Heartbreakers: Baseball’s Most Agonizing Defeats

Bobby Thomson’s home run in the ninth to beat Brooklyn and give the Giants the 1951 National League pennant. Bill Mazeroski’s ninth-inning homer for Pittsburgh to beat the Yankees in the 1960 World Series. The Mets’ amazing 1969 stretch drive. It’s the winners we remember in baseball’s most dramatic episodes. But baseball being a game of inches, it’s often a fine line between victory and defeat. Losing is unexpected, unpredictable, frequently a consequence of fickle fate. The game is designed to break your heart, Bart Giamatti said. In Heartbreakers , veteran baseball writer John Kuenster recalls fifteen of the game’s most painful “disasters” of the last half-century and looks at them from the losers’ point of view. With a reporter’s skill and a fan’s enthusiasm, he sets the scene for these memorable matchups, surveys the players who led each team to the big moment, and tells the story of the game and the emotions that can’t be erased. He has interviewed key players who suffered the defeats, providing personal insights and sometimes surprising perspectives on the game action that snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Heartbreakers offers a box seat for―and a fresh slant on―the replay of baseball’s most thrilling games. With 50 black-and-white photographs.