The Complete Game

Reflections on Baseball, Pitching, and Life on the Mound

By Ron Darling
(Knopf, Hardcover, 9780307269843, 288pp.)

Publication Date: March 31, 2009

Other Editions of This Title: Google eBook

Categories: Baseball - General

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Ron Darling was a starting pitcher for the New York Mets from 1983 to 1991 and was the first Mets pitcher to be awarded a Gold Glove. Since 2006 he has been SportsNet New York’s game and studio analyst; since 2007 he has also been a game and studio analyst for TBS, for that network’s game-of-the-week and postseason broadcasts. Darling won an Emmy Award for best sports analyst in 2006. He was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, and attended Yale University, where he was a two-time All-American. He currently lives with his family in Manhattan.

Daniel Paisner has collaborated with dozens of athletes, actors, politicians, and business leaders on their autobiographies and memoirs. He is coauthor of Last Man Down: A Firefighter’s Story of Survival and Escape from the World Trade Center with FDNY battalion commander Richard Picciotto and The Girl in the Green Sweater: A Life in Holocaust’s Shadow with Krystyna Chiger.

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“[Darling] has written a thoughtful and lively new book about the art, craft and business of his trade. It’s a nuts-and-bolts kind of baseball book–a pitcher’s answer to Ted Williams’s classic, The Science of Hitting . . . [Darling is] an affable, frank and witty guide . . . [He] has a sense of humor about the game’s ups and downs . . . He also sees its elegiac potential.”
–Bruce Handy, The New York Times Book Review
“My kind of guy . . . [Darling] writes soulfully about coming into and leaving the game . . . When most former major leaguers write memoirs, you wonder why they bothered; with Ron Darling . . . You wonder why it took him so long.”
–Allen Barra, Newsday
“Incisive, in-depth . . . Fascinating . . . [Darling] seems to have an almost photographic memory of every game he pitched . . . His pitch-by-pitch descriptions . . . illustrate the complexity of baseball . . . The antithesis of the sordid baseball tell-all.”
–Rege Behe, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
“An insightful story for anyone who loves the game.”
–Maureen McCarthy, Minneapolis Star Tribune
“An unconventional baseball book . . . [And] a very good one, too . . . [Darling] can explain all the cerebral stuff while also answering some questions fans always wonder about . . . It’s a snapshot inside a pitcher’s head, and for a baseball fan, it’s worth framing.”
–David Hinckley, New York Daily News
“Enough oddities and thrilling turns of baseball to make a reader glad to be here and–well, not out there.”
–The New Yorker
“This is a book about pitching and life, and about how a man of intelligence looks at baseball from the field level, not from the stands.”
–David M. Shribman, Bloomberg
“Baseball generates dozens of books every year . . . This is easily the best of the year so far . . . It’s hard to recall a baseball book that offers as much information about the game–from a player’s perspective–as this one.”
–Booklist
“Darling serves up his keen recollections in a finely shaped memoir with the game–and the task of pitching–at its core.”
–Library Journal
"Mets fans already know Ron Darling as one of the game’s most insightful commentators, but this is a book for all of Baseball Nation to cherish. Just as artfully as he once changed speeds, Darling moves adeptly between his own experience on the mound and his probing analysis of the art and psychology of pitching to offer us a rare glimpse inside the world of the loneliest man on the field. The result is the pitching equivalent of Ted Williams’ The Science of Hitting."
–Jonathan Mahler, author of Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning
"Darling's little gem of a book immediately takes its place alongside Ball Four and Moneyball as a classic, and the best account ever of the way pitchers think."
–Joseph J. Ellis, author of American Creation

"Totally absorbing. Ron Darling takes us inside the mind of a pitcher, and a funny, thoughtful, and observant one at that."
–Kevin Baker, author of Sometimes You See it Coming and Paradise Alley