Waite "Schoolboy" Hoyt's improbable baseball journey began when the 1915 New York Giants signed him as a high school junior, for no pay and a five-dollar bonus.
Based on a trove of Hoyt's writings and interview transcripts, Tim Manners has reanimated the baseball legend's untold story, entirely in Hoyt's own words.
Over his twenty-three-year professional baseball career, Hoyt won 237 big league games across 3,845 2/3 innings-and one locker room brawl with Babe Ruth.
He writes at length about the art of pitching and how the game and its players changed-and didn't-over his lifetime. After retiring from baseball at thirty-eight and coming to terms with his alcoholism, Hoyt found some happiness as a family man and a beloved, pioneering Cincinnati Reds radio sportscaster with a Websterian vocabulary spiked with a Brooklyn accent.
When Hoyt died in 1984 his foremost legacy may have been as a raconteur who punctuated his life story with awe-inspiring and jaw-dropping anecdotes. In Schoolboy he never flinches from an unsparing account of his remarkable and paradoxical eighty-four-year odyssey.
