The game

The founding editor of ESPN the Magazine and Pulitzer Prize nominee presents the extraordinary inside story of baseball's last 20 years, during which the genius and struggle for power of three men saved the game from self-destruction. In the fall of 1992, America's National Pastime is in crisis and already on the path to the unthinkable: canceling a World Series for the first time in history. The owners are at war, their decades-long battle with the players has turned America against both sides, and the players' growing addiction to steroids will threaten the game's very foundation. It is a crucial moment in the game's history that catalyzes a struggle for power by three strong-willed men: Commissioner Bud Selig, Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, and union leader Don Fehr. It's their uneasy alliance at the end of decades of struggle that pulls the game back from the brink and turns it into a money-making powerhouse that enriches them all. This is the real story of baseball, played out against a tableau of stunning athletic feats, high-stakes public battles, and backroom political deals-- with a supporting cast that includes Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire, Joe Torre and Derek Jeter, George Bush and George Mitchell, and many more. Drawing from hundreds of extensive, exclusive interviews, this is a rigorously reported, definitive account of how an enormous struggle for power turned disaster into baseball's Golden Age.--

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.