Achieving excellence in the athletic arena is incredibly difficult. And with each rung one advances on the ladder, that difficulty increases exponentially. So to be recognized as the best at what you do at the athletic pinnacle is impressive indeed.

Now, a single outstanding season is not enough to place you among the immortals. Indeed, the history of every professional sport is littered with singularly transcendent stat lines by people who would never again reach those heights.

Take MLB’s Cy Young Award. To be named the Cy Young winner is to be placed among the very best to ever take the mound. For some, the award is a box checked on the way to Cooperstown. And yet … there are also many Cy Young winners whose careers prove that elite season to be the outlier rather than the norm.

In Doug Wedge’s "Pinnacle on the Mound: Cy Young Winners Talk Baseball," we get a closer look at some of the men who won baseball’s preeminent pitching award. There are conversations with 10 Cy Young winners whose historic seasons span over half-a-century, devoted to shining a light on the particularities that allowed these hurlers to be, for one season at least, the very best in the game.

From Red Sox pitcher Jim Lonborg’s win in the Impossible Dream season of 1967 to Corey Kluber, the sole two-time winner (2014 and 2017), “Pinnacle on the Mound” offers up concise portraits of these gifted pitchers, from their biographies to their philosophies and more. We learn about their theories of pitching and the manner in which they developed the talents that made them unique. We also learn about how their careers played out – some would disappear soon after their Cy Young victiories, due to injury or other factors. Others would have perfectly acceptable runs in which their Cy season was the primary highlight. Only two of the 10 would land elsewhere – the still-active Kluber and Hall of Famer Dennis Eckersley, who won both the Cy Young and the MVP in 1992.

As a longtime baseball fan, I had at least a passing familiarity with all of the names on this list, though I’ll concede that there are a couple that I knew precious little about. Randy Jones won the Cy Young the year that I was born (1976); his name resonates more as a teacher of pitchers rather than as a pitcher himself (he was an instructor to 2002 AL CYA winner Barry Zito, who gets his own chapter here). The biggest mystery to me was Mike McCormick, who won the NL Cy the same year that Lonborg won in the AL. Literally all I knew about him was – you guessed it – that he had won the Cy Young.

The others profiled in the book are: Ron Guidry (1978 AL, Yankees); LaMarr Hoyt (1983 AL, White Sox); Jack McDowell (1993 AL, White Sox); and R.A. Dickey (2012 NL, Mets).

Each of these pitchers brought something unique to the table. For some, their Cy Young season was a shooting star, a streak of light that flashed across the sky for one glorious year before being extinguished. For others, it was a career apex, for sure, but part of a larger, longer career that bore witness to other successes. Eck made the Hall of Fame, so he’s probably at the top here; we’ll have to see where Kluber’s career winds up, but two trophies give him a pretty strong case for that second slot.

After that? Depends on your criteria.

Ron Guidry had a stretch of true greatness, though he’d never again quite reach the heights of 1978. Still, his might be the best season on the list. Dickey’s win carries its own historicity – he remains the only knuckleballer to ever win the award. I’ve got a soft spot for McDowell and Zito, as their wins came during two of my most passionate periods of general baseball fandom. Lonborg was on that ’67 Red Sox team, so I’ll always love him even though I never saw him pitch.

But honestly, it might be the guys that I knew the least about that I found the most interesting. McCormick was a guy who was scuffling his way out of the league before discovering the screwball that would lead to that glorious 1967 season. Hoyt’s post-Cy run is probably the bleakest, while the reinvention of Jones as a pitching guru is fascinating in its own right.

And on and on. Some people don’t put a ton of stock into individual awards, but I love them as a way to mark not just who the greats were at a certain time, but what it was that made people believe so much in their greatness as to anoint them the best in the league.

“Pinnacle on the Mound” is a quick, breezy read – the kind of book that can and will be eagerly consumed by fans of baseball history. Wedge has done good work in putting together a varied collection of arms, featuring those who would go on to immortality, those who would go on to crash and burn, and those who would … go on. Informative, entertaining and fun – this is a book that will have you yearning for the pop of the mitt and the crack of the bat. It’s a book by a baseball lover for baseball lovers – and Doug Wedge has his fastball working.

Pinnacles On The Miund contains 10 interviews with Major League Baseball pitchers who won the Cy Young Award between 1967 and 2017. In these interviews, the participants talk about their careers (9 of the 10 are retired), their routines, their training regimen, how they dealt with adversity, and the state of modern baseball.

The author is takes these 10 completely different men and tries to find the common threads that made them successful enough to be named the best pitcher in their respective leagues.

If you're a baseball fan, wanting to learn more about pitching, or just interested in what makes these guys tick, then you'll enjoy this book. There's also a lot of good history here for those who like baseball history. I would definitely recommend!

Thank you to Rowman & Littlefield, author Doug Wedge, and NetGalley for gifting me a digital copy of this book. My opinions are my own.