Baseball as Metaphysics
Marvin Cohen
Introduction by Jim Bouton
November 15, 2017
ISBN 9780692967515 / Paperback / 112 pages / $10.95

A new, expanded edition of Marvin Cohen's 1974 Baseball the Beautiful. Retitled as Baseball as Metaphysics, the book is an idiosyncratic meditation on the game as a philosophical and aesthetic system, where ritual, repetition, failure, and grace become vehicles for metaphysical inquiry. This volume includes a later essay not present in the original edition, along with a new brief introduction by the author.

“Probably the most sympathetic book ever written about the game.”
— New York Post

“Cohen approaches baseball as the artist does a great work of art — it contains, for him, the metaphysical, the holy, the myth, that which lives beyond us, love. Seeing baseball as the supreme art, we are drawn into the book, and close to whatever art we are involved in, close to life.”
— Margins

“Cohen’s essays on the sport never become trapped in sentimentality or overblown analysis — as pleasing as a perfect game with two out in the ninth.”
— Penthouse

“Unlike any book on baseball that you have ever read.”
— Arizona Republic