Knocking on Heaven’s Door

"Marty Dobrow is a patient listener and sure-eyed observer as he sketches these portraits of a half-dozen people beguiled by baseball. The result is as lively, intimate, and engrossing a book as Hoop Dreams was a movie."—Alexander Wolff, senior writer, Sports Illustrated and author of Big Game, Small World: A Basketball Adventure



"The best account of the life of minor league baseball players I have read. The reader feels the despair of each player's struggles and the joys of their eventual successes, however brief they may be."—Jerome Mileur, former owner of the Harrisburg Senators and author of High-Flying Birds: The 1942 St. Louis Cardinals

"This book is definitely worth a read."—The Recorder

"Knocking on Heaven's Door is an insightful journey through the minors, providing access most of us will never have to future big leaguers."—Baseball America

"Dobrow does an excellent job telling the stories of each of the young players, and establishes their personalities, quirks and all, so we have an idea of what makes each man tick. . . . Marty Dowbrow's Knocking on Heaven's Door: Six Minor Leaguers in Search of the Baseball Dream is a book that all baseball fans will want to read, certainly in the summer, as the minor leaguers are working toward their dream, but perhaps even more so in the winter, during that long hibernation bwtween baseball seasons."—NINE: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture

"Dobrow's first book is a beautifully written, meticulously orchestrated account of the families, common agents, notable triumphs, and devastating failures of half a dozen talented young men who want to play in the Major Leagues. A veteran sports writer, Dobrow reveals an insider's instinct, a high level of compassion, and finds the drama in the dream of "making it big.""—Publishers Weekly