Atomic Baseball

A historian breaks down nine legendary innings into their smallest elements, then makes them whole again
by Chuck Klostermani

Most of the time, the process of examining historical events revolves around taking a mammoth, multifaceted issue and reducing it to its simplest, least-complicated thesis. (This, after all, is why we have the Internet.) But the best historians do the opposite: They take something small and make it vast. The process tends to work especially well with national tragedies (most notably Josiah Thompson's JFK-conspiracy investigation Six Seconds in Dallas), metaphorical culture landmarks (like Greil Marcus's recent 304-page analysis of Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone"), and the inner world of sport (such as Bob Ryan and Terry Pluto's underrated tome Forty-Eight Minutes, a possession-by-possession account of a 1987 Celtics-Cavaliers game). Prepare to place the work of Lew Paper into that third category. Paper's just-released Perfect: Don Larsen's Miraculous World Series Game and the Men Who Made It Happen (NAL, $25) is as deep as any man can go into a baseball game that lasted only two hours and six minutes.

What has always made Larsen's 1956 World Series perfect game so memorable is that it seems to exist separate from the rest of baseball lore — at first glance, it doesn't appear to have much meaning outside itself. Larsen was an extremely average pitcher, and sometimes less than average. (As a Baltimore Oriole in 1954, he somehow managed to go 3-21 as a starter.) Were it not for this one game, he'd mainly be remembered for how much booze he consumed on Broadway. But Paper's book feels meaningful. The author's interest lies in the game around Larsen — he is, ultimately, a minor character in his own story. Nineteen players touched the field of Yankee Stadium that afternoon; seven ended up in the Hall of Fame. This book is about them as much as it is about the man on the mound.

At times, Perfect is not propulsive reading — Paper spends 13 pages on a single pitch (the game's final toss, a high strike to Dodger pinch hitter Dale Mitchell). But if you love baseball, you're probably not looking for propulsion; you probably like things slow and deliberate and exact. That's what this book is. Almost every chapter feels like its own biography. For example, Paper alludes to Mickey Mantle casually standing in center field in the top of the fifth, moments before making the most important catch of his career. But then he takes the reader back... and I mean all the way back — not just to the 461-foot center-field wall, but to Mantle's formative life in Depression-era Oklahoma, where the Mick was still wetting his bed as a neurotic 16-year-old. His insights on the likes of Jackie Robinson, Duke Snider, and Billy Martin are complete, objective, and—perhaps most important— baseball-centric. What Paper loves is the game itself; if you want a salacious, gossipy examination of baseball's Golden Era, this is not the book to buy. But if you want to live inside the most famous statistical afternoon in baseball history, Perfect is... well, let's just say "ideal."

Equire magazine, November 2009, p38