The Ball

Originally published in 1999, Daniel Paisner's THE BALL: Mark McGwire's 70th Home Run Ball and the Marketing of the American Dream was hailed as "one of the great quirky masterpieces of baseball journalism" by the editors of Sportsjones.com, and named an Amazon.com "Top Ten Sports Book of the Year." THE BALL is a wistful parable about our national pastime. It chronicles the distinctly American path of Mark McGwire's record-setting seventieth home run ball—from the moment it was stitched in a Rawlings factory in Costa Rica and shipped (eventually) to St. Louis; to the moment it left the hands of Montreal rookie hurler Carl Pavano and collided with McGwire's "Big Stick" bat; to the moment it was "caught" by a researcher working on the heralded Human Genome Research Project; to the moment it was won at auction for $3.08 million dollars by a comic-book maven. Shot through with colorful characters, high drama and rich baseball history, it is must-reading for anyone interested in what drove our various marketplaces—and collective fantasies—at the end of the twentieth century. As baseball fans commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the historic home run race of 1998, they look back as well to a more innocent time in the game—a time before the taint of steroids and the reliance on sabermetrics that has transformed the way the game is played and the way it is remembered.