Stealing First Base
Language: English
Published by Carrier Press, 2026
- Softcover
- New
Seller: California Books, Miami, FL, U.S.A.California Books
AbeBooks seller since October 27, 2023
Condition: New
£ 15.44
Quantity: Over 20 available
Add to basketSeller Inventory # I-9798950343216
- Title
- Stealing First Base
- Author
- Carrier, Jeffrey L.
- Publisher
- Carrier Press
- Publication year
- 2026
- Condition
- New
- Binding
- Soft cover
- Language
- English
- ISBN 13
- 9798950343216
Inspired by the true story of the largest sports memorabilia fraud in American history.
Between 1997 and 2005, an FBI investigation called Operation Bullpen tore the lid off a national racket and produced more than sixty convictions. By the Bureau's own estimate, most of the autographed baseballs, balls signed by Ruth, by Mantle, by Williams, that changed hands in those years were fakes. Stealing First Base is the novel that finally puts a family at the center of that crime.
It begins in 1920, on a train platform in southern Italy, where a nineteen-year-old porter named Russo Massena throws one punch too many and has to run. He runs all the way to America, all the way to Yankee Stadium, carrying nothing but a love of a game he has never seen played. That love becomes an inheritance. It passes down through three more generations of Massenas and Messinas, each one twisting it a little further from the boy on the platform, until it arrives, warped almost beyond recognition, in the hands of his grandson.
Gavin Messina was supposed to hit home runs for the Yankees. Instead he turns out to have the coldest nerve and the most relentless organizing mind in the business. From a warehouse outside Bakersfield he builds the most prolific signature-forgery operation in the country, aging paper in shellac baths and sealed bags of dog food, turning a lifetime of cataloged baseball facts into a machine for manufacturing the past.
But the hand at the center of that machine is not Gavin's. It belongs to Gregory Marino, the quiet prodigy Gavin first handed a pen and a shoebox of signatures across a Long Island kitchen table, when Gregory was eight years old and Gavin told him to try the Mantle. Gregory could already draw anything he saw with complete fidelity. He grows into the finest forger in the country, mixing his own iron gall ink from a chemistry textbook and a set of glass beakers, signing dead legends back to life one ball at a time.
What Gavin does not know is that one of his best customers is a fictitious Japanese trading company, and that every transaction is being recorded by federal agents who have been patient for nine months and are running out of patience fast. He does not know about Steuben Razzburger, the obsessive collector whose lifelong faith in a single baseball card is about to collide with the truth. He does not know that the whole beautiful machine is built, like the game itself, to come apart at exactly the moment of greatest tension.
Moving from a Pullman card game in 1952 to a Las Vegas card show to a federal courtroom in San Diego, Stealing First Base is a sweeping, warmhearted, slyly funny saga about fathers and sons, faith and fakery, and the specific American sadness that arrives when love and ambition meet in the wrong kind of room. The characters are invented. The crimes are not.
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California Books
Miami, FL, U.S.A.
AbeBooks seller since October 27, 2023
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