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Out of my League

An Amateur's Ordeal in Professional Baseball

George Plimpton author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Vintage Publishing

Published:4th Aug '16

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Out of my League cover

From the author of Paper Lion.

George Plimpton goes behind the scenes of a professional baseball team in the classic that Ernest Hemingway called 'beautifully observed and incredibly conceived'



The original foray into participatory journalism that started it all, Out of my League announced George Plimpton as a giant of sports journalism, able to penetrate deep into the very spirit of sport, with his characteristic wit, charm and grace.

From the author of Paper Lion

It began as a fun filled stunt and came to a deeply hellish, nearly humiliating end. George Plimpton had the chance to answer every baseball fan’s question: could I strike out a major league star? Out of My League chronicles what happened next as his inspired idea – to get on the mound and pitch a few innings to the All-Stars of the American and National Leagues – got seriously out of hand.

The original foray into participatory journalism that started it all, Out of my League announced George Plimpton as a giant of sports journalism, able to penetrate deep into the very spirit of sport, with his characteristic wit, charm and grace.

Beautifully observed and incredibly conceived, this account of a self-imposed ordeal has the chilling quality of a true nightmare. It is the dark side of the moon of Walter Mitty -- Ernest Hemingway
A baseball book such as no one else ever wrote, and one of the best ever * New York Herald Tribune *
With his gentle, ironic tone, and unwillingness to take himself too seriously, along with Roger Angell, John Updike and Norman Mailer he made writing about sports something that mattered * Guardian *
What drives these books, and has made them so popular, is Plimpton’s continuous bond-making with the reader and the comedy inherent in his predicament. He is the Everyman, earnests and frail, wandering in a world of supermen, beset by fears of catastrophic violence and public humiliation, yet gamely facing it all in order to survive and tell the tale… A prodigious linguistic ability is on display throughout, with a defining image often appended at the end of a sentence like a surprise dessert. -- Timothy O'Grady * Times Literary Supplement *

ISBN: 9780224100410

Dimensions: 198mm x 129mm x 11mm

Weight: 117g

160 pages