FREE: The October Heroes: Great World Series Games Remembered by the Men Who Played Them

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(1979) Hardcover

Honig and his tape recorder may well be the most valuable combination since Tinker to Evers to Chance. In his justly celebrated oral histories, Baseball When the Grass Was Real and Baseball Between the Lines, he captured the game's voices from the '20s through the '50s. Heroes reels in recollections of the World Series with a powerful lineup of recollectors: Smokey Joe Wood of the 1912 Red Sox; Tom Seaver of the '69 Mets; Monte Irvin of the '54 Giants; Gene Tenace of the early '70s A's dynasty; and Johnny Podres of the '55 Dodgers.
The most memorable moment of the book, however, belongs to Fred Lindstrom, the second baseman for the Giants of the '20s; less remembered for the overall quality of his Hall of Fame career than for the single chance that got away: "It's possible," he says with unembarrassed matter-of-factness, "that if it hadn't been for that ball bouncing over my head in the 1924 World Series a lot of people would have forgotten I existed. The association is made so often: Lindstrom, the bad bounce, the World Series. I still hear about it. Some people think I hit the ball, some think I scored the winning run. I have to refresh them on it. 'I didn't do anything but just stand there,' I tell them. 'It was very easy. Anybody could have done it.'" Like Lindstrom's bad hop, Heroes is filled with its share of unexpected bounces and the grace under pressure needed to survive them.