Home Run

Seven Things You Should Know

De: JIM STOVALL

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

Every summer, right before the All-Star break, baseball hands its biggest stage to a single swing. But how much do you actually know about that swing?

"Home run" didn't start on a baseball diamond — it started in 1830s horse racing, decades before professional baseball existed. For half a century, hitting one over the fence was closer to a lucky accident than a skill anyone trained for, until one player and one rule change turned it into the sport's defining moment. The physics packed into that moment is stranger than it looks, the era that nearly wrecked its credibility still divides fans today, and the metaphor it gave the English language means something close to the opposite in a country that plays a different game with a similar ball.

In Home Run: Seven Things You Should Know, journalist Jim Stovall goes looking for what's genuinely surprising about baseball's signature moment — and finds a story that runs through horse racing, Prohibition-era New York, applied physics, a scandal nobody can quite agree how to remember, and a British idiom that means the opposite of what you'd expect.

You don't need to know a batting average from a box score. You just need to be curious.

Part of the "I'm No Expert, But" series — short, accurate, surprising books for people who want to know more without committing to a textbook.