The Complete Game

February 15, 2009
The former All-Star hurler for the New York Mets, now a baseball analyst for TBS, reflects on the profession and psychology of pitching as exemplified in his career.

Is there a trite expression not found in Darling's prose? Enshrined here:"a ball game can turn on a dime,""I had some butterflies" and myriad others. Granted, it's somewhat effective to organize the text into nine"innings," plus pregame, warm-up, extra innings and postgame. Each inning/chapter centers on an actual game the author either played or watched, which allows him to ruminate on a pitcher's strategies in early, mid-game and late-game situations. Darling makes some mildly interesting comments about the craft of pitching (why he couldn't throw a slider) and his mound behavior (what he did when someone hit a home run; how he felt when the pitching coach strolled out). He also offers encomiums for former teammates Gary Carter and Jamie Quirk, coach Dave Duncan and manager Davey Johnson. He writes affectingly of his realization that his family had been having a life of its own while he was off playing and movingly describes his emotions when he reached the end of his Mets tenure, as well as his career-sunset years with the Oakland Athletics. It's evident that the author watched a lot of video; he often provides a pitch-by-pitch account of key moments in games long past. Occasionally, a felicitous phrase elbows its way through the crowd of clichs. Near the end, for example, Darling mentions baseball's"beautiful cruelty"—too bad he tries to slip the same pitch by us again 18 pages later.

Will certainly appeal to devoted Mets and Darling fans, but few others.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

Starred review from February 15, 2009
As any baseball fan can attest, ex-ballplayers who do analysis for game broadcasts remember every play of every game they were ever in. Darling is a perfect example, and here he serves up his keen recollections in a finely shaped memoir with the gameand the task of pitchingat its core. Nine chapters are each named for their respective inning: Darling recalls in detail a game he pitched in which that particular inning served as a kind of crucible. With plenty of anecdotes and asides offered along the way, this is a superior book, highly recommended for all baseball collections.

Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from April 1, 2009
Darling was a Major League pitcher from 1983 to 1995. He was good but not great. Along the way, he became a student of the gameand a very observant, self-aware one at thatand has since won an Emmy as a baseball analyst. Using a unique nine-inning format in this mix of autobiography and reflection on the game, Darling picks a particularly notablenot necessarily successfulinning in his career and minutely dissects it. For example, for his first entry, he examines his first inning as a big-league pitcher: who he faced, what he was thinking, why he threw the pitches he did, what happened, and what he learned. His fifth-inning choice takes place during an August 1984 game against the Chicago Cubs in which Darling was intimidated, pitched poorly, and nearly incited a brawl when he hit a Cub batter out of frustration. He supplements each chapter with context, flashbacks, and other examples from his career to illustrate how what he learned in that particular inning carried forwardor didnt. Its hard to recall a baseball book that offers as much information about the gamefrom a players perspectiveas this one. Baseball generates dozens of books every year, from biographies to statistical abstracts. This is easily the best ofthe year so far.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)