http://www.geocities.com/coney36_nyy/

Hi everyone!  Well first of all, I know we haven't heard any news about
David for awhile...but I'm hoping that means things are going well!  I
just wonder what minor league team he will start pitching with...

Also, there was a review of Roger Angell's book in the New York Times Book
Review.  It was a really great article with some quotes from the book, so
if you haven't seen it yet...check it out!  Those of you waiting for your
copies, I hope they come soon!

Take care! ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
                    --KC :)

Hi everyone, I too ordered mine from Amazon last week. 
It has been shipped so hope to receive it in the next 
few days. Does anyone know. Is that David on the cover?
Hope we hear some good news soon.
Have a great day.

http://www.geocities.com/coney36_nyy/

I am not sure if that's David on the cover or not, but there is a nice
picture of him and Angell on the back cover. :)  Penny found a scan of
it...would you like to do the honors, Penny? :)

Take care~ ~ ~ ~ ~
                --KC :)

Hey Guys

I got an e-mail last night from Amazon saying they have shipped my book...
so those of you waiting for orders that you placed on-line.. looks as though
we'll be getting our books very soon :)


Have a great weekend everyone!

Penny... please would you do the honors ;)  I can't wait that long to see
the back cover LOL


Laura

In a message dated Fri, 4 May 2001  2:11:38 PM Eastern Daylight Time, "Coney's
Court!" <[email protected]> writes:

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I am not sure if that's David on the cover or not, but there is a nice
picture of him and Angell on the back cover. :)  Penny found a scan of
it...would you like to do the honors, Penny? :)

Take care~ ~ ~ ~ ~
                --KC :)


______________________________________________________________________
To unsubscribe, write to [email protected]

 >>

Certainly, Coney.:) Here's the download, all...enjoy!

~PEN~
T<:)

So far I've read the first five chapters. It is terrific so far.

http://www.geocities.com/coney36_nyy/

--So far I've read the first five chaptters. It is terrific so far.

You've read about as much as I have!  And I agree, it is just
*fabulous*!!!!

Penny, thanks so much for sending the scan!  I bet everyone enjoyed seeing
it! :)

Have a great weekend! ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
                    --KC :)

This Sunday's Book Review Section of the NY Times is a special
baseball issue. Besides Angell's book, "Zim: A Baseball Life" and one
about El Duque, "The Duke of Havana" and others are reviewed.

Imperfect Games 
Roger Angell hung out with David Cone during his worst season in the
majors. 

By PETE HAMILL

All good sports reporters know that the best stories are in the
loser's locker room. Winners are bores-assuming a false modesty or
performing a winner's strut while thanking their mothers, their agents
or God. Losers are more like the rest of us. They make mistakes that
they can't take back. They are imperfect when perfection is demanded,
and thus suffer the sometimes permanent stain of humiliation. If
organized sports teach any lessons about life, the most important is
about accepting defeat with grace. 

Roger Angell surely had no intentions of writing an essay on defeat,
humiliation or grace when he arranged to follow David Cone across the
many innings of the 2000 baseball season. His task was much simpler.
Angell had been watching baseball since he was a child in the late
1920's (he is now 81) and writing about it with style and precision
for almost 40 years in The New Yorker.  Now he wanted to go deeply
into the mind of the game's most crucial player, the pitcher. The
37-year-old Cone seemed to be the perfect subject. He was intelligent,
analytical and experienced. He had made his share of mistakes, as a
man and a player, and had learned from them. He had returned in
triumph from a career-threatening aneurysm in 1996 and thus knew
something about endurance and will. The two veterans arranged to meet
in Florida before pitchers and catchers were due to report for spring
training. 

"Cone has agreed, for his own reasons, to let me hang around
with him during the coming season," Angell writes early in "A
Pitcher's Story," "and, for my part, I'm happy to be watching and
talking with someone at his stage of a great career as he sets
about winning again-winning when it's work, with hard days
and nights to get through, and times when the fastball is
snoozing and the slider has gone off to the dentist or to the
races." 

A fine game plan. Then, as almost always happens in baseball and in
life, it had to be scrapped. The 2000 season was David Cone's Job
year. The baseball divinities were cruel and vindictive, as if
punishing him for the ancient sin of chutzpah.  Who was he to defy
time? In game after game for the Yankees, Cone was shelled. His
fastball was slow. His slider hung. His curveball didn't curve. He was
sent to the bullpen. He was sent down to the Yankee complex in Tampa
for a week, to work on his basics. After pitching several solid games
in August, he fell while diving for a ball in early September, landed
on his left shoulder and drove his nonpitching arm out of its socket. 

The pain tested every notion of the stoic ideal. After his shoulder
was popped back into place and he went through weeks of rehab, Manager
Joe Torre gave him the ball again. Opposing hitters took batting
practice. Cone was lodged in purgatory. 

"Everyone in this game has to go through hard times in order to enjoy
the good parts," said the Yankee outfielder Bernie Williams, "but this
is too hard for anybody." 

Angell begins this painful chronicle with Cone at his very best, since
one of the ancient rules of tragedy is that it must happen to
remarkable men. The date was July 18, 1999, the place Yankee
Stadium, and at the age of 36, after 14 seasons in the major leagues,
Cone pitched a perfect game. Cone had the first no-hitter in his
career and only the 16th perfect game in baseball history. After the
final out, Cone fell to his knees on the mound, threw back his head
and stretched his arms toward heaven. 

But in baseball, perfection is transient. After the perfect game,
Cone started looking suspiciously old, as if his 2,600
major-league innings were finally catching up to him. At one
point in 1999, he didn't win a game for three weeks, and added
only two more regular-season victories to finish with a record of
12 and 9. In the post-season, he rose to the occasion: striking
out nine and giving up two runs while beating the Boston Red
Sox in the American League Championship Series, then
shutting out the Atlanta Braves for seven masterly innings of
one-hit ball in the World Series. Still there were those months of
mediocrity, those tremors indicating the shocks to come in
2000. The baseball analysts always insisted that Cone threw too
many pitches. He thought too much, tried too many approaches,
fiddled too much in his fierce desire to dominate batters. In one
early talk with Angell, before spring training began in 2000,
Cone recalled an outing in 1992 with the Mets when he had
thrown an astonishing 166 pitches to win a 1-0 shutout. Cone
insisted, defiantly, "It's one of the three or four favorite games of
mine, ever." 

Cone says about the role of the pitcher: "I think it's the definitive
position. . . . I like to think of the world's greatest athlete coming
up to bat against me-Tiger Woods, Wayne Gretzky, I don't care who it
is-and I'm looking in at him and thinking, You have no chance." 

Neither Cone nor Angell could have anticipated the 2000 season,
but in telling its story, Angell avoids the trap of straight-ahead
linear narration. Loss after loss, calamity upon calamity would be as
numbing to read about as they were to live through. Instead, he
goes back and forth from past to present, showing what Cone was
to underline the dread he feels about what he has become. 

Early in the book, Angell takes us to Kansas City, the place where the
Cone template was cut. We meet Ed Cone, the pitcher's tough
blue-collar father. Across the years of David's youth, his father was
a night-shift maintenance mechanic at a Swift meat-processing plant,
working 62 �-hour weeks. His labor brought the family a three-story
house just across the street from a ball field. Ed Cone was a Roman
Catholic married to a Protestant, a man faithful to the codes of an
era when all bosses were Republicans and all workers were Democrats
and every workingman was entitled to a drink. A fierce disciplinarian
at home, he coached a Little League team that eventually included each
of his sons on the roster, and was a stern, blunt teacher. David was
the youngest child, with two older brothers and a sister, and from
childhood he was both talented and headstrong. "As the youngest
sibling," his sister, Christal, said, "he'd learned not to let anyone
push him around." Young David played all sports (including tennis and
basketball) and was a star quarterback in high school, but from the
beginning baseball was the fundamental game. And from the start, he
wanted to be a pitcher. His father certainly encouraged him. 

"He wasn't proving anything through me," Cone told Angell.
"With him, sports was an avenue for his kids to get a better
education. We were sports-crazy in my family, but the real
obsession was always school. You might say it didn't work out
that way with me." 

In the fall of 1977, the cash-strapped Cones somehow cobbled together
enough money to send David to Rockhurst, a Jesuit academy. Angell
doesn't do much with the intellectual or academic side of Rockhurst,
but for me there was always something Jesuitical about the
professional style of David Cone. Even today, the Rockhurst Web site
proclaims its goal: magis, or excellence in all things. On the mound,
facing hitters, Cone was the epitome of magis, a restlessly
intelligent warrior, willing to make sudden, surprising choices,
convinced that failure was surely a sin but that the worst sin of all
was doubt and absolutely driven by the demands of excellence.
Pitching, like theology, is above all a game of the imagining human
mind. 

Angell uses plain, graceful prose to tell the complex tale of Cone's
season without ever falling into glib psychobabble or wormy
sentimentality. He is a fan, hardly objective, but he is not a
publicist. Along the way, he gets everyone to talk: Cone's wife, Lynn;
old friends; retired pitchers; Cone's first girlfriend; family
members; Torre. The warts in the portrait are given their proper
place. But David Cone is always firmly at the heart of Angell's tale.
And reality allows both men one final moment of sheer redemptive
magic. 

After finishing his brave, terrible season with 4 victories and 14
defeats and a horrendous earned run average of 6.91, Cone suddenly
came out of the bullpen in the fifth inning of the fourth game of the
World Series to pitch to the best hitter on the Mets, Mike Piazza. He
had homered in his last at-bat, and Cone, looking frail from where I
sat, drew on all his remaining skills and his fierce will. Fastball
inside, fastball away, slider, slider and then Piazza popped up a
fastball for the third out. Inning over.  Cone would never pitch
another inning as a Yankee. 

During the winter, Cone thought about calling it a career. The
Yankees talked vaguely about signing him as a possible fifth
pitcher, at a salary greatly reduced from the previous year's $12
million, but the talk remained talk. In December, Cone
announced that his Yankee days were over, even though he had
no offers from other teams. "Thirty-eight is old for a pitcher," he
told Angell on his birthday in January. "Maybe I should retire and
become a young man again." 

He finally signed with the Red Sox, which to some old Jesuits might
appear to be a triumph of faith over reason. No matter.  For a little
while longer, Cone may get to stare down at some murderous young
hitter, thinking, You have no chance. 


susan peters ~ [email protected]

May 1, 2001

'A Pitcher's Story': Toting the Wins and Losses of a
Pitcher's Art

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

No one writes more evocatively about the craft and magic of baseball
than Roger Angell, and about a year and half ago he decided to do a
book about the pitcher David Cone, a pitcher he selected not only for
his skill and high-profile career, but also for his eloquence and
analytic mind. The book was to focus on the technical art of pitching
as seen by a resourceful veteran, but the year Mr. Angell, the New
Yorker writer, spent with Cone would turn out to be a nightmare for
this pitcher. Though the Yankees scrapped and clawed their way to
their fourth championship in five years, he struggled throughout the
2000 season, ending with a 4-14 record, while grappling
with a misplaced slider, a slowing fast ball and those perennial
athletic bugaboos age and injuries and bad luck.

"Instead of an inside look at a wizardly old master at his late last
best," Mr. Angell writes, "this was going to be Merlin falling
headlong down the palace stairs, the pointy hat airborne and his
wand clattering." Cone, understandably, was less than thrilled about
Mr. Angell's determination to continue writing the book, but he
courteously saw the project through to the end, the same way he
walked "back out there every five days" to "take what came."

While the reader winces at the spectacle of a reporter dogging the
heels of a struggling athlete, documenting his every failure, "A
Pitcher's Story" becomes a tribute to Cone's "bulldogness," his
courage and gutsy determination to try to stage one more comeback in a
career of storied bounce-backs. The book is also a meditation on the
"difficulty and complexity" of pitching - its mysterious reliance on
physical skills, craftiness, creativity and psychological intimidation
- and the vagaries of baseball, its cappacity to afford heartbreak and
perfection, misery and redemption.

"This is the Sisyphean burden we fans lay on the pros at all times,
priding ourself in assessing blame for anything short of a triumphant
outcome," Mr. Angell writes. "The normal year-to-year swings - a
batting average down 20 points from the season before, a loss or a
couple of no-decisions that take away a 20-win record - are not quite
countenanced. There is always someone up there ahead of our team in
the standings or our man among the league leaders, so why weren't they
better?"

Although Mr. Angell is a self-confessed Mets and Red Sox fan, in these
pages he has muted earlier criticisms of George Steinbrenner, the
Yankees owner, and the effects of big money on baseball to set down a
fairly sympathetic account of the long winding road taken by the 2000
Yankees on their way to the World Series. Intercut with his
descriptions of the Yankees' - and more specifically, David Cone's -
travails, are flashbacks chronicling his childhood in Kansas City,
Mo., and his father-supervised apprenticeship in sports along with
highlights (both good and bad) from his long, peripatetic career.

There was the devastating loss the Mets suffered to the Dodgers in the
second game of the 1988 National League Championship Series, in which
Cone gave up five runs in the first two innings; the Yankees' 1995
elimination by the Mariners in the final divisional playoff game, in
which Cone walked in a tying run; his remarkable comeback from
aneurysm surgery in 1996, when he pitched seven innings of no-hit ball
against Oakland; his embattled win over the Atlanta Braves later that
year in the third game of the World Series; and of course the perfect
game he pitched for the Yankees in July 1999 against Montreal. 

Although some of the book's flashback material dealing with Cone's
youth and family background has a familiar, canned quality, Mr. Angell
finds his groove writing about his subject's pitching. He conveys the
"insane admixture of prodigality and thrift" Cone so often displayed.
(In a 1992 Mets game against the Giants, he threw 166 pitches on the
way to a 1-0 shutout.) And Mr. Angell conjures up the ferocious
arsenal of pitches Cone displayed at the height of his career, mixing
speeds and angles while mesmerizing fans with his "histrionic range,
his pallid coldness of concentration, his head shakes and clenched-jaw
regroupings."

Of Cone's pitching with the Mets, Mr. Angell writes: "If you were a
fan, what you began to appreciate in Cone was that his surface fire
and exotic array of pitches - the breaking stuff and the mid-90's
fastball, the plummeting split-finger and the balls that flared
crazily wide of the plate and ran up his counts - concealed a
steadfast, almost assembly- line regularity of output. He
was embarked on a stretch of five years in which he never missed a
start."

By many accounts one of the things that made Cone a great pitcher was
what the sports announcer and former catcher Tim McCarver has called
his willingness to trust "his animal instinct" on the mound, an
ability that was misplaced, during the miserable 2000 season, as
failure and injuries led to a numbing self- consciousness. "I tend to
get overcreative when things aren't going well," says Cone in one of
his many astute self-analyses. "I've tried all those different
grips - some I've never used before - and somewhere in the middle I
lose my way. Too much tinkering, too much Young Tom Edison. I'm a
victim of my own style."

"Pitching is style," as Mr. Angell notes, "and when you have it it
appears innate and touchable: yes, this is me. When it's gone, you
must think and grope - it's more a psychic loss than something
mechanical - and you feel bereft and clunky even before you've been
punished by another defeat. Now the key had been turned, and style,
from wherever it had been, came whispering back, perhaps to stay a bit
and to make it all feel so easy."

In Game 4 of the 2000 World Series against his old team the Mets, Cone
got a crucial out from the dangerous Mike Piazza. Several months after
the Yankees won the World Championship, Cone announced that he was
signing with the hated Boston Red Sox for 2001. Suggesting that
he was hoping to use the rivalry with his old team as motivation, Mr.
Angell writes: "He'd found his edge once again."



susan peters ~ [email protected]

http://www.geocities.com/coney36_nyy/

Thanks for sending the reviews, Susan!  The first one I had read at work,
and I loved the second one as well!  This book really is just absolutely
fantastic...The second review quoted one of my favorite quotes from the
book: 

"Instead of an inside look at a wizardly old master at his late last
best," Mr. Angell writes, "this was going to be Merlin falling
headlong down the palace stairs, the pointy hat airborne and his
wand clattering." 

Even though it's describing the tragedy that had happened to David last
year, I thought that was one of the most wonderful metaphors I had ever
read...brilliant imagery...beautiful!  This book is just full of stuff
like this!

Take care! ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
                      --KC :)

Jose Vizcaino, a member of last year's team who is now with the
Houston Astros, attended the ceremony. Former Yanks David Cone,
Glenallen Hill, Jose Canseco, Denny Neagle and Jason Grimsley declined
invitations.

susan peters ~ [email protected]

None of last year's Yankees who aren't with the club this season was
snubbed when it came to being invited to the White House yesterday.
However, only Jose Vizcaino and Dwight Gooden were able to attend.
And another bit about the White House:

"We reached out to everybody," GM Brian Cashman said. "We went through
the clubs or the players' agents. We knew Nellie [Jeff Nelson] was on
the West Coast and had no chance."

Asked specifically about David Cone, who is rehabbing a shoulder
problem at the Red Sox minor league complex in Florida, Cashman said
he spoke with Steve Fehr, Cone's agent.

"Steve told me that he would talk to David and anticipated that David
would probably appreciate the call but wouldn't want to take anything
away from his rehab," Fehr said.

susan peters ~ [email protected]

From the Sportingnews:

Righthander David Cone (right shoulder) topped out at 91mph while
pitching two innings in an extended spring training game. He is
scheduled to increase his innings and pitches gradually. 

susan peters ~ [email protected]

I can't wait to read it! Tomorrow I'm going to call Angell (he works
in my building) and see if I can go up to get it signed.

I'm going to ask him if that's David on the cover. I agree with RUPunk
that David's nails are always too nibbled on to look that good!

What else should I ask Angell? I have to play it by ear and see if
he's in a mood to chat, but if he is I'm going to make the most of it.

BTW, I don't know if I posted this before - there's a website that has
a list called "Library of Suggested Reading of Twentieth Century
Works" which are the latest recommended authors for the English
Advanced Placement Language and Composition classes by the College
Board. "A Pitcher's Story" is on the list of recommended books!
susan peters ~ [email protected]

Don't worry gal - I've got the URL for your website written down to
bring with me tomorrow ;-)
susan peters ~ [email protected]

When I got home from work yesterday a package from Amazon was waiting!!

I have to confess I cheated a little by perusing through the book..but I
forced myself to stop that and decided to start from chapter 1 LOL!!

With the Yankees playing the way they did last night... this book will
certainly take my mind off unpleasant games :)

Susan you are so fortunate to have Roger Angell sign the book for you..
goodness.. I can't even think of what you could tell or ask him.  I guess
just letting him know that David still has wonderful fans who support him
throughout the country (not just NY) and hope his comeback is successful is
enough for me :)

Oh.. and I am sure KC would appreciate a plug for her site as well ;)


Happy reading one and all- and have a great hump day~

Laura