Sixty Feet, Six Inches: A Hall of Fame Pitcher & a Hall of Fame Hitter Talk about How the Game is Played
Selected Book Details
- Hardcover
- Edition: 1
- Author: Bob Gibson, Reggie Jackson, Lonnie Wheeler
- Publisher: Doubleday
- Release Date: September 2009
- ISBN-10: 0385528698
- ISBN-13: 9780385528696
- List Price: $26.00
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Summaries and Customer Reviews provided by Amazon
SummaryReggie Jackson and Bob Gibson offer a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to understand America's pastime from their unique insider perspective. |
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
a great addition to baseball history
Rating:
How much fun would it be to read an account of Cy Young sitting down and talking about the pitcher/hitter battle with Ty Cobb? Or Warren Spahn with Ted Williams? We don't have any such account, but we do have Bob Gibson talking with Reggie Jackson! This book will only grow in importance over the years.
For those of us who remember Reggie's and Bob's playing career, this is a wonderfully vivid reminder. For those who do not, it will paint a detailed portrait of who they are and show why, even among vastly talented athletes, intelligence and will power decide true excellence.
The final pages on current issues is the weakest part of the book, showing that even these guys don't have much light to shed on steroids, pitch counts or the current gut of statistics. I suppose these issues had to be discussed, in the interest of full coverage.
The battle between hitter and pitcher is the ultimate baseball battle. These two warriors share with the reader how they survived the war so long and with so many victories.
WORTH EVERY PENNY
Rating:
This book may be a little too technical for the casual baseball fan, but if you know and love the game, and want to learn a little more about the nuts and bolts of pitching and hitting, this is a great read. It's not great baseball literature like Roger Angell, or the best of Roger Kahn, more of an informal conversation between two hall-of-famers and World Series greats. It's a wealth of information about how the game is played, and more importantly, how it should be played.
What makes it great is that there are a lot of fascinating anecdotes from both Bob Gibson and Reggie Jackson interspersed with the technical stuff. Both men talk at some length about their early years in the game, and what they had to go through coming up as young black players in the 50's (Gibson) and 60's (Jackson). I already had great respect for Gibson, but have even more after reading this book. I wasn't as enamored of Reggie Jackson, but after reading Sixty Feet, Six Inches, I have new respect for him as well. Any serious student of baseball and baseball history would thoroughly enjoy this book.
Excellent training or fan manual
Rating:
I am a casual fan. I like the game, but don't care much which team is playing.
This book is an excellent training book that gives you the inside scoop on what the pitcher is trying to do and how he does it and how the batter plans his attacks against the pitcher. Understanding their plans makes watching a game much more enjoyable.
This book should be required reading for any aspiring player. The two retired players share their thoughts about specific players in occasionally brutal detail.
I don't rate it at a five level because sometimes the two guys go on and on and on. Sometimes I wished they would just take the walk instead of repeatedly fouling off their ideas.
But overall, I strongly reccommend it to anyone who wants to more deeply understand what they are seeing during the game.
How Many Ways Can You Tell This Story?
Rating:
Bob Gibson and Reggie Jackson are both world-class Hall-of-Famers that need no introduction, and anything they offer on baseball is worth paying attention to - up to a point. The problem with "Sixty Feet, Six Inches," a tale of the game between the pitcher and the hitter, is that there are only so many ways to tell this story. Hitters need strength and big hands, good hand-eye coordination, good eyesight that can even read the spin on the ball, and the ability to wait out bad pitches. Pitchers need arm speed, control, and a variety of offerings. Both Gibson and Jackson agree on the importance of constant practice, that getting ahead in the count is the most important part of being a good hitter or pitcher, that it is more important to respect each other as team players than to like each other, and that the psychological aspect of the contest between pitcher and batter, though sometimes overlooked, is also important. Nothing earth-shattering there.
Nonetheless, it was still quite interesting to read Reggie's explaining how he went about achieving a psychological advantage through dictating the timing to get the pitcher out of his rhythm and sense of control, but not mad enough to get thrown at. (Gibson denies he would ever throw at a batter for psychological harassment.) Jackson would also try to intimidate the pitcher by looking at him - this, however, he admits didn't work with the best pitchers. Gibson responded that pitchers might play the same psychological game - shaking off pitches just to annoy batters, even though he did prefer to get into a timing routine and finish the game within two hours. Gibson also wouldn't talk to opposing hitters or pitch vs. National league teams in spring training - he wanted to remain a mystery.
On steroids, Jackson says he would not have used them, Gibson says 'maybe.' Both are amazed at how useful slow-motion digital films are in analyzing oneself for improvement, though not so useful for analyzing competitors. Finally, they both also agree that pitchers aren't as good as they used to be - Gibson believes it is partly due to their not getting enough practice when young. (Too many other things to do.) Lowering the mound 5 inches didn't help either.
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