Pennant Race: The Classic Game by Game Account of a Championship Season, 1961

From the author of The Long Season—considered by many to be the greatest baseball book of all time—comes another classic sports memoir by legendary pitcher Jim Brosnan, which chronicles how his team, the Cincinnati Reds, went on to win the 1961 National League pennant.

With legendary pitcher Jim Brosnan’s first book, The Long Season, he not only entered the canon of great sports literature, but also redefined it when he returned two years later to write Pennant Race—his memoir of his days playing for the Cincinnati Reds and how the team went from not being taken seriously as a pennant contender to having a shot at the 1961 National League pennant.

In Pennant Race, Brosnan—with his trademark wise-guy wit and plain-spoken practicality—once again offers a refreshingly candid alternative to hackneyed baseball mythologizing. Day by day, game by game, Brosnan reveals the real lives of professional ballplayers: their exhilaration and frustration, hope and despair, chronic worry over job security, playful camaraderie, world-weary cynicism, and boyish—if cautious—optimism. Although the Reds would ultimately lose the World Series to the Yankees, for Brosnan and his teammates, this was a winning season.

Pennant Race vividly captures a remarkable year in the life of a ball club and the golden age of one of Major League Baseball’s most memorable eras.

“Brosnan obviously knows his baseball, writes about it wittily, informally and with irony. He is a cynical, tough professional athlete and his book makes wonderful reading.”—New Yorker