The Unofficial Guide to Baseball's Most Unusual Records

By Bob Mackin

Book Overview

Discover who holds the record for sitting on birthday cakes, opening beer bottles with one eye socket, having the most marijuana-growing convictions, inflicting the most horrendous injuries in a fight and for being the game's most outstanding one-legged pitcher -- plus the skinny on the owners, the umps and the off-field antics of summer's game. This insider's guide goes far beyond the standard statistical fare to reveal the underbelly of baseball arcana, presenting records not only of rare achievement but also of abject failure -- weird facts and stats that answer the questions often asked but for which, until now, trivia hounds could find no answers. Book jacket.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1553650387
• ISBN13: 9781553650386
• Release Date: March 2004
• Publisher: Greystone Books
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 7.0" x 0.8" x 4.8"

Customer Reviews

"Unusual" Has Its Moments

Bob Mackin's "The Unofficial Guide to Baseball's Most Unusual Records" is a reasonably entertaining book showcasing baseball's interest in all kinds of statistics - records, in this case. The book, in twenty chapters, is organized into groups of like records (i.e., pitchers, batters, home runs, etc.) and within each chapter are records of the mildly interesting (such as age of youngest player, age of oldest rookie) to those records that you probably will not find anywhere (earliest news conference to announce a retirement, for example, or the only ballplayer shot by a Lithuanian-speaking stalker). Like potato chips, cashews or nachos, these bite-sized bits of information are hard to put down. That said, the errors in the book tend to hit a wrong note when one is found when reading. While I usually tend to look past mistakes in books, reference and record books should be checked more closely to eliminate errors, so that others don't pass along faulty facts. But finding out that the first tie World Series game occurred in 1922 (not including 1907 or 1912, apparently) and errors on World Series opponents do cause one to look twice at the information, to make sure it's being read correctly.