The Head Game: Baseball Seen from the Pitcher's Mound

by Roger Kahn

Beyond the techniques and training, baseball begins with one player facing another and the psychological battle that they wage-the head game. In his critically acclaimed and bestselling new book, Roger Kahn presents the story of this supreme war of wits and the people who changed the course of baseball by playing, what he calls, chess at 90 miles an hour. In The Head Game , Kahn investigates not only grips, tactics, and physics, but also the intelligence, maturity, and competitive fire that has inspired some of the greatest hurlers in history.
By covering renowned pitchers and pitching minds-from Christy Mathewson, Cy Young, Don Drysdale, Bob Gibson, and Bruce Sutter to today's reigning pitching coach, Leo Mazzone-Roger Kahn sheds new light on baseball's most pivotal contest. A delightful and edifying tour of America's favorite pastime seen through the pitcher's eyes, The Head Game "is as lively and familiar and old-shoe as the game itself, even today" (Los Angeles Times).

Genres: Baseball, Sports, Nonfiction

336 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Roger Kahn was best known for The Boys of Summer, about the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Reviews

[Joy D · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first half of this book covers the history of pitching, how the mound started, the physics involved, and the various changes that have been made over the years. The early chapters rely on historical sources about “Ol’ Hoss” Radbourn, Cy Young, and Christy Mathewson. The next several chapters include interviews which Roger Kahn conducted in person with prominent pitchers such as Warren Spahn, Johnny Sain, Don Drysdale, Sandy Koufax, Bob Gibson, and Bruce Sutter. This section covers how to hold the baseball to throw specific pitches and their mental approach to the game.

I enjoyed the minibiographies of notable pitchers but had read much of this historical material before. For me, the main attraction is the information Roger Kahn gleaned from conducting in-person interviews. These chapters are compelling. Their stories are entertaining, humorous, and insightful. This where we find most of the strategic discussion about what pitches to throw in particular game situations. Published in 2000, some terminology is a little outdated, but overall, it is definitely worth reading for any baseball fan.

[Nate Hendrix · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a great book about baseball, especially the pitchers. He covers pitchers from way back at the beginning of baseball. I really enjoy reading about how baseball was played in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I found this book because it was mentioned in another excellent baseball book I read.

[K · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very charming book, a little dated in parts, but pitch-perfect (pun intended) for what it's trying to do. The writing is leisurely and of a style from another era, reflecting a polished writer who was raised in sophisticated circumstances and began his career by covering the Brooklyn Dodgers. Roger Kahn was pretty much everywhere in baseball, the right place at the right time with the right people, for 60 years. He knows it and revels in it, and he deigns to share it with you. Occasionally, it's cloying, but for the most part it's fascinating, and you appreciate that someone so sensitive and smart and thoughtful took the time to visit with ballplayers and learn everything.

The book is organized chronologically about pitching at the professional level, from the 1880s to about 2010. Kahn gives mid-length biographies of great pitchers of different eras who represented the pinnacle of the game and, in some cases, changed how the game was pitched. For many of them, Kahn quotes his own conversations with the pitchers, and for the oldest guys he often at least has long conversations with people who played with and against them. It's as close to first-person reporting as can be done about someone like Hoss Radbourne or Cy Young.

The anecdotes flow, like all of the best baseball writing. Cy Young selling tickets from the booth for the World Series. Christy Mathewson's special treatment from John McGraw. Johnny Sain struggling through six minor league seasons with below-average stuff. But there's another purpose in this book, too. Kahn wants these pitchers to explain how the game is pitched. How the ball is held, how to throw as hard as possible but also when to back off. How to deal with the vagaries of fielding and the adaptability of the best hitters. How to shake off a sore or injured arm. By the end, you really do understand the nuances of pitching better than when you started.

Having recently read the work of Joe Posnanski in "Baseball 100," I think that this book as a series of biographies of ballplayers holds up well. Posnanski is flashier, and he is much better with new-school statistics. But Kahn captures the romance of baseball, as well as its grit, in a way that Posnanski's slickness misses. And while Kahn is a romantic, he also tries to get at the facts and to separate them from the tall tales. Meanwhile, he doesn't lose sight of the fact that winning games and keeping opponents from scoring runs are important. It's not just how you throw or talk about throwing, it's about results.

On the other hand, I have quibbles with Kahn's statistical awareness. Keep in mind this book was written in the 2000s, when the Bill James revolution was decades underway. Kahn ignores that stuff and spends a lot of time on wins and innings pitched. He seems not to understand how much the game has changed over the decades. I don't mean he's oblivious, but he downplays it in order to do a book that looks at the consistencies over 130-plus years. Plus, some of Kahn's numbers are flat-out wrong. One blatant error is him writing that Nolan Ryan completed "less than a third" of the number of games that Cy Young completed: 222 vs. 449. That's well more than a third, and just under half. Error.

I'm also not happy with Kahn's references to women and drinking, which were dated even when he wrote the book, but which seem hopeless today. The few women mentioned are noted as attractive, shapely, etc., and Hoss Radbourne is happily noted for his preference of spending his time with women of loose morals. There must be 30 references to whiskeys drunk alongside ballplayers and coaches. That stuff feels like it's coming from a 75-year-old who spent way too much time in the company of men who acted like adolescents.

But the great thing about Roger Kahn is that he put in the time with all of those adolescents, and he distilled from it (another pun) the nuggets of value, so that we can sit back and enjoy them. We don't have to waste our time in locker rooms and bars, waiting for the occasional brilliant moment. Roger Kahn has done it for us in a book that's a joy to read and an education.

[Ken Heard · Rating 4 out of 5]

From Christy Mathewson to Sandy Koufax to Bruce Sutter, baseball pitchers have been pretty cerebral on the mound and Roger Kahn shows the thinking man's aspect of the game.

Some of the chapters are more historical in the case of Mathewson and Cy Young. As old as Kahn was (he died in 2020 at 92), he wasn't around to interview those pitchers. But he did get into the minds of Warren Spahn, Sandy Koufax, Bob Gibson and Johnny Sain. Although repetitive at times and certainly rah-rah favoring the old Brooklyn Dodgers, this book is still a very good read for any baseball fan. Inclusion of reliever Bruce Sutter and pitching coach Leo Mazzone were good ideas and showed a different side of the game.

I'm not a huge fan of Kahn's; I really didn't like The Boys of Summer. But there were moments in The Head Game that the writing sang and it was a lot of fun to read.

[Aaron Rivera · Rating 4 out of 5]

A well written romp into the history of pitching and some of its most important figures in early history. One can learn much from it, but I don't know that he really explores far beyond the history. The "head game" as he calls it tends to take a back seat, as the only real depth about it comes from Warren Spahn, but we don't get very far. Overall good read.

[Jim Blessing · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a decent read.

[Brett T · Rating 4 out of 5]

Roger Kahn, along with Thomas Boswell, is probably one of the top living baseball writers working today. His The Boys of Summer stands next to Boswell's Why Time Begins on Opening Day as one of the best explorations of baseball's appeal, its uniquely American identity and the kind of philosophical speculation that it can inspire among its fans given to thinking about such things.

In 2000, a couple of years after Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa chased down Roger Maris' single-season home run record but before steroid use and doping marred their achievements and brought many others into question, Kahn explored the history and some of the thinking behind the sport's primary competitive relationship: That between pitcher and hitter. His The Head Game takes a look at that relationship and its effect on the game from the pitcher's point of view, since it is his throw towards home plate that drives the subsequent actions.

Kahn takes a look at what the game's top pitchers said about their work, digging all the way back to its earliest days as a national-level sport at the hinge of the 19th and 20th centuries. For those men, he relies on published interviews or biographies, but he conducted his own interviews among those still living who date from later eras.

Although Head Game could be summed up as a "what's the pitcher thinking?" book, the diverse personalities, understandings and strategic visions of the different men involved give it a much greater depth. It suffers from the exclusion of Negro League giants such as Wilbur "Bullet" Rogan and Satchel Paige, but since Kahn is focusing on the American and National League's top pitchers, the fault for that exclusion lies mostly with the owners, players and managers who supported the segregated system from the 1880s to 1947.

Original available here.

[Margaret · Rating 4 out of 5]

After an introductory chapter on the physics of pitching and how the different pitches work (much of which is based on the work of Robert Adair, author of The Physics of Baseball), Kahn proceeds to a history of pitching, spotlighting various pitchers along the way, from Old Hoss Radbourn, who won 60 games in 1884, to Bruce Sutter, the master of the splitter, and pitching guru Leo Mazzone (at the time the Braves' pitching coach). Along the way, he offers interesting analyses of various aspects of pitching: the development of different pitches, the dimensions of the playing field and of the pitchers' mound, headhunting and hitters' fear of getting, coaching and keeping fit (exploding the myth of the pitcher not being much of an athlete).

It's a good and absorbing book, as you would expect from the author of the baseball classic The Boys of Summer. And besides, you've got to like a guy who offers his own list of the greatest pitchers of all time and ends with Jerry Solovey of Lake Mohegan, NY, because "lists are subjective. Solovey could almost always get me out."

[Ty · Rating 4 out of 5]

Roger Kahn is one of the greatest baseball writers of all time...he started out covering the Yankees and Dodgers and Giants in New York in the golden age of the early 50's. he used to hang out with Maris and Mantle, covered the end of the Ruth years and the full Jackie Robinson story. Kahn's baseball books are interesting not only because of his insight into the game, but also the anecdotes he provides about all of these fascinating characters. in this book, Kahn looks at the art and science of pitching. he covers "great" pitchers from the late 1800's through today, including Christy Matthewson, Warren Spahn, Bob Gibson, Don Drysdale, Greg Maddux, etc. mostly this book focuses on how these great pitchers approached getting into the heads of the hitters, how pitching is as much a psychological effort as a physical one...thus "The Head Game"... i found it very entertaining, but it is probably only suitable for big time baseball fans. if you can actually find a 1-0 extra innings game fun to watch, then you will like this book.

[Bill · Rating 3 out of 5]

From the title of the book and the dust jacket, I expected The Head Game to be little more in the vein of something like George Will's Men At Work. I wanted something a little more technical, perhaps looking at how a pitcher in a similar situation (say, a 2-2 count) might employ different strategies against different batters, that sort of thing. While there is some of that in here, this is book is more or less one-half biographical anthology and one-half Roger Kahn's memoir of the great pitchers he has met.

For that, it is not at all a bad book; the chapters on the pitching coaching careers of Johnny Sain and Leo Mazzone were a treat. But most baseball fans will be aware of at least the biographical outlines of most of the pitchers portrayed here (Cy Young, Christy Mathewson, Warrren Spahn, Sandy Koufax, and others).

It's worth the read, but maybe not a permanent place on your non-virtual bookshelf.

[Zach Stern · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my favorite book of all time.

I am a nostalgic person who loves baseball. The Head Game combines both of these when describing the art of pitching throughout the history of baseball.

More importantly, after reading this book as a young lad (and blossoming pitcher) my outlook and analysis of the game of baseball and my approach to pitching changed drastically. Baseball instantly became a sport with infinite depth. I no longer watched and played games based on each inning. Instead I became focused on each pitch. Each pitch as an at bat, each at bat as a contest between batter and pitcher.

If you don't really know baseball you will be bored to tears with this book. However for others, those who have played or those who are knowledgeable fans, this is a great read.

[Co2 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Roger Kahn writes great baseball. I know most of the pitchers stories use in the book....but he puts them in great context and adds great detail and context. He used his access to some of the greats to interview them about great pitching. For my money, the Don Drysdale section was worth the price of the book. Kahn knows baseball well enough not to get too involved in who was the greatest, (although he does give his list of the greatest at the end of the book) but he highlights the intelligence of the greatest pitchers. He focuses on those pitchers who adapted and who changed the game.

Brillantly written (its Roger Kahn!!) and a beautifully thought out premise. As I said, I knew the stories but now I understand how the game was changed.

[Pablo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kahn is obviously one of the greatest and most prolific baseball writers of all time. This is well-structured, but rambles at times and repeats itself at other times. His chapters on Koufax and Gibson are a little too short for me considering the topic and their undeniable abilities in that arena. Also, I can't understand why there's very little mention of Nolan Ryan, the most intimidating pitcher of my lifetime.

[Jenny Brown · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was hoping to learn more about pitching from this book than I did. Most of the book dwells on pitchers active in the last 19th century and the first decade of the 20s. There's far more about Christy Mathewson than I had any interest in knowing. There's a bit about the pitchers active in the 1950s-70s, and lots of name dropping by the author ("as Branch Rickey said to me . . . .")

Not a terrible book, just not anything to get excited about.

[Sean O'Brien · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting from an historical perspective - an account of different types of pitches invented over time. I was looking for more insight and perhaps quotes, really getting inside the minds of the most brilliant pitchers since the game began. I learned a thing or two but found it to be rather dry. I've read quite a few books on baseball, but there is still much I don't know. George Will's "Men At Work" provides much more of an insider's look even if it is dated now.

[Daimon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Less a discussion about the art of pitching and more like a history of pitchers as told through Roger Kahn's chats with former players and coaches, the book had some nice stories about the characters in baseball over the years but I came away feeling like there was not nearly as much substance as I wanted.

[Bfeyen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting look at different pitchers approach to pitching through serveral eras of baseball.

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.75
Good exploration of different eras of pitching and how rules/strategies/attitudes have shifted by generations.

[Steven · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good read from and excellent sports writer. Really gets into the pitcher vs batter part of baseball.

[Terry Birkel · Rating 4 out of 5]

great insights into the subtle art of pitching from one of the keen observers

[Kathy Cramer · Rating 1 out of 5]

Kept waiting...

[Lane · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good baseball book by one of the premier baseball writers. Lots of good stories about the history of pitching and the pitchers through time. Interesting choice for some of the pitchers and their stories and very little on other influential pitchers but this is Kahn's discussion on pitching and much of it is his interaction with various baseball people,