At last, in Kiss It Good-bye: The Mystery, The Mormon, and the Moral of the 1960 Pittsburgh Pirates (Shadow Mountain, $24.99, releasing March 2009) the sports world will find out what caused a superstar major league pitcher, possibly en route to Cooperstown, to suddenly lose his dominance over the batters he faced.
In 1960, an upstart Pittsburgh Pirates team beat the vastly superior New York Yankees in the World Series. With a Yankee roster including Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford, and Yogi Berra, that improbable victory did more than give Pirates fans something to cheer about; it put Pittsburgh on the map.
Though Kiss It Good-bye author John Moody was only six years old during that magical baseball season, he was a devoted fan of the Pittsburgh team. The star pitcher for the Pirates and John’s first sports hero was Vernon Law, an unsophisticated Idaho country boy, widely known as The Deacon, a friendly nickname derived from his strict Mormon upbringing.
Law was a relatively young man at the time and should have enjoyed several more seasons of fame and success, yet his career went into decline following that phenomenal Series.
But the book is more than just another exposé. This is about a real sports hero: Vernon Law – a man of integrity. Recalling a distant time in American sports, Kiss It Good-bye contains a universal theme: a son’s affection for his father and the bond that was forged between them because of their love of baseball.
About the Author
Not content to hang around suburban Pittsburgh forever, John Moody lived and worked in New York, Moscow, Paris, Bonn, Warsaw, Mexico, Costa Rica and Rome, among other places. He helped start the Fox News Channel and now works for its parent company, News Corporation.
He co-wrote The Priest Who had to Die, and is the author of Moscow Magician, a novel, and Pope John Paul II, a biography.
After all his world travels, he’s still proud to come from Pittsburgh.
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