Waite "Schoolboy" Hoyt's improbable baseball journey began when the 1915 New York Giants signed him as a high school junior, for no pay and a five-dollar bonus.
Based on a trove of Hoyt's writings and interview transcripts, Tim Manners has reanimated the baseball legend's untold story, entirely in Hoyt's own words.
Over his twenty-three-year professional baseball career, Hoyt won 237 big league games across 3,845 2/3 innings—and one locker room brawl with Babe Ruth.
He writes at length about the art of pitching and how the game and its players changed—and didn't—over his lifetime. After retiring from baseball at thirty-eight and coming to terms with his alcoholism, Hoyt found some happiness as a family man and a beloved, pioneering Cincinnati Reds radio sportscaster with a Websterian vocabulary spiked with a Brooklyn accent.
When Hoyt died in 1984 his foremost legacy may have been as a raconteur who punctuated his life story with awe-inspiring and jaw-dropping anecdotes. In Schoolboy he never flinches from an unsparing account of his remarkable and paradoxical eighty-four-year odyssey.