Baseball’s Greatest Hits & Misses

In Baseball’s Greatest Hits & Misses, Jack L. Hayes, award-winning author of two other books on Major League Baseball, shares interesting and almost unbelievable stories from his experiences as a batboy at Griffith Stadium in Washington, D.C. Jack also makes you privy to some of those nuggets he picked up along the way, and a few other amazing Hits and Misses-unconventional, bizarre, wacky, and legendary happenings that took place on and off a big league baseball field. Baseball’s history is rich with interesting characters and the way they played ball. Characters like the seventeen-year-old female who took to the mound in her first professional appearance and struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig; little Eddie Gaedel, standing only three feet, seven inches tall, who stepped up to the plate to bat against the Detroit Tigers; Bobby Thomson, whose greatest moment in baseball history home run was given an embarrassing black eye years later. Some baseball bloopers are insignificant and fun to see. Others can be devastating and leave such players as Fred Snodgrass, Fred Merkle, Mickey Owens, Ralph Branca, and Bill Buckner with a lifetime of heartbreak and ridicule. Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle, both ran the bases under similar circumstances. One emerged a hero; the other was blamed for an unbelievable blunder. Baseball’s Greatest Hits & Misses, Volume I, is full of stories-amazing, amusing, almost unbelievable, a few sad. Yet, they all have one thing in common-they’re true!