Heartbreakers

It's the winners we remember in baseball's most dramatic episodes. Bobby Thomson homers into the left-field stands in the ninth inning to beat Brooklyn and give the Giants the 1951 National League pennant. In the 1960 World Series, Bill Mazeroski's ninth-inning home run for Pittsburg defeats the powerful Yankees. The Mets come from far back in 1969 to win the pennant and the World Series.
But baseball being a game of inches, it's often a fine line between victory and defeat. Losing is unexpected, unpredictable, frequently a consequence of fickle fate: the slider that wasn't far enough outside; the missed tag at home plate; the line drive that sliced just foul.
In Heartbreakers, a veteran baseball writer John Kuenster recalls fifteen of the game's most painful "disasters" of the last half-century and looks at them from the loser's point of view. With a reporter's skill and a fan's enthusiasm, he sets the scene for these memorable matchups, surveys the players who led each team to the big moment, and tells the story of the game and the emotions that can't be erased, even decades later. He has interviewed key players and managers who suffered the defeats, providing personal insights and sometimes surprising details on the game action that snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.