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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 796.357
EAN num: 9780618551132
ISBN number: 0618551131
Label: Houghton Mifflin
Manufacturer: Houghton Mifflin
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 288
Printing Date: April 02, 2007
Publishing house: Houghton Mifflin
Sale Popularity Level: 69420
Studio: Houghton Mifflin
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
Ever see Mike Piazza block the plate? Or Derek Jeter slide hard into second? Illegal. But it happens every game. Baseball's rules, it seems, were made to be broken. And they are, by the players, the front office, and even sometimes the fans. Like it or not, cheating has been an integral part of America's favorite pastime since its inception. The Cheater's Guide to Baseball will show you how cheating is really done. In this lively tour through baseball's underhanded history, readers will learn how to cork a bat, steal signs, hurl a spitball, throw a World Series, and win at any cost!
They'll also see the dirty little secrets of the game's greatest manipulators:
John McGraw and Ty Cobb; Billy Martin and Gaylord Perry; Graig Nettles and Sammy Sosa; and, yes, even Barry Bonds. They'll find out how the Cleveland Indians doctored their basepaths to give new meaning to the term home field advantage. They'll delight in a hilarious examination of the Black Sox scandal, baseball's original sin. And, in the end, they'll come to understand that cheating is as much a part of baseball as pine tar and pinch hitters. And it's here to stay.
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers 
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Not quite history, not quite essay on mores of cheating, not quite anecdotal stories of baseball's cheaters, this lightweight and lightly cynical look at baseball's cheating history succeeds in holding the game in the respect it deserves.
Sidebars on how to cheat seem silly at first, but provide insight into how hard it really is to get away with cheating in any meaningful way that achieves the goal of helping win games.
One interesting tidbit from the book: the spread of televised baseball in the 1960's, with its frequent closeups of the pitcher on the mound, effectively ended the spitball as a weapon in the pitcher's arsenal.
Rated by buyers 
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Try writing this book about Football. The history just isn't there. Basketball? What, you going to go with the origin of the dunk? The finger roll? Boooooring. But baseball...ahh...baseball. A real game, and with a rich history of Gamesmanship.
Sometimes hilarious, always informative, I found it a pleasure to read.
Rated by buyers -
This is a brilliant book - it may well change the way you think about baseball. Congratulations to the author!
Rated by buyers -
I'll be honest with you, I dislike the game of baseball. Going to a game, watching it? Doesn't intrigue me in the slightest, and I played 3 years of softball growing up. But my husband loves it and he wants to share this fun with me by including me in the season ticket package he bought into with others. So I bring magazines to games or puzzle books so I'm not completely bored. But this season? I brought Derek's book with me and I tell ya - it actually got me watching the game for the very first time in a long time. I started looking out for a lot of what he describes in the book while the game was going on - from the history of the pitcher's mound to trying to figure out the signs the base coaches where giving. I even pointed stuff out to my husband that he didn't know. This book helped make my trips to the ballpark more enjoyable AND helped my husband have even more fun with me.
My honest to goodness recommendation is to buy this for the baseball haters that you baseball fans take to games and get frustrated with when they don't pay attention or understand what you're so excited about. This book gives them a level of interest that they may never have known about before - it certainly has for me.
Rated by buyers -
Whether you know someone who watches three games a day or just the seventh game of the World Series, this book will entertain them. It's got solid baseball information in it, but is so amusing that even a casual fan will enjoy it.
Derek Zumsteg doesn't advise cheating (for example, in an aside, he describes how to throw a World Series, complete with looking for the "clean, honest crime figures who won't try to blackmail you...They're on aisle 6, subsequent to the unicorns, fairies, sprites, and leprechauns.") But he does explain how cheating through the years has brought us many of the intricacies we have in the game today.
My favorite sections were on how groundskeeping can improve the home team's chance of winning, and a look at the Black Sox that showed, alas, that Shoeless Joe shouldn't be in the Hall of Fame.
Buy it for the man (or woman) who likes baseball and you won't go wrong.
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