"A wonderfully informative, exuberant, and entertaining book--part sports history, part personal history--that explores America's romance with baseball through one 'perfect game' and the drama of pitching. In Off Speed, Terry McDermott weaves the fascinating story of baseball's 150-year hunt for the perfect pitch. Using the framework of a single game (9 chapters, 9 innings, 9 pitches), he explores the history of every type of pitch, combining the folk wisdom of the players with the enormous wealth of new data brought to the sport by the growing legion of statisticians who are transforming many of the sport's once sacred beliefs. As a lifelong baseball fan, McDermott approaches his subject with the love every fan brings to the park plus the expertise of an investigative journalist, exploring with irrepressible enthusiasm and curiosity both the technical side and the romance of the game"--