High Heat; The Secret History of the Fastball and the Improbable Search for the Fastest Pitcher of All Time

Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2010. First Edition [Stated], First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. xii, 268 pages. Illustrations. Bibliography. Index. DJ has slight wear and soiling. Tim Wendel (born 1956 Philadelphia) is an American writer whose works have appeared in many newspapers and magazines such as the National Geographic Traveler, The New York Times, both the Huffington Post and Washington Post among others. In 2004 he was awarded with the Professional Achievement Award and five years later received an Award for Teaching Excellence from Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of more than nine books. Wendel is also a writer in residence at Johns Hopkins University. He is also a recipient of the Walter E. Dakin Fellow and Tennessee Williams Scholar to the Sewanee Writers' Conference. He also co-founded USA Today Baseball Weekly, which he edited and wrote for. Wendel has also been nominated twice for the Virginia Literary Award. He has won the USA Today Luminary Award. In High Heat Tim Wendel undertakes a journey to explore the often remarkable lives of some of the greatest hard-throwing pitchers in baseball history in what he describes as "the improbable search for the fastest pitcher of all time". Identifying the fastest pitcher might seem easy at first. We are told the speed of every pitch at Major League ballparks and on TV broadcasts and can look up all the data. Some of the most entertaining passages in High Heat are the descriptions of the various ways that people have tried to measure the speed of a pitcher's fastball. None can quite match the dare-devil drama of Bob Feller's 'motorcycle' test in 1940, in which 'Rapid Robert' was recorded throwing a fastball just as a motorbike sped past at 86 MPH. Even if you could go back and calculate the speed of every top pitcher's best fastball, that alone wouldn't be enough to tell you who is the fastest pitcher. High Heat tells you that pure heat alone is not enough.