1964: The Year the Phillies Blew the Pennant

The 1964 Phillies seemingly ran away with the National League pennant and had it all wrapped up by September 21st. With only 12 games remaining - 7 of them at home - the Phillies were in first place by 6 1/2 games. It was almost mathematically impossible for the Phillies to blow that big a lead - but they did. More often than not, Phillies manager Gene Mauch has been blamed for the monumental collapse ever since. But was he responsible? You be the judge as you follow the events that transpired during the 162-game schedule. Woven in between the day-to-day highlights are the author's personal anecdotes, tidbits of information about some of the greatest ballplayers who ever played the game - not only for the Phillies, but for players on other teams, and players in other sports. You'll also be exposed to trivia like - What baseball player was John Glen's wingman during the Korean War? What baseball player was Sgt. Ernie Bilko named after? Who was the first Little Leaguer to make it to the big leagues? It all came down to the last day of the season.

Barry Bowe stands for Truth, Justice, and the American Way. He became a writer at forty-five after being fired from a lucrative sales management position in Philadelphia in 1987. He moved to the island of St. Croix in the Caribbean and vowed to never again work in the corporate world and to learn the craft of writing. He taught algebra, geometry, and trigonometry at Country Day School, an exclusive private school, and he moonlighted as a bartender while taking correspondence courses in writing. He eventually landed a sports writing job with the territory’s Daily News. As the only sports writer on the island, he covered soccer, basketball, baseball, softball, volleyball, horse racing, yacht racing, boxing, golf, tennis, sailboarding, fishing, and croquet. Born to Be Wild was originally published by Warner Books in 1994 and consisted of 80,000 words and became a Main Selection of Doubleday’s Book of the Month Club and was translated into German under the title: Der Wilde. At that point, Barry Bowe quit writing for the next twenty years to devote his life to betting on racehorses and delivering pizza. In 2014, the passion to create returned and he revised the original version of Born to Be Wild by restoring the 40,000 words that he’d been forced to delete by the publisher to conserve space the first time around. The revised version is 124,600 words long. Since then, he published 1964 - The Year the Phillies Blew the Pennant and 12 Best Eagles QBs. More on the drawing board for 2015.