Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Pages: 336
•
Trim: 6¼ x 9½
978-1-4422-7759-5 • Hardback • April 2017 • $53.00 • (£41.00)
978-1-4422-7760-1 • eBook • April 2017 • $50.00 • (£38.00)
Lyle Spatz is the former longtime chairman of the Society for American Baseball Research’s Baseball Records Committee. He is the author of numerous baseball books, including Historical Dictionary of Baseball (2012) and Willie Keeler: From the Playgrounds of Brooklyn to the Hall of Fame (2015), both published by Rowman & Littlefield. Spatz is also the co-author of 1921: The Yankees, the Giants, and the Battle for Baseball Supremacy in New York (2010), which won SABR’s Seymour Medal for best baseball history of the year. Spatz’s baseball articles have appeared in the New York Times, The Washington Post, Total Baseball, Baseball Digest, and more. In 2000 he was presented with SABR’s highest honor, the Bob Davids Award, and in 2017 he was a recipient of SABR's Henry Chadwick Award, established to honor the game's great researchers.
Photographs
Foreword
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1: The Blood of the Old South
Chapter 2: A Sense That Good Times Were Coming to Brooklyn
Chapter 3: Brooklyn’s Best Pitcher
Chapter 4: A Legitimate Pennant Contender
Chapter 5: Beanballs, Spikings, and Rhubarbs
Chapter 6: Casey Fuels a Feud with the Cubs
Chapter 7: Building a Champion
Chapter 8: Casey the Workhorse
Chapter 9: National League Champions
Chapter 10: A Dramatic World Series Ends a Memorable Season
Chapter 11: The Pitch That Got Away
Chapter 12: A Memorable Night with Ernest Hemingway
Chapter 13: Becoming a Full-Time Relief Pitcher
Chapter 14: You’re in the Navy Now
Chapter 15: Baseball Enters a New Era
Chapter 16: The Return of Peace Brings the Return of Wars with St. Louis and Chicago
Chapter 17: A Restaurant Launched and a Pennant Lost
Chapter 18: A History-Making Addition
Chapter 19: Burt Shotton Replaces Leo Durocher
Chapter 20: The Hugh Casey Theory of Relief Pitching
Chapter 21: Holding Off the Cardinals
Chapter 22: The Mainstay of the 1947 World Series
Chapter 23: A World Series Hero and a Successful Restaurateur
Chapter 24: Falling, Literally and Figuratively
Chapter 25: Casey and the Dodgers Part Ways
Chapter 26: The Pirates and the Yankees
Chapter 27: A Pennant and a Paternity Suit
Chapter 28: A Wonderful Guy Who Never Hurt Anyone—but Himself
Chapter 29: Remembering Hugh Casey
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
Hugh Casey: The Triumphs and Tragedies of a Brooklyn Dodger is a prolific baseball biographer Lyle Spatz's latest effort, and it rescues another worthy subject of the author from the mists of baseball history. The book contains much game reportage but necessarily so, as Spatz uses it to characterize Casey as a prototype of the relief pitcher role known today as 'closer.' The book also portrays the big hard-drinking Southerner as a tough and fearless competitor; a well-liked restaurateur and supporter of local civic causes; and a key member of teams that led to the establishment of the 19050s Dodgers as a NL powerhouse. Even with the benefit of the subtitle, the reader is shocked and saddened by the account of the pitcher's demise, at age 37.
— Spitball: The Literary Baseball Magazine
Baseball author and historian Lyle Spatz presents a deeper portrait of the pitcher and the man in his latest biography, Hugh Casey: The Triumph and Tragedies of a Brooklyn Dodger.... Spatz’s talent as a researcher shines through in an extensive bibliography.
— The Sports Bookie: A sports blog by Bob D’Angelo
4 Stars: [Spatz] examines the life and career — from his birth in Atlanta to his suicide in that same city 37-years later — of one of the most colorful members of the iconic Brooklyn Dodgers, [exploring] a different place in time in Brooklyn and in baseball.
— Baseball Almanac
With meticulous and absorbing detail, master biographer Lyle Spatz has crafted a memorable portrait of a neglected Brooklyn Dodger hurler. As unfortunate as Casey’s life was off the field, Spatz has done an exemplary job of giving his career as a mound craftsman its overdue credit.
— Lee Lowenfish, author of the award-winning biography Branch Rickey: Baseball’s Ferocious Gentleman and collaborator with Tom Seaver on The Art of Pitching
For the longest time, Hugh Casey’s career was marginalized to a single World Series pitch. Thanks to the research by Lyle Spatz, fans can replay Casey’s “complete game” and his bittersweet life in baseball.
— Mark Langill, team historian, Los Angeles Dodgers