The New Yorker includes The Greatest Game in its “Briefly Noted” section this week.

BOOKS BRIEFLY NOTED

THE GREATEST GAME

by Richard Bradley (Free Press; $25)

MAY 5, 2024

In 1978, the American League East division champion was determined by a one-game playoff, a taut battle between the Yankees and the Red Sox at Fenway Park. Bradley gives a pitch-by-pitch breakdown of the Boston loss (a three-run homer by Bucky Dent in the top of the seventh cemented the Yankees’ lead), and an account of the volatile season preceding it. At a time when pro baseball was making the transition from homegrown pastime to big business, emotions ran high and outsized personalities clashed; New York’s pugnacious manager, Billy Martin, resigned in tears mid-season. Bradley’s prosaic style and his penchant for statistics sometimes test the reader’s patience, but his portraits of the coaches and players who converged that day in October lend an intimacy and richness to the book.

My initial reaction: Prosaic style? Why, I oughta…. But in fact, it’s really pretty terrific to be noted in the New Yorker, and so I won’t quibble. Instead, my thanks to whomever was responsible for the write-up.I only wish that my dad could have seen it. He would have been enormously pleased.