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During the 19th century, baseball was a game with few rules, many rowdy players and just one umpire. Dirty tricks were simply part of a winning strategy-spiking, body-blocking, cutting bases short or hiding an extra ball to be used when needed were all OK. Deliberately failing to catch a fly in order to have the game called due to darkness was also acceptable. And drinking before a game was perhaps expected. Providing brief bios of dozens of players, managers, umpires and owners, this book chron...

The Seventh Inning Stretch, by noted baseball expert Josh Pahigian addresses all of the most interesting baseball arguments, however frivolous, that fans have been engaging in for decades, and even a few they may have never stopped to consider before.

The National Pastime offers baseball history available nowhere else. Each fall this publication from the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) explores baseball history with fresh and often surprising views of past players, teams, and events. Drawn from the research efforts of more than 6,700 SABR members, The National Pastime establishes an accurate, lively, and entertaining historical record of baseball. A Note from the Editor, Jim Charlton: Growing up as a baseball fan, I was well awa...

Christy Mathewson (1880-1925) was the greatest baseball pitcher of his day, a hero with appeal reaching beyond sports. A college-educated player from Pennsylvania farm country, he restored respectability to a game tarnished by the rowdies who had dominated baseball in the 1890s. Pitching in a Pinch, originally published in 1912, is an insider's account blending anecdote, biography, instruction, and social history. It celebrates baseball as it was played in the first decade of the twentieth centu...

The "bonus rule" of 1953-1957 required players who signed a baseball contract for more than $4,000 to remain on the major league roster for two full seasons. These were the bonus babies young men of about 18 or 19 years old, so full of promise and talent that they overshadowed their high school or collegiate teammates and had professional teams scrambling to sign them. This system produced three members of the Baseball Hall of Fame (Al Kaline, Harmon Killebrew, and Sandy Koufax) and several othe...

Alexander Cartwight wrote out the first set of rules for the game of baseball as we know it in July of 1846 at Hoboken, New Jersey. Shoeless Joe Jackson was the star member of the 1919 Chicago White Sox baseball team -- the finest player of the era with a lifetime batting average of .356 -- and a member of the dubious group of players who threw the World Series that year in exchange for payment (which was never received). After Jackson and the Black Sox scandal, baseball had lost its innocence a...

The extraordinary life of Jackie Robinson is illuminated as never before in this full-scale biography by Arnold Rampersad, who was chosen by Jack's widow, Rachel, to tell her husband's story, and was given unprecedented access to his private papers. We are brought closer than we have ever been to the great ballplayer, a man of courage and quality who became a pivotal figure in the areas of race and civil rights. Born in the rural South, the son of a sharecropper, Robinson was reared in southern...