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8 new baseball books for Opening Day

Here are excerpts from eight new titles on baseball.

5. ‘Gator: My Life in Pinstripes,’ by Ron Guidry with Andrew Beaton

  • By Ross Atkin

Countless words have been written about such Yankee pitching greats as Whitey Ford, Mariano Rivera, and Roger Clemens, but one ace who has remained more or less in the shadows is Ron Guidry. For any fan who may have forgotten, but now will be reminded in his autobiography, the lefty known as Gator and Louisiana Lightning enjoyed one of the best seasons ever by a pitcher in 1978, when he posted a 25-3 record and an impressively low 1.74 earned-run average. The Yankees went on to win the World Series championship, giving the club back-to-back titles. Guidry spent his entire 14-year career in Yankee pinstripes. Besides the peaks, there were challenging times he describes during one of the most tumultuous times in franchise history, when owner George Steinbrenner and manager Billy Martin often kept the pot stirred. 

Here’s an excerpt from Gator:

“The Sunday before the All-Star break in 1985, I was at my locker taking a nap. That was often the case for me on days when I started. I liked to get a bit of rest before loosening up, to make sure I was fresh. We were a few games back of Toronto in the AL East standings. It was the last game before the break, and [Yankees owner] George [Steinbrenner] felt the need to stress the importance of this game. And George had one way of doing that. He marched into the clubhouse, found me snoozing, and slapped me awake.

“  ‘Hey,’ he bellowed, his finger in my face. ‘I don’t want to tell you how big this game is. We’ve got to have this game. We can’t lose it. You’ve gotta have a great game. You’ve gotta win this for us.’ 

“I had to get up in about ten minutes anyway, but he’d just taken ten minutes out of my nap.”

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

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