Pennant Race: The Classic Game-by-Game Account of a Championship Season, 1961 – The Legendary Pitcher's Candid Baseball Memoir

by Jim Brosnan

“Brosnan obviously knows his baseball, writes about it wittily, informally and with irony. He is a cynical, tough professional athlete and his book makes wonderful reading.”— New Yorker From the author of The Long Season —considered by many to be the greatest baseball book of all time—comes another classic sports memoir by legendary pitcher Jim Brosnan, which chronicles how his team, the Cincinnati Reds, went on to win the 1961 National League pennant. In Pennant Race , Brosnan—with his trademark wise-guy wit and plain-spoken practicality—once again offers a refreshingly candid alternative to hackneyed baseball mythologizing. Day by day, game by game, Brosnan reveals the real lives of professional their exhilaration and frustration, hope and despair, chronic worry over job security, playful camaraderie, world-weary cynicism, and boyish—if cautious—optimism. Although the Reds would ultimately lose the World Series to the Yankees, for Brosnan and his teammates, this was a winning season. Pennant Race vividly captures a remarkable year in the life of a ball club and the golden age of one of Major League Baseball’s most memorable eras.

Genres: Baseball, Sports, Nonfiction, History

272 pages, Paperback

First published March 25, 1983

Reviews

[Howard · Rating 5 out of 5]

REREAD

In 1959, Jim Brosnan (1929-2014), a major league baseball pitcher, kept a diary of that season that was published the following year as The Long Season.

A departure from all the sanitized ghost written books that preceded it, it was a real look inside a ballplayer’s life, making it the first book of its kind. A critical success and a bestseller, it was so well-written that many people questioned the claim that Brosnan wrote the book without a collaborator. But he did.

This is how I described Brosnan in my review of The Long Season:

His teammates liked [Brosnan], but that doesn’t mean that they understood him. Although he stood 6-4 and weighed 200 pounds he did not look like a typical baseball player. He wore horn rimmed glasses and smoked a pipe and thus looked more like a college professor than an athlete. But the big difference was that he kept a small library of books in his locker and he read them while the team flew from one city to another or on trains used for short trips in the east – and he used big words. His teammates would have been further puzzled if they had known that his mother, a nurse and piano teacher, taught young Jim to play classical music, and that he studied Latin for seven years.

Because of his personal appearance and reading habits, it was Frank Robinson who dubbed him “Professor” after he was traded [from the Cardinals] to the Reds during the middle of that 1959 season.

Brosnan pitched well that year after leaving the Cardinals and a manager that he detested, but his new team experienced little success, finishing six games below .500, and in fifth place in an eight team league.

He did not keep a diary in 1960, the year his book was published, but it was an even worse year for him and his teammates, as they finished twenty games below .500 and in sixth place.

In 1961, lo and behold, the Cincinnati Reds turned things around in a big way. They finished the season thirty-one games over .500 and in first place. They would play in the World Series for the first time in twenty-one years.

As luck would have it, Brosnan, after skipping a year, kept a diary of that championship season. The result was Pennant Race.

It didn’t make the waves that his first book did, possibly because it wasn’t the first, but it is written in the same vein, and like its predecessor it is an insider’s look at what it meant to be a major league baseball player.

Brosnan by this time was entirely a relief pitcher. In that day, unlike today, a relief pitcher was someone who wasn’t quite good enough to be a starter. Furthermore, starting pitchers, unlike today, were expected to pitch the entire game, and they often did.

Therefore, as in The Long Season, Brosnan spends most of his time in the bullpen in Pennant Race, where the players swap stories, joke, kibitz, and second guess the opposing manger as well as their own. When the game is over Brosnan can be seen in the clubhouse writing.

Not only was Brosnan a good writer, but he also possessed a dry sense of humor, and his two books illustrate both traits. He could also be serious when things weren’t going well for him or his team.

The book ends with the pennant clinching game which Brosnan saved in relief and does not include the World Series, which the Reds lost to the Yankees in five games. He said that the reason he did not include the World Series in the book is that he didn’t want the book to have an anticlimactic finish. Instead he wrote about the World Series in Sports Illustrated with a headline that said “Embarrassing, Wasn’t It?”

[Brian Eshleman · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a witty, erudite, observant right through the 1961 baseball season.

[Lance · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sometimes it's best to read a book that is strictly about baseball and nothing but baseball. For those times, this classic book by Jim Brosnan is just right. Brosnan was a relief pitcher for the Cincinnati Reds in 1961 and this is his diary of events through the regular season, one in which the Reds won the National League pennant.

The book is a good reflection of baseball players and their day-to-day work life during the season, especially for relief pitchers. At the time, these pitchers were the ones who weren't quite good enough to be in the starting rotation, but nonetheless their clubs and managers wanted to have them ready to pitch. Since these were the days when starters would work as many innings as possible, that left a lot of idle time for the relievers to swap stories and jokes with each other and, depending on the ballpark, fans as well.

These stories are told by Brosnan with very dry humor which will make the reader chuckle frequently throughout the book. Some of the stories will contain names very familiar to fans of baseball in the 1960's such as Frank Robinson and Vada Pinson. Some of the best lines in the book come when Brosnan shares words about the curmudgeonly manager of the Reds that season, Fred Hutchinson. Whether it is when Hutchinson is making a pitching change to either bring Brosnan in or taking him out or if it is about one of his clubhouse talks, those pieces were very entertaining.

While Brosnan talks about life as a ballplayer in the bullpen and on the road, it is not full of the controversial or shocking (for the time) aspects that "Ball Four" would contain eight years later. Instead, this book is more like a diary with stories and accounts of Reds games in a season that became one for the ages as Cincinnati was the surprise winner of the 1961 National League Pennant. It is a bit of a let down that the World Series was not included in the book, but this is still a very good account of a season and a team that is a reflection of the sport before multi-million dollar contracts and constant media exposure. It's a good book for a reader who just needs a baseball fix.

https://sportsbookguy.blogspot.com/20...

[Mickey Mantle · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved it. I love the dry matter of fact style of Brosnan. He personally actually had a great season. The reader has to figure this out.
The Reds were picked to finish 6th in a then 8 team league. They somehow won the Pennant.
It was a much simpler time before professional sports became corporate. Fans were fans....not simply revenue sources. Players were players...a lot of that has not changed. All of this 21st Century fan emphasis on statistics removes the humanity of players. Jim Brosnan displays over and over again the humanity of the players. Thrill of victory...Agony of defeat....but measured to hold themselves together. A fun fun read for an older baseball fan who remembers what the game was.

[Shay Caroline · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked this, but not as well as I liked Brosnan's earlier book "The Long Season." Like that book, this one has his acerbic wit, and an insider's view of baseball as it was in the early 1960's. However, it seems a little less fresh, and a little less varied--less inspired, somehow, than the first book.

That's not to say it wasn't a fun read. I was six years old in 1961 and my very earliest memories of the game I have loved all my life date back to that season, though the Reds--Brosnan's team--were not on the radar of this fledgling American League fan. By modern standards, this is not at all a "tell-all" book, but still there are some surprises. Brosnan has eliminated the casual racism of the earlier book, and even taken obvious effort to counter that, here. We get a much more human depiction of the Latin players in particular. I was genuinely shocked by the open discussion of greenies, the amphetamines popular among players of the era, which Brosnan refers to as "bombers." I knew about greenies, but never expected the workaday casualness in mentioning them. Almost two decades later another pitcher named Bill "Spaceman" Lee would catch all kinds of flak from league and club bigwigs for acknowledging his marijuana use. As far as I know, Brosnan's disclosures caused nary a ripple.

I missed the family stuff from the earlier book. In "Pennant Race" we hear very little about Brosnan's wife, and even less about his kids. Drinking, on the other hand, is constant and heavy. Like the pep pills, I already knew that major league baseball was a drinking culture at the time, but in both books the author seems afloat on a sea of martinis. One wonders how he performed so well, despite the night life. It's been done before, and often, I suppose, but when he describes being barely able to function in a game due to being hungover--following a drinking binge over not being selected to the All Star team--it's disturbing. At least it was to me.

In the latter third of the book particularly, when the pennant race becomes the sole focus, the day to day game descriptions blur together a bit, and grow rather tedious. Somehow, the excitement of a pennant race in an era when there still were pennant races, doesn't come through. Brosnan doesn't describe his team's city, Cincinnati, at all really, and the fans are described mostly as a clueless nuisance or, in the case of female fans or "broads" as he calls them, either hogs or hot. One has to consider the "Mad Men" environment, but still. Once the pennant is won, the book ends, with nothing at all written about the subsequent World Series against the Mantle & Maris led New York Yankees. Maybe the loss in five games would have been a down note to finish up with, but I had hoped for an insider's account of post-season play at a time when baseball was king.

Recommended if you like baseball, especially baseball back in the day, but not recommended as heartily as "The Long Season."

[Oliver Bateman · Rating 5 out of 5]

by far the better and more polished of brosnan's two "year-in-the-life" accounts of playing ball. the '61 NL pennant race and the surprisingly loaded pinson/robinson reds are a forgotten story, but brosnan brings them vividly to life (even if there is far too little explanation of who all the main players are - we're six decades out from '61 and i needed baseball reference up the entire time). that said, there are some great turns of phrase in here...really just better writing in general than we'd get from anyone else in the baseball business, which makes sense because brosnan, like other ballplayers of his era, worked in the offseason, and his work was in the advertising/copywriting field.

[Brad Lucht · Rating 4 out of 5]

Originally published in 1962, this is Jim Brosnan's diary of the 1961 season. The Cincinnati Reds were picked to finish sixth that year, but won the National League pennant.

As a baseball fan I enjoyed this book for a couple different reasons. One, it took me back to a different time. Baseball has changed significantly in the 50+ years since Brosnan wrote this. I had forgotten that teams opened the season with 28 players, and only cut them down to 25 a month after the season began. There are lots of little things like this that I had forgotten or never knew.

In addition, they played two All-Star game that season.

I was motivated to read this book after the New York Times published Brosnan's obituary July 4 (He died June 29, 2014, at the age of 84).

"In 1964 Brosnan was forced from the game because he would not sign a contract — he was then with the Chicago White Sox — that stipulated he could not publish any of his writing during the season. But perhaps more remarkable was the reaction to Brosnan outside baseball, where he was portrayed as something of an alien character: an athlete with a brain."

[Jim Gold · Rating 4 out of 5]

Prompted to read this book about the 1961 Cincinnati Reds pennant winning season by the recent death of their MVP Frank Robinson. This was the last season in which 8 teams competed for the Pennant; the Mets and Houston Colt .45's were added the next year and divisional playoffs were introduced in 1969. In Brosnan's description of the banter during the long season, he comes across as a cynical, but good-hearted man, qualities I found appealing.

[Don · Rating 5 out of 5]

The second of his baseball diaries. Both books are classics.

If, like me, you grew up in the late '50s/early '60s as a baseball fan, you'll really enjoy both of Brosnan's books. Frank Robinson, Hank Aaron, Don Drysdale, Ernie Banks and Willie Mays are just some of the names that come up, as well as many of the lesser-known, journeymen players of the era.

[Clay Kallam · Rating 4 out of 5]

There was a time when baseball players -- and all celebrities, for that matter -- were sheltered rather than shattered by the media. There was a time when infidelities of athletes and presidents were hushed up and hidden from sight. There was a time when heroes were created and celebrated, unsullied by their very human flaws and errors.

But just as in "The Long Season," Jim Brosnan's first journal of life in the major leagues (set in 1959), "Pennant Race," for better or worse, treats athletes as human beings, with wives and families and doubts and struggles. So over and above the narrative of "Pennant Race," which describes in journal fashion the 1961 season of the Cincinnati Reds, this book also marks the beginning of the shift in sports writing from hero worship to journalism, the change from athlete as exemplar to athlete as person.

And "Pennant Race" is very much of its time, as Brosnan -- a cultured, intelligent man who read widely, appreciated cutting edge jazz and wrote wonderfully -- reveals the inherent sexism and racism of the time without really meaning to. He is much more aware of the racial attitudes that surround him than the sexism that permeates the young men who populate this book, and it does get hard to read women continually referred to as "broads." But that, sadly, was the way it was in 1961, and for us to pretend otherwise makes it that much more difficult to break away from our past. (And Jim Bouton's journal of the 1969 season, "Ball Four," is even more explicitly sexist, as Bouton didn't gloss over aspects of athletes' behavior the way Brosnan did.)

All that said, this is a baseball book, about how Brosnan and his teammates navigated a challenging season, with its inevitable ups and downs. Players excel and struggle, get hurt and sometimes get well, and do so in conditions very different from those that modern athletes work in. For example, salaries were much lower, similar to what well-paid workers made rather than outrageous. Teams flew commercial, players had roommates on the road and long-term guaranteed contracts were as fantastic an idea as landing a man on the moon.

Put all of this together, and for a baseball fan -- especially one of a certain age -- "Pennant Race" is a fascinating, fast-moving book that evokes a different time, with both its positives and negatives. Brosnan pulls a few punches, but all in all, there's no better way for a sports fan to realize how much has changed than to read about the Cincinnati Reds and their surprising 1961 season.

[Trevor Seigler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Before there was Jim Bouton, another pitcher named "Jim" ripped the lid off the genteel cover of baseball's shining image and exposed the dirty doings in dugouts across the land. Well, actually, Jim Brosnan was less about exposing stuff than just relating the regular, workaday lives of baseball players who lived a transient life, going from city to city and pursuing athletic glory and a good time in equal measure. Readers of "Ball Four" won't find anything here or in Brosnan's previous book ("The Long Season") to be too terribly shocked by. But Jim Bouton was just coming into the league when Brosnan was exiting, and so the revelations of the earlier era (Brosnan's) are perhaps amazing for his time. This was another re-read, and I enjoyed it a lot the second time around (not that I didn't enjoy it the first time, to be clear). It's more entertaining than the ghostwritten "memoirs" of previous athletes, and it certainly sets the scene for the Jim Boutons to come. After you've read "Ball Four" (which, after fifty years, may not be that shocking anymore), you can read "Pennant Race" and enjoy it as the precursor that it was.

[Dean · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great book for dyed-in-the-wool baseball fans, taking the reader from day one through the end of the season. Candidly written, funny at times, insight-revealing at others, Cincinnati Reds relief pitcher Jim Brosnan carries you through the 154-game season, from location to location and series to series (note, for nonbaseball fans, that's lowercased "series," not uppercased "Series," meaning the World Series). One shortcoming is that Brosnan only occasionally updates the reader on the team's W-L record or place in the league standings, and he doesn't cover the 1961 World Series between the Reds and the powerful NY Yankees at all.

But for baseball fans and Americana aficionados, I recommend it. It will enhance your knowledge of the inner workings of the National Pastime from a player's perspective, and if you are old enough to remember the players and teams of the era, it will lead you on a trip down nostalgia lane.

[Joe Santoro · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was one of those books that sort of just happened. I had no idea it existed, but was looking for something new to do with APBA, and I remembered I had the 1961 season on the computer version of the game that I never did much with. Then low, and behold, here is this book in my good reads feed, so I had to get it and read it.

Perhaps it was because it was on kindle (the physical copy was more that I wanted to spend and the library system was a no go.. used all my free points), but it definitely dragged some. There were definitely a few great stories, and some funny on going themes, but there was also a whole lot of simple play by play of the games, and the style by the middle felt somewhat repetitive.

It's great it exists and thanks Steve for somehow sensing my APBA needs and reading this book so it popped up in my feed :).

[Steve · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this about 45 years ago, but (oddly) the book was missing the last 20-30 pages. For whatever reason, I never cared to read it again until now (due to a conversation I had with someone). I liked it better back then and probably hadn’t read Ball Four yet, can’t remember. It’s a good diary of the 1961 Reds season and Brosnan is a good writer. But not enough depth about the players and it’s missing the World Series. He’s funny but also can be kind of pretentious.

One weird thing is that he never once mentioned tons the Maris/Mantle home run chase of Ruth’s record. That was pretty much national news back then and I’m sure other teams were paying attention. Maybe just not the Reds bullpen.

[Pgricchi · Rating 4 out of 5]

From the inside…

Details: funny, mundane, insightful and all from the inside fill this book. It will be best appreciated by baseball fans who followed the game in the early sixties, before the explosion of new franchise.

[Gary]

Warning: Not always politically correct, but a great reflection of baseball in the early 60's from the author of The Long Season.

[John Benzing · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m a life long Reds fan do his bound I not give it 5 stars.

[Bruce Gunther · Rating 5 out of 5]

Easily one of my favorite sports books ever. For me, "Pennant Race" is a far better read than the much-acclaimed "Ball Four."

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read library copy ages ago (date is only a guess) following Brosnan's other excellent book about the 1959 season.

[Spiros · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this follow-up to The Long Season, Broz gives us his bullpen's-eye view of the Red's improbable 1961 season, which saw them claiming the National League flag, before coming up short to the Maris-Mantle-Ford led Yankees in the World Series. A well written guided tour of the rollercoaster ride that is any pennant race, at the remove of 50 years the book can certainly be deemed to be short on Political Correctness, particularly with regard to female fans, as well as Black and Latino ballplayers.
The players of Brosnan's time seemed to subsist on a steady diet of post-game alcohol and pre-game amphetamines; I'm not sure if this regimen can precisely be defined as "performance enhancing", but it's certainly an eye-opener. It is also instructive to read about a youngish lefthanded starter for the Dodgers who could never seem to get the ball over the plate, at least not against the Reds: both Koufax and Drysdale seemed to consistently come up short against the Reds.
A third striking aspect of the book is the lack of fundamental execution in what was, in the National League, a non-expansion year. Three examples, all within a few pages of each other:

From the second game of a late August doubleheader with the Dodgers: "Pinson hit a two-run home run in the first inning of the second game and Drysdale walked the next two batters. His temper threatened to get completely out of hand as his pitches strayed farther and farther from the strike zone. Alston had two pitchers warming up, and three minutes of fatherly advice for Drysdale. Alston's words calmed Drysdale sufficiently for him to fan Bell, and when Lynch tried to steal third, Roseboro caught him for the third out." That's Jerry Lynch, pinch-hitter nonpareil, but by no means Maury Wills, engaged in a zero percentage play.

Another example, this one perpetrated by the Phillies, who at least had the excuse of being about as bad as any Major League team could ever hope to be: "[O'Toole] walked [seventh-place hitter] Amaro to start the inning, and Dalrymple bunted. O'Toole ran off the mound, reached for the ball, slipped on the wet grass, and fell down...he then walked the pitcher to load the bases." So we have Philly bunting their eighth-place hitter to set the inning up for their pitcher? No wonder they finished the season 47-107.

Finally, and to my mind most bizarrely, this, from an extra-inning game when the Reds had run through their bullpen: "In the twelfth, Cardenas led off with a double. [Pitcher] Henry batted for himself with a ton of pressure riding on him. He was after his first hit in two years and his first win in four months. A little-bitty single would do it. He struck out." Obviously, Henry wasn't Fernando Valenzuela or Don Newcombe with the bat; might it not have been a higher percentage play to, oh I don't know, have him try to bunt the winning run over to third with less than two outs?

[James Bechtel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jim Brosnan's 1962 book captures the Cincinnati Reds and their grueling fight to win the 1961 National League pennant. The Dodgers finished second. Brosnan does not continue the story into the World Series where the Reds fell to the Yankees four games to one. He is surely a precursor to someone like Jim Bouton. Road trips to the West Coast provided Brosnan with the opportunity to make some casual comments about Los Angeles. For example:

"It is not surprising that in Los Angeles, where religious sects of outrageous and neurotic extremes are embarrassingly common...." Still true in 2020.

"The best way to get rid of the blues in L.A. is to rent a car, drive to Malibu, stand on a cliff, and look at the sea over the top of a tall, cool drink. The Pacific Ocean waves have a discernable saline effect on the drinking (or mixing) water, making Scotch taste more nourishing than intoxicating." Without a doubt, it is "nourishing" to contemplate life by looking out on the unbroken horizon of the ocean. Today, if you drive up the coast from Malibu to Ventura or Santa Barbara counties you get to see the
string of offshore oil platforms and contemplate the next environmental disaster.

[Ray Cervantez · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brosnan has a keen eye for detail, which he illuminates well to show what life is like in the major league baseball world. It's pettiness, player rivalries, managerial dictums, owner-employee relationships, he wants the reader to know his world with it's ironic painful superficial glamour. He wants the reader to swallow hard the travel tedium, the riddled injury-laden atmosphere, and that is a tough game to play and be successful. This is an old book with it's black and Latino stereotypes of Black people being called colored and Latinos struggling with English, he doesn't forcefully comment on the racial integration of baseball and his view, he glosses over the subject. Nevertheless, it is the small mindless details of who is to be elected to be Captain of the bullpen, or Jerry Lynch the great pinch hitter with Brosnan wondering if he swings at the first pitch in a tight game, he does hit on the first pitch a homer and the Reds win. That make the book enjoyable along with the articulate writing. Baseball with it's warts, fun and athletic achievement is here to be experienced.

[Writemoves · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jim Brosnan was a relief pitcher for the Cincinnati Reds in 1961. He describes the National League race where the underdog Reds win the pennant. It is a bit of a dated baseball book. Since I am 65, I still remember Stan Musial, Willie Mays, Sandy Koufax, Frank Robinson, Vada Pinson, Don Drysdale and Warren Spahn among others. There are some really good baseball stories but nothing that would create great controversy or scandal. I also got a kick out of reading Brosnan's analysis of the pitiful 1961 Philadelphia Phillies. The Phillies had a horrible year ( even worse than this year) and experienced a 20+ losing streak.

I downloaded this book from Kindle for $1.99. Not the best baseball book I've ever read but entertaining for an old fan like me.

[Leonard · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very well written book about the pressures and stress a major league player goes through during the season. I enjoyed his insight as to the way the stadiums of the sixties were configured, fans right behind the players in the bullpen. I enjoyed this season as I was following baseball closely then. The Reds lost to the Yankees 4 games to 1. Brosnan pitched 6 innings, gave up 9 hits and had a 7.5 ERA in the Series. Unfortunately, they made the Series during the incredible run the Yankees had in the early '60's.

[Tom Gase · Rating 3 out of 5]

Eh, it was a pretty good journal from Reds pitcher Jim Brosnan on the 1961 pennant race in the National League, but it feels really incomplete and not as groundbreaking as the Long Season, the book Brosnan wrote in 1959. I guess these books were groundbreaking at the time, but I don't know, nothing really unbelievable to me about either one of these books now. Good dialogue at times, but just seemed incomplete. Also, not having anything on the actual 1961 World Series was disappointing and made me wonder why it was left out.

[Dan Lalande · Rating 3 out of 5]

Brosnan is back - and better in all ways: better team, better pitcher, better writer. His spent half his first book on the hapless St Louis Cardinals of 1959; he spends all of this one on the pennant winning Cincinnati Reds of '61. As was the case on the mound that improbable season, his arsenal really hits a groove here: his feel for the varying rhythms of the game, his finely-honed ear for dialogue, his dry, oblique wit.

[Sean Tenney · Rating 3 out of 5]

I felt this book was a solid read, though likely, by 1961's standard was far more polarizing and controversial. Presently, the book reads a tad dull and colorless, with the detail he provides falling into a repetitive rhythm.

This book is worth the read, though is not a world-beater by any stretch. Considering its era, Pennant Race is quite respectable.

[Chris Gager · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not the right edition but then I'm not sure I read it anyway. I wonder if it was serialized in Sports Illustrated? If so then I definitely read it. Date read is a guess.

[Billhotto · Rating 3 out of 5]

Brought back a lot of memories, especially of the Cubs-Reds games in 1961.

[Chuck · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent first-hand account of the 1961 Cincinnati Reds' season.