NONFICTION

Gibson, Jackson take readers deep inside game

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I have in my office a wall full of sports books, the majority of which serve no purpose but to illustrate that most sports books really aren’t worth the time it takes to read them, but their dust jackets make for a useful decorating touch.

After all, I am a sportswriter by trade and having a wall full of home decorating books or a colorful collection of the collected works of bird watchers, shark hunters and great Buffalo mayors serves no purpose unless I want to fool people into thinking I’m more metrosexual than you’d expect or, in that last category at least, feel the need to forever preserve a good deal of precious wall space.

But even if the latter were true, I would still find space for “Sixty Feet, Six Inches,” the distance between the pitcher’s mound and home plate and a tome by what the jacket readily acknowledges is a simple conversation between a Hall of Fame pitcher—in this case, the legendary Bob Gibson of St. Louis Cardinals fame (circa the late 1960s) — and a Hall of Fame hitter—here represented by Oakland and later New York Yankees great Reggie Jackson (circa late 1970s and early 1980s). It’s not a book in the traditional sense, more a give-and-take dialogue between two baseball greats from relatively recent but still different eras. It’s co-authored by Lonnie Wheeler, who has authored several noteworthy baseball books, but this time Wheeler had the good sense to just bring two legends together, put the topics in front of them and pretty much get out of the way.

The result is a worthy read that former Cincinnati Reds catcher Johnny Bench sums up perfectly with a blurb that celebrates the coming together of two of the most dominating personalities in the game, one from each side of the plate, to give insight into the mind games and personal challenges that go on between the hitter and the pitcher.

Gibson, whom Jackson refers to as “Hoot,” established a standard for hard-throwing pitches over 17 seasons in the major leagues, crossed over into icon status by unleashing a devastating fastball in outstanding performances in World Series competition. He is a wealth of knowledge when it comes to discussions about the mechanics of pitching, owning home plate and playing mind games with hitters. A similar argument can be made for Jackson, who pretty much lived up to the media consecration of “Mr. October” for his postseason accomplishments with the Yankees, and gives unique insight into the way a batter occupies the space inside the box and tries to manipulate both the pitcher and the distance between him and a hitter’s kill zone to his advantage.

If that were all this book tried to accomplish, then reading the first four chapters would suffice, but Wheeler takes it further. Wheeler allows the two to engage in discourse that ranges from debate and flat-out disagreement to observation, speculation and introspection as well as dealing with personalities, character issues and the nuances of the sport that shaped both their games and the game itself (at least during their time in it).

That’s the endearing feature of this book, that there is a book within the book, a dialogue separate from the structure of the mechanics of pitching to a good hitter or hitting a ball off a good pitcher.

The second story allows Gibson’s personality to shine and it’s a personality far different from the stoic image he so carefully crafted as a St. Louis Cardinal en route to becoming a Hall of Fame legend and one of the most intimidating pitchers the game has ever known. Same goes for Jackson, who still maintains the image of his time as “the straw that stirs the drink” (one of the top sports utterances of all time) but also displays a fine mind for the more subtle elements of the game, elements that go beyond just the strength of his hitting and the baseball of his era.

In truth, one of the joys of this book is that both men come across not just as intelligent, knowledgeable and opinionated, but also as men who aren’t restricted by the curse of seeing the present and even the future from their positions in the past. Gibson not only gives insight into his game and that of legendary pitchers and batters like Tom Seaver, Sandy Koufax, Hank Aaron and Duke Snider, he’s also able to comment smartly on today’s throwers and hitters, what makes some of them great and what would appear to be holding some of them back.

His commentary on contemporary training methods, pitching coaches and hitting instructors goes far beyond simply falling back on the “in my day” cliche. Instead he provides clearly thought-out and well-defined observations of the accomplishments and the pitfalls of the modern era, an era where pitchers appear to be both coddled and over-managed to the point where the fine art of controlling a game from the mound seems lost on so many of the breed.

Gibson gives life to the argument that many of them are little more than throwers on a constant pitch count managed by people with little or no sense of how to get beyond managing by the numbers and using the kind of “gut instinct” that allows a pitcher not just to pitch, but to learn how to win.

Memo to New York Yankees manager Joe Girardi: You could learn a lot from Bob Gibson. Perhaps more than you could imagine, given your performance in Game 3 of the American League Championship Series with the Los Angeles Angels.

In this area, Gibson moves far beyond Jackson, but Jackson does make strong statements designed to address the rights and wrongs of today’s hitters, and he does it with an eye for the modern game rather than simply reciting from the “How I Did It” book that seemed to be the centering point for everything he accomplished while in the game.

This is what makes the book truly shine. As delicious as the stories about getting Aaron to pop up with what Gibson calls his “slurve,” a cover-up for a weak curve ball that was more of an off-speed slider than a real breaking pitch, Gibson admits he might have experimented with steroids had they been an issue in his time just to keep up with the competition and be as good a pitcher as he possibly could be. Jackson takes a different approach (protecting his image perhaps), making a strong argument that he likely wouldn’t have used steroids simply because you can’t make yourself into a baseball player simply by popping a pill or injecting a needle.

The wide range of topics and the two insightful points of view make for a book that goes beyond the norm in sports books, especially sports books involving legendary performers, the bulk of whom seem interested only in keeping their feet firmly planted on a public pedestal and who seek out coauthors with a standard low enough to do the same.

There’s real thought involved in this work and it comes from two men who are relatively fearless regarding their sense of place in the game, the direction it should be going and even how it might be possible to at least imagine walking in another man’s spikes.

And with the World Series upon us, it will be difficult to have read this book and not look at the game with a sense of wonder as to what it would have been like had these two men gone head to head in a world just 60 feet 6 inches from start to what surely would have been an epic finish.

Jim Kelley is a former News sports columnist and a current columnist for Sports Illustrated and Sportsnet.ca.

Sixty Feet, Six Inches By Bob Gibson, Reggie Jackson and Lonnie Wheeler Doubleday 273 pages $26

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