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Product Reviews:
The 1964 Phillies: The Story of Baseball's Most Memorable Collapse |
Rating: 5 (out of 5)
Summary: 1964 Phillies
Comments: Great Book, great service. What more can you say. I am completely pleased with my purchase |
Rating: 1 (out of 5)
Summary: THE COLLAPSE OF ALL SPORTS BOOKS
Comments: Without question,John Rossi's book on the 1964 Phillies is the almost all inept attempt at sports literature that I have read in 59 years on planet earth.Not only does the author fail to convey the true feeling of the 1964 season,he fails time and again with the English language.Grammatical errors abound,factual data is constantly presented in repetitious banalities,much of the data is convoluted or simply erroneous,and the slipshod boxscores at book's end are simply unacceptable to all however those who still use crayons.Rossi was given an excellent topic and just simply wasn't up to it.Since I lost $30 and gained little or nothing in the process,just label me "Losing Pitcher Mulcahey-2006" |
Rating: 4 (out of 5)
Summary: A great book
Comments: If you are a Phillies or MLB fan, then you should read this book. The book really starts about 1960 and what lead up to the 1964 season. It also talks about 1965 through the Curt Flood trade to the Phillies in 1969. As billed, the book talks a lot about segregation in Philly and Richie (later Dick) Allen. The book paints an entirely different pictures of Richie that what fans remember him as. I will not say the book made Richie a saint, however it minimizes his character flaws. Richie definitely walked to a different drum beat. The book paints an interesting picture of Gene Mauch and several times points out that he was a poor people person. I wonder if Gene would have as much success managing today as he did in the 60-80s. |
Rating: 4 (out of 5)
Summary: 1964 Phillies - Unlike the Phillies, the Book Doesn't Fold!!
Comments: This book covers a legendary year and event in baseball history. Although not a world class writing job, it does a workman-like job describing the events of the season. As a Phillies fan, I enjoyed reading the book and would endorse it to other people, although do not expect any great work of art. It Comes with a lot of recounting of events pretty much out of the boxscores and not an awful lot outside of that.
I'd give it a "B". |
Rating: 5 (out of 5)
Summary: The Sad Story of a Summer Long Ago
Comments: In this book, John Rossi tells the story of the 1964 Phillies, almost all famous for being in 1st place with a 6 1/2 game lead with 12 games to play, only to suffer a 10 game losing streak and end up in second place. This Phillies season did more than anything else to define the psyche of the Philadelphia sports fan, who is now conditioned to always expect the worst. I was a 9 year old Phillies fan that summer and have vivid memories of my father, grandfather and uncle enjoying the success of the team, led by manager Gene Mauch, in the days before playoffs when winning the National League pennant meant a trip to the World Series.
Rossi, a history professor at LaSalle University in Philadelphia, does an excellent job of providing the historical context for the season, describing the City of Philadelphia, the Phillies' losing tradition, the management of the team in the lean years after the Whiz Kids of 1950 won the pennant, and the emergence in the early 1960s of the Phillies under Gene Mauch. (However, throughout the book Rossi annoyingly refers to the Phillies' stadium as Shibe Park, when it had been renamed Connie Mack Stadium in 1953 and virtually no1called it by its former name in 1964.)
Rossi then goes through a game by game description of the season, including the quick start, grabbing 1st place in mid-July and holding on for 73 fateful days. The Phillies were having a magical summer, highlighted by Jim Bunning's perfect game on Father's Day, Johnny Callison's All-Star game winning homer, and Richie Allen's Rookie of the Year season. The author explains how all season long the Phillies really were playing above their heads, with a lineup that on paper was not the equal of the Reds, Giants and Cardinals, all of which were stocked with future Hall of Famers.
The10game losing streak is then described in excruciating detail, including an analysis of what went wrong. For decades, the common wisdom was that Mauch cost the Phils the pennant by panicking and repeatedly starting Bunning and Chris Short on 2 days rest. This book shows that Mauch's genius was largely responsible for the Phillies 1964 success, and that the 10 game losing streak was an untimely combination of weak offense, uncharacteristically bad defense and an exhausted pitching staff. Once the losing began, the psychological burden on the Phils of failing to fulfill eone's high expectations just seemed to steamroll the team.
Philadelphia has never fully recovered from 1964. At key times of the Phillies "dynasty" in the mid-1970s and early 1980s, whenever things would start to go wrong the spectre of 1964 would be raised. Some say that the roots of the current attitude of Philadelphia sports fans generally, and in particular Phillies fans, are traceable back to 1964, although rooting for the Phils with their history of losing more games than any team in any professional sport ever may also have something to do with it. Rossi's book brings the 1964 season back to life and with it the opportunity to relive both the summer of magic as well as the crushing collapse.
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