Skip to main content
Trade Books For Courses Tradebooks for Courses

The Game from Where I Stand

From Batting Practice to the Clubhouse to the Best Breakfast on the Road, an Inside View of a Ballplayer's Life

Doug Glanville

St. Martin's Griffin

opens in a new window
opens in a new window The Game from Where I Stand Download image

ISBN10: 031257309X
ISBN13: 9780312573096

Trade Paperback

304 Pages

$18.99

CA$26.99

Request Desk Copy
Request Exam Copy

TRADE BOOKS FOR COURSES NEWSLETTER

Sign up to receive information about new books, author events, and special offers.

Sign up now

Doug Glanville, a former major league outfielder and Ivy League graduate, draws on his nine seasons in the big leagues to reveal the human side of the game and of the men who play it.

In The Game from Where I Stand, Glanville shows us how players prepare for games, deal with race and family issues, cope with streaks and slumps, respond to trades and injuries, and learn the joyful and painful lessons the game imparts. He also tells us with insight and humor what he learned from Jimmy Rollins, Alex Rodriguez, Randy Johnson, Barry Bonds, Curt Schilling, and other legendary and controversial stars.

In his professional career, Glanville experienced every aspect of being a player—the first-round pick, the prospect, the disappointment, the can't-miss, the cornerstone, the veteran, the traded, the injured, the comeback kid. His eye-opening book gives students a new level of understanding of day-to-day life in the big leagues.

Reviews

Praise for The Game from Where I Stand

"I found Doug Glanville's The Game From Where I Stand a wonderful teaching tool in my classes. Students love the book for its engaging mix of personal anecdotes and war stories from the big leagues. Yet The Game From Where I Stand also opens up for discussion much larger questions about money, race and gender, myth-making and celebrity, and the role of the athlete in our sports-obsessed culture. Students cited the book as a favorite reading of the semester, and I plan to use it again in the future."—Orin Starn, Duke University

"Doug Glanville was always different from other baseball players—in a good way . . . He was more like one of us (regular folks) than one of them (exalted athletes). He saw himself the way you would if you made the majors: full of self-awareness and humanity, traits that are otherwise in short supply in the VIP-treated, image-conscious world of pro sports. It stood to reason, then, that Glanville's baseball memoir, The Game from Where I Stand, would be different as well . . . [Glanville] is a witty, insightful writer. . . . Many times during the steroids scandal, it has seemed as if the players were on one side of the battle and the baseball writers were on the other. In Glanville, finally, we have someone who is of both camps, and everyone on either side would benefit from hearing what he has to say."—The Washington Post



"Filled with sharp insights, keen observations, and great stories, his book is championship caliber."—The Philadelphia Inquirer

"Doug Glanville is a salesman. The former Cub is selling two of the most vanishing commodities on the contemporary American slipscape—empathetic insight and independent thought . . . It's an engaging and thoughtful detailing of the way a smart, feeling player processed and parried with the realities of megabyte-era Major League Baseball."—Jim O'Donnell, Chicago Sun-Times

"Glanville has an effective knack for unveiling the usually untold story of the tricky balancing act of real life—ill family members, love life, confidence issues, lifestyle choices, injuries—most players are constantly engaged in with varying degrees of success . . . Generous, perceptive, wise (he's a Penn graduate, after all) and thoughtful, Glanville further distinguishes his career with this rich and rewarding look back at it."—Boston Herald



"An entertainingly clear-eyed look at big league life."—Sports Illustrated



"Doug Glanville . . . is as adept at thinking and writing about baseball as he was at playing it."—Men's Journal



"The Game from Where I Stand is absolutely enthralling. Doug Glanville effortlessly interweaves the personal, strategic, and conceptual aspects of baseball, and brilliantly peels back the curtain on so many aspects of the game's culture. His voice is perfect, too—at once open, smart, warm, funny, and honest. He has given those of us on the outside looking in, wondering what it's really like, quite a treat."—Lynn Novick, producer of the PBS film Baseball



"Glanville, who fashioned a solid nine-year major-league career playing outfield for the Chicago Cubs, Philadelphia Phillies, and Texas Rangers, has lately been writing an op-ed column on baseball for the New York Times, a column that led to this longer rumination on the game. Although superbly talented—Glanville also has an engineering degree from Penn—the author presents himself as an average Joe, just passing along some thoughts: how he prepared for a game, the politics of winning and keeping a spot on the roster, the big and little things that bond teammates, the tension between playing for oneself and for the team, the distractions that steal a player's focus, and the decline of an athlete's skills, among many other topics. Not much headline-grabbing dirt here, just a workingman's perspective on the national pastime."—Alan Moores, Booklist

Reviews from Goodreads

BOOK EXCERPTS

Read an Excerpt

INTRODUCTION

"Now batting, the center fielder, number six, Doug Glanville."

For fifteen professional seasons, nine of them in the major leagues, those words (or some variation of them) began my workday. I heard them in tiny...

About the author

Doug Glanville

Doug Glanville played outfield for the Philadelphia Phillies, Chicago Cubs, and Texas Rangers from 1996 through 2004. From 2008 to 2010, he wrote an online column for The New York Times and provided baseball analysis for XM Radio. In the spring of 2010 he joined ESPN as a baseball analyst. He serves on the executive board of Athletes Against Drugs, and advises high school student athletes as a special consultant to the Baseball Factory. He lives with his family in Chicago.