From the New York Times baseball columnist, an enchanting, enthralling history of the national pastime as told through the craft of pitching, predicated on many years of archival analysis and interviews with an increase of than three hundred people from Hall of Famers towards the stars of today

The baseball is an amazing plaything. We can hold it and keep it a wide variety of ways, and even the slightest calibration can turn a typical pitch into a tool to thwart the greatest hitters in the world. Each pitch offers about K: A BRIEF HISTORY of Baseball in Ten Pitches its own history, growing through the decades as the masters pass it down to the next era. From the initial days of the game, when Chocolate Cummings dreamed in the curveball even though flinging clamshells on a Brooklyn seaside, pitchers have never stopped innovating.

In K: A BRIEF HISTORY of Football in 10 Pitches, Tyler Kepner traces the multi-colored stories and exciting folklore behind the ten major pitches. Each chapter shows a different pitch, in the blazing fastball towards the fluttering knuckleball towards the slippery spitball. Infusing every web page with infectious enthusiasm for the overall game, Kepner brings readers in the minds of combatants sixty feet, six inches aside.

Filled up with priceless insights from many of the top pitchers in baseball history including twenty-two Hall of Famers–from Bob Gibson, Steve Carlton, and Nolan Ryan to Greg Maddux, Mariano Rivera, and Clayton Kershaw–K will be the definitive book on pitching and sign up for such functions as The Glory of Their Instances and Moneyball like a classic from the genre.