I received an ARC of this soon-to-be-released biography through NetGalley.

How can you not enjoy a biography of this great baseball legend? Drysdale was an iconic pitcher and personality, a guy who grew up in southern California and became one of the prime faces of the Los Angeles Dodgers. The author is a veteran and now retired sportswriter, based in SoCal. Drysdale's career as a pitcher was from 1956 to 1969, so the author relied on written archives and several interviews to put this together. Drysdale died at age 56, but maintained a high public profile as a sports announcer (not just baseball) and TV personality until his death in 1993.

Drysdale's life was always quite interesting, full of highs and lows, and the author did a good job of presenting both, though there was an obvious bias to present his life favorably. Not a whole lot of original information here, except notably that gained through interviews with Drysdale's second wife, Ann Meyers, the former basketball star.

Thank you, IPG /Triumph Books, for providing this book for review consideration via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

I just finished Don Drysdale: Up And In: The Life of a Dodgers Legend, by Mark Whicker.

Among the many topics covered by the book were Drysdale's intimidation of batters, his extreme competitiveness, his experience throwing the spitter (which he admitted to throwing 5-20 times a game), the three World Series championships the Dodgers won with Drysdale (1959, 1963, 1965), the 1962 pennant race with the Giants, his joint holdout with Koufax, the controversy over playing after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and Drysdale’s scoreless streak.

I give this book a B+.

Goodreads and NetGalley require grades on a 1-5 star system. In my personal conversion system, a B+ equates to 4 stars. (A or A+: 5 stars, B+: 4 stars, B: 3 stars, C: 2 stars, D or F: 1 star).

This review has been posted at NetGalley, Goodreads and my blog, Mr. Book’s Book Reviews

I finished reading this on November 1, 2024.