Schoolboy

The Untold Journey of a Yankees Hero

By: Waite Hoyt, Bob Costas - foreword, Tim Manners - contributor

Narrated by: Joe Barrett

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.

©2024 Tim Manners; Foreword copyright 2024 by Bob Costas (P)2024 Tantor

A good listen!

Very enjoyable narrator and trhe back story was very interesting.. i love to read about former players and their experiences inside and outside of their careers.

OUTSTANDING MEMOIR OF A WELL-TRAVELED MLB LEGEND

Mr. Waite Hoyt had quite a life, and he got to play with a befriend Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. He played some for John McGraw, and starred for Miller Huggins and Connie Mack.

Mr. Hoyt met Al Capone, and he became a broadcasting legend for the Cincinnati Reds. He later befriended Joe Nuxhall, the Big Klu, Frank Robinson, Pete Rose, Johnny Bench, and Joe Morgan, and he collected many Big Wins, his last One over the bottle.

What a life! Great story, and welk-written! MLB Historians: Allow yourself this treat, and read/ listen to this Saved Masterpiece!

Thank you, Writer - For putting this all together!

GRADE: A+

Mediocre Sports Biography

Based on the description of the book, I was hopeful that the biography would give more insight into the players of the 1920s and 1930s. Instead, we get a superficial look at those players and the bemoaning of a flawed man. It sounds like Mr. Hoyt failed to make the most of his own talent through his own failings which were ordinary rather than say the extraordinary failings of a Babe Ruth. I was surprised, given the timeframe is playing in broadcasting career spanned that he did not give him more attention to the impact of Jackie, Robinson and others breaking the color barrier in baseball.