Baseball is often seen as a game of mental trials, one coming immediately after the next for nine innings. Pitching, especially, is seen in this light. Each hitter becomes a new puzzle to solve, the answers evolving as every moment of history records itself. When a pitcher’s on the mound he has to weigh all his options, balancing what’s working for him tonight against a hitter’s strengths and weaknesses. And with every new pitch, the question’s frame shifts. Consider this:

Now, at 0-2, [Aaron] Heilman faced a small dilemma. Should he come back at [Vladimir] Guerrero with his third straight slider? Or should he change it up and hope to catch Guerrero off guard? If it had been me on that mound, with the same arsenal of pitches, I would have come back with a fastball, head-high, just to change the look of the at-bat and keep the batter guessing. Maybe Guerrero would swing at it, maybe he wouldn’t; but either way, it would set up the next pitch.

That’s an excerpt from Ron Darling’s new memoir, The Complete Game: Reflections on Baseball, Pitching, and Life on the Mound (Alfred A. Knopf, 288 pages, $24.95), which focuses on the mental and emotional aspects of mound work. Fans of those mid-80’s Mets teams looking for more rowdy stories should look elsewhere; Darling’s book instead aims to provide a glimpse of what it’s like being a professional pitcher on the hill.

At the center of the book is a delightful concept: each chapter is devoted to an inning, from one through nine with a tenth dedicated to extra-innings. To demonstrate his points, Darling takes the reader batter-by-batter through a noteworthy (at least from his point-of-view) inning from his career. The innings aren’t all from his pitching days, however; he includes two innings from his broadcasting career, from 2008. And they’re not all concerning professional baseball, either. The tenth chapter, on extra innings, shadows him as a member of Yale’s staff in the 12th inning of his legendary duel with St. John’s Frank Viola, during which Darling threw 11 innings of no-hit baseball.

For the most part, the concept works quite well. It allows Darling to cover most of what almost any pitcher has to go through over the course of his career: his first inning in the bigs, an inning where he struggled but righted the ship, an inning where he struggled and never rebounded. Darling finds plenty of different dilemmas pitchers have to work through, and he does an admirable job of conveying what’s going on through their heads. The chapters aren’t totally devoted to the inning in question; in fact, most of them are spent building context, getting you into the mindset of Darling via recollections from earlier that game or analogs from earlier in Darling’s career.

The book’s not totally devoid of fun, either. There are some little gems hidden in the book, things that left me with a smile on my face. Like how Ron Hodges spit a wad of tobacco on his uniform during his first game in the majors, leaving a big stain, or how Dwight Evans, not Jim Rice, was the one batter in Boston’s lineup he didn’t want to face with the bases loaded. But they’re a side dish, not the entrée here.

To his credit, Darling is even interesting in the chapters where other pitchers are on the mound while he is broadcasting, albeit it in a completely different way–by necessity he focuses more on pure strategy in these instances and less on his emotional status. In fact, because of this, he might even be more interesting to certain readers during these chapters.

All of this is not to say that readers will hang on every word Darling writes. He is prone to spitting out baseball clichés from time-to-time, especially during the more sentimental moments of the book–the kind of stuff casual fans might eat up but die-hards will cringe over. Once or twice, he even sounds downright crotchety as he rails against pitch counts and pitchers in this day not being as tough or proud as they were in his. But those moments are thankfully the exception and not the rule.

Regarding style, Darling’s prose is mostly clear, concise, and well constructed. There are some sentences toward the beginning of the book that are a tad stiff and repetitive, but they’re never awkward, and he works through them as he goes along. On the whole, Darling comes off as very articulate, just as he does in the Mets’ broadcast booth alongside Gary Cohen and Keith Hernandez. Considering how some former athletes have written some atrocious autobiographies, even with ghost writers in their corners–ever read Nails?–The Complete Game is a refreshing read. Darling did have help from a pro–Daniel Paisner who isn’t listed on the cover but is on the title page–and the two appear to have worked well together. The writing sounds very much like Darling in the booth but cleaned up and dressed in its Sunday best.

The book will be enjoyable for anyone looking to understand life on the mound a little better. Again, I wouldn’t recommend it for anyone searching for more dirt on the ’86 Mets, but that stuff can be found elsewhere with very little effort. Darling wisely understands this and strips it down to just one thing: Ron Darling talking about pitching.