Perfect

The great David Halberstam passed away in 2007, victim of a tragic car crash. He wrote numerous books on history, most notably The Best And The Brightest, about America's entry into the Vietnam War. A couple of years ago I was captivated by The Coldest Winter, his history of The Korean War. Halberstam also wrote many books on sports, using the same methods - quotes and anecdotes from first-hand sources - as his history books. In my opinion, the finest of these that I have read is October 1964, about the 1964 World Series between the New York Yankees and the St. Louis Cardinals.

I am glad to report that at least two authors have stepped up and have recently written great sports books in the Halberstam tradition. A couple of years ago Mark Bowden (author of the excellent Black Hawk Down, not to mention the also-excellent Guests of the Ayatollah) came out with The Best Game Ever: Giants vs. Colts, 1958, and the Birth of the Modern NFL. From the title you can guess what that one is about.

And I recently finished Perfect: Don Larsen's Miraculous World Series Game And The Men Who Made It Happen by Lew Paper. Larsen was a journeyman pitcher and Paper doesn't go into a lot of inside baseball as to how the Yankee pitched that perfect game against the Brooklyn Dodgers. But he does tell the life stories of each man who was on the field that day in 1956. All of them had lived through the Depression, and many of them served in World War II. Not they talked much about their war experiences. Dodger great Gil Hodges served in the Pacific Theater. He earned a Bronze Star, but his wife didn't know this until after they had been married three years when a sportswriter told her.

The Dodgers, of course, were the team that integrated the major leagues with Jackie Robinson in 1947. The Yankees, as was the American League, were slow to integrate. This would lead to the Yankees' slump in the mid-sixties, with the 1964 World Series their last try for glory as they faced a younger Cardinals team that had been quicker to integrate and had such black stars as Bob Gibson, Curt Flood, and Lou Brock. Halberstam's October 1964 finely chronicles the Series and the individuals who played and managed in it. Congrats to Lew Paper for pulling off something Halberstam-like with Perfect.