When the Crowd Didn't Roar: How Baseball's Strangest Game Ever Gave a Broken City Hope - Hardcover

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.
 
 

"Cowherd's book elucidates a chilling collision of race and sport from recent history."—John Swansburg, New York Times Book Review (John Swansburg New York Times Book Review)

"A compassionate, objectively rendered examination of a frightening case of police brutality."—Wes Lukowsky, Booklist (Wes Lukowsky Booklist 2019-03-08)

"This book should be read under the knowledge that while it is about an unusual baseball game, it is more than just a baseball book.  The reader will have a much better understanding of what the city of Baltimore was enduring during that week and how this game both gave the city a small amount of normalcy during a trying time and was a illustration of how grim the situation seemed at that time."—Guy Who Reviews Sports Books (Guy Who Reviews Sports Books 2019-03-14)

"The story comes vividly to life through the eyes of city leaders, activists, police officials, and the media that covered the tumultuous unrest on the streets of Baltimore, as well as the ballplayers, umpires, managers, and front-office personnel of the teams that played in this singular game, and the fans who watched it from behind locked gates."—Jason Schott, Brooklyn Digest (Jason Schott Brooklyn Digest 2019-05-06)

“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 (David Simon 2018-09-14)

“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 (Cal Ripken Jr. 2018-09-14)