The High Hard One

By Martin Peter Quigley and Kirby Higbe

The High Hard One intimately portrays the rough-and-ready life of a bush-league ballplayer during the Great Depression. Kirby Higbe broke into the big time with the Chicago Cubs in 1938, showed his talent for striking out batters while pitching for the Philadelphia Phillies in 1940, and led the National League in victories for the pennant-winning Brooklyn Dodgers in 1941. He was with the Dodgers when Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier and integrated the team in 1947. That year was, for Higbe, "the end of what you might call the Babe Ruth era and the beginning of modern professional baseball."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 080327310X
• ISBN13: 9780803273108
• Release Date: January 1998
• Publisher: Unp - Bison Books
• Length: 189 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Hard-Knuckled and Raw

Kirby Higbe (1915-1985) describes his 20+ years as a professional pitcher in this hard-boiled 1967 biography. This grade-school dropout rode a blazing fastball to 12 seasons in the big leagues. Readers learn about Higbe's hard-scrabble youth in South Carolina, pitching for company teams, signing with Pittsburgh in 1932, life in the minor leagues during the Great Depression, etc. Then we get his view on big league life (1937-1950) and the fast lane, pitching inside/beanballs and his wildness, Leo Durocher ("the best manager ever"), service in World War II, Jackie Robinson (Kirby respected him but still opposed integration), etc. Higbe won 22 games for the pennant-winning Brooklyn Dodgers in 1941, and remained a solid pitcher until the late 1940's. Then came inevitable decline, a sliding road from part-timer, to high minor leagues down to low ones. Higbe continues and describes his postwar years, where he mixed modest jobs with convictions for writing bad checks and smuggling pills to inmates. A gruff but open man, Higbe admits his regret at never having gotten an education. This is a roughly-spoken biography, interesting, and informative.

It's all relative

It's interesting to read other people's reviews of this book. Kirby Higbe was my great uncle. I never met him- in fact, he was always referred to as crazy... but that just goes with being a Higbe, I think. I asked my dad for a copy of this book when I was younger, and he told me it would be impossible to find. Chances are, he just didn't want me to see any of the skeletons in the closet. It's odd seeing Uncle Kirby's face and seeing my dad, and uncle, and grandfather's features there. I think the book had a different meaning for me than it would for other readers. It was more a search for family history rather than learning more about baseball.

Hooray for this reprint

I read The High Hard One while I was in high school, and then again about 15 years ago, both times in library copies. Immediately after I read it the second time our local library purged it, and I have been looking for a copy ever since. This biography of Higbe stands out from all of the saccharine self-righteous hackneyed sports biographies to which we have been exposed. Higbe tells what it was like to be a working man and a baseball player. Higbe does not claim to have been a role model or a hero. He describes his life as he went from poverty to major league baseball to prison, and his skills, his gifts, and his personality flaws are all on display. He was not a nice man, but his life story sheds accurate light on the prejudices and beliefs of the people that fans turn into heroes. His willingness to look honestly at his life, even though that look was not complimentary, shows admirable courage.