Out of My League

"Beautifully observed and incredibly conceived, this account of a self-imposed ordeal has the chilling quality of a true nightmare. It is the dark side of the moon of Walter Mitty."—Ernest Hemingway

"A baseball book such as no one else ever wrote, and one of the best ever."—New York Herald Tribune

"Out of My League copes with the problem of the imaginary nightmare of walking every batter and the glittering triumph (the shutout) of striking them out, one after the other."—Marianne Moore

"It's all there: the humor, the classical allusions and the verisimilitude that makes you feel that you were not only there to see it but suffered through it with George."—Allen Barra, Dallas Morning News

"A delight--more entertaining, if possible, than I remembered... the reader leaves George Plimpton's wide world of sports with deep reluctance.... His prose is as elegant and seemingly effortless as Ted Williams's swing or an Arnold Palmer iron shot.... His teammates recede--like the old baseball players vanishing into the cornfield in Field of Dreams, taking their magical world with them but living on in fond memory."—Edward Kosner, Wall Street Journal

"Sports memoirs, like humor collections, rarely outlive their authors, but Plimpton's books have aged gracefully and even matured. Today they have the additional (and unintended) appeal of vivid history, bearing witness to a mythical era."—Nathaniel Rich, New York Review of Books