Out of my League: An Amateur's Ordeal in Professional Baseball

Description

From the author of Paper Lion. George Plimpton goes behind the scenes of a professional baseball team in the classic that Ernest Hemingway called 'beautifully observed and incredibly conceived' From the author of Paper Lion It began as a fun filled stunt and came to a deeply hellish, nearly humiliating end. George Plimpton had the chance to answer every baseball fan's question- could I strike out a major league star? Out of My League chronicles what happened next as his inspired idea - to get on the mound and pitch a few innings to the All-Stars of the American and National Leagues - got seriously out of hand. The original foray into participatory journalism that started it all, Out of my League announced George Plimpton as a giant of sports journalism, able to penetrate deep into the very spirit of sport, with his characteristic wit, charm and grace.

George Plimpton (1927-2003) was the bestselling author and editor of nearly thirty books, as well as the cofounder, publisher, and editor of the Paris Review. He wrote regularly for such magazines as Sports Illustrated and Esquire, and he appeared numerous times in films and on television.

Beautifully observed and incredibly conceived, this account of a self-imposed ordeal has the chilling quality of a true nightmare. It is the dark side of the moon of Walter Mitty -- Ernest Hemingway A baseball book such as no one else ever wrote, and one of the best ever * New York Herald Tribune * With his gentle, ironic tone, and unwillingness to take himself too seriously, along with Roger Angell, John Updike and Norman Mailer he made writing about sports something that mattered * Guardian * What drives these books, and has made them so popular, is Plimpton's continuous bond-making with the reader and the comedy inherent in his predicament. He is the Everyman, earnests and frail, wandering in a world of supermen, beset by fears of catastrophic violence and public humiliation, yet gamely facing it all in order to survive and tell the tale... A prodigious linguistic ability is on display throughout, with a defining image often appended at the end of a sentence like a surprise dessert. -- Timothy O'Grady * Times Literary Supplement *