Baseball as Metaphysics - by Marvin Cohen (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

"Cohen is a superfan, and he has written an intellectual manual for his co-religionists. They know who they are and they will cherish this manual. But anyone who has spent a soft, green afternoon, his shirt open at the throat to the sun, the whistles and chatter of the infield drifting up to the edge of his mind, watching, absorbing, taking in a baseball game, will cherish it."
-- From the introduction by Jim Bouton, former Major League pitcher and author of the 1970 controversial bestseller Ball Four.

Originally published in 1974 as Baseball the Beautiful: Decoding the Diamond, this new paperback edition has been completely reformatted and contains the full text of the original version. According to the bio that Marvin Cohen, now 86, wrote for his website, the original publisher took the liberty of changing the book's now restored title "for commercial feasibility and to bring in the lumbering lowbrow audience."

This new edition also contains a later essay that did not appear in the original, and the author has also written a new foreword.

Review Quotes

"Probably the most sympathetic book ever written about the game."
-- New York Post

"Cohen's essays on the sport never become trapped in sentimentality or overblown analysis -- as pleasing as a perfect game with two out in the ninth."
-- Penthouse

"Cohen approaches baseball as the artist does a great work of art -- it contains, for him, the metaphysical, the holy, the myth, that which lives beyond us, love. Seeing baseball as the supreme art, we are drawn into the book, and close to whatever art we are involved in, close to life."
-- Margins

"Unlike any book on baseball that you have ever read."
-- Arizona Republic