Slightly Better than Replacement Level
Baseball as fiction is always, in my opinion, hard for an author to pull off. The main reason for this is that the author doesn’t let baseball tell the story. Instead, they feel the need to insert some sort of extraneous element that isn’t really necessary to the story. Shadow Ball: A Novel of Baseball […]
It’s not often that one gets to read something that is a verifiable piece of history. Such is the case with Sol White’s Official Base Ball Guide. I had this one on my list of baseball books I wanted to get to for some time. Luckily, Summer Game Books republished the book in recent years, […]
On the whole, I really enjoyed Jules Tygiel’s effort. The concept is one that is right up my alley, and for the most part, it had me hooked from the get-go. There are times when it faltered and when Tygiel succumbed to classical tropes instead of actual investigations of history. Those moments were decidedly in […]
The Negro Leagues Are Major Leagues is an interesting concept. The title came on the heels of Major League Baseball’s decision to declare the Negro Leagues were major leagues. I’m not going to use this review to litigate that announcement, I’ve done that plenty on this site already. Regardless, a collection of essays discussing the […]
2007 wasn’t that long ago, only 17 years if my math is mathing correctly. Yet, Black Baseball Out of Season feels so much older than that. Most of that comes down to the writing style employed by the author, William F. McNeil. In that sense, I have no complaints and anyone who is a student […]