The year 1986 was remarkable. Roger Clemens had a twenty-strikeout game, Don Sutton tallied his three hundredth victory, Steve Carlton got his four thousandth strikeout, and Sparky Anderson became the first manager to have six hundred wins in both leagues. The baseball season is most famously remembered for the World Series featuring the New York Mets’ dramatic win and more heartbreak for the long-cursed Red Sox, with their first baseman Bill Buckner making one of the game’s most famous errors. 
That same year American patriotism reached a zenith. The Statue of Liberty reopened after its massive refurbishment. Hollywood’s summer blockbuster Top Gun inspired pride in America’s military prowess. President Ronald Reagan embodied strength as he helped move the United States and Soviet Union closer to a nuclear treaty at his summit with General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik, Iceland. The president’s leadership also manifested after the Challenger disaster when his televised speech calmed fears and reawakened enthusiasm about America’s space program.
1986: Baseball and America in the Reagan Era captures the sense of perseverance, patriotism, and promise that buoyed the nation during one of its most significant years of the late twentieth century. David Krell offers a compelling combination of baseball, politics, and culture in a novelistic account backed by archival research taking the reader behind the headlines of the events that characterized the time. With a month-by-month chronicle, Krell employs history, nostalgia, and memory to portray a pivotal year in baseball and America.