num_pages: 322
description: “The year’s funniest and most insightful baseball book.” — Chicago Tribune A classic look at those years of baseball futility and frustration that make the rare taste of success so much sweeter. Any team can have an off-decade. But three in a row? Only in Cleveland. No sports fans suffered more miserable teams for more seasons than Indians fans of the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. Terry Pluto takes a fond and often humorous look at “the bad old days” of the Tribe and finds plenty of great stories for fans to commiserate with. Other teams lose players to injuries; the Indians lost them to alcoholism (Sam McDowell), a nervous breakdown (Tony Horton), and the pro golf tour (Ken Harrelson). They even had to trade young Dennis Eckersley (a future Hall-of-Famer) because his wife fell in love with his best friend and teammate. Pluto profiles the men who made the Indians what they were, for better or worse , including Gabe Paul, the underfunded and overmatched general manager; Herb Score, the much-loved master of malaprops in the broadcast booth; Andre Thornton, who weathered personal tragedies and stood as one of the few hitting stalwarts on some terrible teams; and Super Joe Charboneau, who blazed across the American League as a rookie but flamed out the following season. Long-suffering Indians fans finally got an exciting, star-studded, winning team in the second half of the 1990s. But this book still stands as the definitive story of that generation of Tribe fans—and a great piece of sports history writing .
language: English
title: The Curse of Rocky Colavito: A Loving Look at a Thirty-Year Slump
titlecomplete: The Curse of Rocky Colavito: A Loving Look at a Thirty-Year Slump
genres: Sports, History, Baseball, Biography, Journalism, Nonfiction
ratings_count: 263
publisher: Gray & Company, Publishers