When the Crowd Didn't Roar

Kevin Cowherd is an award-winning sports columnist and features writer who worked for the Baltimore Sun for thirty-two years. He is the New York Times best-selling author of Hothead, The Closer, and four other baseball novels for young readers written with Cal Ripken Jr. Cowherd is also the author of four books of nonfiction, including Way Down in the Hole: The Meteoric Rise, Tragic Fall and Ultimate Redemption of America’s Most Promising Cop.

“Kevin Cowherd has written a remarkable sports book that isn’t actually about sports. Instead, it is a reflection on a single professional contest played in silence-a historical anomaly in which an American city, challenged by both legitimate protest and grievous violence that followed the unnecessary death of a man, took a deep breath and played a baseball game in a locked stadium, without fans. And in that empty space, everyone-from the teams’ owners, to the players, to the politicians, journalists, fans, and ordinary citizens-had to contemplate the hopes and fears and the failures and strengths of their city.”-David Simon, creator and executive producer of the HBO series The Wire “Dad always used to say, if you hang around baseball long enough, you will always see something new. That was definitely the case when I watched this ball game in an empty Camden Yards. Kevin Cowherd has done an outstanding job capturing the uniqueness of this very odd day in baseball history and all that surrounded it.”-Cal Ripken Jr., Hall of Famer and former Baltimore Oriole