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 that changed hands in those years, balls signed by Ruth, by Mantle, by Williams, 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, passing down through three more generations 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. But the hand at the center of that machine belongs to Gregory Marino, the quiet prodigy Gavin first handed a pen and a shoebox of signatures at a Long Island kitchen table, telling him to try the Mantle. Gregory grows into the finest forger in the country, mixing his own iron gall ink and signing dead legends back to life one ball at a time.
What they do not know is that one of their best customers is a fictitious Japanese trading company, and that every transaction is being recorded by federal agents who are running out of patience fast.
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.
外文書商品之書封，為出版社提供之樣本。實際出貨商品，以出版社所提供之現有版本為主。部份書籍，因出版社供應狀況特殊，匯率將依實際狀況做調整。
無庫存之商品，在您完成訂單程序之後，將以空運的方式為你下單調貨。為了縮短等待的時間，建議您將外文書與其他商品分開下單，以獲得最快的取貨速度，平均調貨時間為1~2個月。
為了保護您的權益，「三民網路書店」提供會員七日商品鑑賞期(收到商品為起始日)。
若要辦理退貨，請在商品鑑賞期內寄回，且商品必須是全新狀態與完整包裝(商品、附件、發票、隨貨贈品等)否則恕不接受退貨。
