest of days for jews... yom kippur

my father was ballistic that my brother and i and two friends went crazy over dent's home run and the final result, on a day when we weren't supposed to be watching television

great account otherwise



5 out of 5 stars The Best Book On The Late 70s Rivalry In A LONG While!   March 18, 2008
 10 out of 12 found this review helpful

Every time a new book comes out on the Yankee teams of the late 70s, which were the first ones I experienced as a child, I keep hoping that it will be a book with some fresh, new insights. Most of the time, the results are very disappointing. Roger Kahn, Maury Allen and Phil Pepe have weighed in with books of their own in recent years and I have found them lacking because for the most part these authors are either too much rooted in the nostalgia for 50s baseball to do justice to the subject of the late 70s (when you read Kahn and Allen you end up seeing more digressions about the 50s than about the later years for the most part!) or they just rehash stuff that was written in books that came out years ago (Pepe's new book was a letdown because there wasn't a single thing I hadn't already read in the autbios of Nettles and Reggie, not to mention the Bill Madden/Moss Klein book from 1990).

That's why Richard Bradley's book was such a breath of fresh air. *Finally* I felt like I was getting the story of 1978 told from a new angle and with some fresh insights on the players, and the race pennant race preceding the game. The alternating chapters of PBP of the game with the background details is not a new feature in baseball books (done with Game 7 of the 60 WS, and Buster Olney with Game 7 of the 01 WS), but it works magnificently here. It makes for a very entertaining and brisk read that I was sorry to see end.

My only tiny nitpick involves the fact that since Bradley did have access to the original telecasts of the game, it would have been nice if some more of the comments of the announcers had been interwoven into the narrative of the game action. And there are also some interesting stories about the broadcasts themselves too (Howard Cosell for instance, was officially part of ABC's baseball broadcast team, but deemed the playoff game taking place on a Monday insufficient reason to miss that evening's meaingless early regular season "Monday Night Football" broadcast). Also priceless was the moment where Phil Rizzuto found himself lingering in the Boston press room after finishing the 6th inning on radio, before heading back to the TV booth and letting out a burst of "Holy Cows!" when Dent homered....only to forget that he was still in the Boston press room, and telling Bill White on-air later that "I thought Frank Malzone was going to bite me on the ankle!" showing how much the Yankee-Red Sox rivalry played itself out in all corners of the ballpark that day!

Thanks again to Mr. Bradley for enriching the baseball literature on the Yankees-Red Sox of the late 70s by taking things to a new level. It gets my vote for what I know will be the best baseball book of the year for me.


Powered by Associate-O-Matic

Contact The Book On Sports