cover image Catfish: My Life in Baseball

Catfish: My Life in Baseball

Armen Keteyian, Jim Catfish Hunter. McGraw-Hill Companies, $16.95 (242pp) ISBN 978-0-07-031371-2

Hunter is as much at home traipsing through woods and streams on a hunting or fishing expedition or planting a soybean crop as he is pitching a major-league victory. In this warm reminiscence, written with Sports Illustrated staffer Keteyian, he covers his brilliant teenage baseball career in North Carolina, his years with the Oakland A's and then the Yankees. The book is particularly interesting about Hunter's stint with the three-time world-champion aggregation put together and torn apart by Charley Finleyand observes that there may have been better players, but there were few teams better than the A's. Then the authors progress to the furious bidding that took place when Hunter became a free agent and his stint with the Yankees at a time when Billy Martin was the off-again, on-again manager and the egos of Martin, Reggie Jackson and George Steinbrenner were in constant collision. Photos not seen by PW. (April)