About this item
The holy grail, the fountain of youth, the golden fleece, and the baseball: rarely do objects inspire such madness. The Baseball is a salute to the ball, filled with insider trivia, anecdotes, and generations of ball-induced insanity. Which Hall of Famer once caught a ball dropped from an airplane?Why do balls get stamped with invisible ink?What’s the best ticket to buy for catching a foul ball?Which part of the ball once came from dog food companies?How could a 10,000-year-old glacier help a pitcher grip the ball? In this enlightening, entertaining, and often wildly funny book, Zack Hample shares ballpark legends and lore, details the evolution of the ball, and offers up his secret methods for snagging your own from major league games.
About the Author
Zack Hample, a baseball superfan and popular YouTuber, has been to 54 different major league stadiums and snagged more than 10,000 balls in the stands, including Mike Trout's 1st career home run and Alex Rodriguez's 3,000th career hit. A former guest on "The Tonight Show" with both Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien, Hample has written three baseball books -- How to Snag Major League Baseballs (Simon & Schuster, 1999) , Watching Baseball Smarter (Random House, 2007) , and The Baseball (Random House, 2011) . In 2013 he set a world record by catching a baseball dropped from the greatest height -- 1,050 feet from a helicopter at a minor league stadium in Massachusetts. Hample also holds six world records on classic video games and appeared briefly in the documentary "King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters." Hample's mother, Naomi, is part-owner of Argosy Books, the oldest independent bookstore in New York City; his father, Stuart, was a children's book author, illustrator, and humorist.
