The Baseball 100

Joe Posnanski, The Baseball 100. NY: Avid Reader, 2021.

Near the end of the book, I took an informal poll of coworkers: Babe Ruth, Willie Mays, Henry Aaron, and Satchel Paige got votes as the best ever; they rank 2, 1, 4, and 10 in Joe's estimation, suggesting that, Family Feud style, he's got a good list. But what is this really about?

The Baseball 100 isn't a history, in the usual sense, though it is Posnanski's story of the sport. It's a list, obviously, purportedly ranking players from all eras against one another (though that's admittedly subjective, almost intended to start arguments). What's it about?  The players -- each essay is a short biography and discussion of the career, a little bit of amazing. Yet each is so much more: the book is a discussion of greatness: what is it, what does it require? It's about relationships, fathers and sons, players and fans, social roles. It's about memory and myth, too, because too many of the best players were excluded from competition, so we have no way to really know how Negro Leaguers compared except what comes down as legend, and the very real loss this unjustified exclusion caused for us all.

And it is, before I've even finished, one of my favorite books.

The Great Encyclopedia of 19th Century Major League Baseball

David Nemec, The Great Encyclopedia of 19th Century Major League Baseball. NY: Donald I Fine, 1997.

Encyclopedia (from the Greek for ‘general education’): a work that treats comprehensively all the various branches of knowledge and that is usually composed of individual articles arranged alphabetically (emphasis added); also, such a work treating only a particular branch of knowledge -- Webster’s Third New International Dictionary

This is an amazing book, but it is not a encyclopedia. While it presents a comprehensive view of Major League baseball -- that is, the National Association, National League, American Association, Union Association, and Players’ League -- from its founding to 1900, after which the American League gave the game its current shape, it is not arranged as a ready reference resource. It is, instead, arranged chronologically -- and instead of breaking its subject down to the atomic level and leaving us to reassemble the story from our choice of pieces, it presents a clear prose narrative.

Nemec, in a precise but personal voice, summarizes each season. These formative years are often discussed, but solid information -- even a basic as complete, team-by-team and season-by-season rosters -- was scattered among various sources or even uncollected before Nemec brought together rosters; team hitting, pitching, and fielding records; standings; and league leader boards compiled over a lifetime of research. It may be the best single volume for quick understanding of pro ball’s early development. But we can’t turn to “A” and find Cap Anson, so let’s call it The Great Book of 19th Century Major League Baseball.

Peter Morris, Base Ball Founders and Base Ball Pioneers

Peter Morris, et al, Base Ball Founders. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013.
                   _____, Base Ball Pioneers, 1850 - 1870. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012.

Base Ball Founders is the second volume of a project exploring the early development and spread of baseball in the late nineteenth century, when it went form a New England variant of a traditional children’s game to the National Pastime in only fifty years.

The “et al” above is a top-notch team of baseball historians, led by Morris, an inaugural winner of the Henry Chadwick award for lifetime achievement. He and William Ryczek, Jan Finkel, Leonard Levin, and Richard Malatzky, with occasional others, take turns penning chapters about important teams of the time. In Founders, they focus on the Boston to Philadelphia corridor where the New York derivative of rounders developed into what we now call baseball. New York City, Brooklyn, New Jersey, Philadelphia, and Massachusetts are each represented by six to ten teams. Each team record gives a club history, and some have player biographies or accounts of significant games. Each also includes a list of resources consulted.

Base Ball Pioneers, the companion volume, explores the game’s dispersal. Following the same format, Pioneers covers teams in ten outlying areas, from Maine and Connecticut, to San Francisco. Each volume is nicely indexed, and this set is a valuable reference. It works especially well when paired with David Block’s Baseball Before We Knew It and John Thorn’s Base Ball in the Garden of Eden, by providing a human face for the history told in those titles.

Jackie Robinson & Alfred Duckett, I Never Had It Made

Jackie Robinson & Alfred Duckett, I Never Had It Made. NY: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1972.

Robinson is good enough to credit his long-time ghost-writer conspicuously; otherwise, we might wonder why a twentieth-century Black activist sounds like an Edwardian gentleman.

Most people will pick up an autobiography from a Hall of Fame baseball star expecting to read about baseball. People picking up Robinson’s book are already familiar with his role as the first Black man in organized ball since the 1800s, and would also expect to read about is struggle to integrate the game. And we do get that, for 134 of 287 pages. It isn’t how Robinson defines himself, and he doesn’t dwell on what is already well documented.

No, Robinson is writing to point out that he was a civil rights leader even after, outside of, baseball. We get a bit about family--nothing in the book is more personal or more moving than a frank assessment of his relationship with Jackie Jr. We get business and politics, fields into which his fame allowed entry, where he did seem to work diligently to change the culture and create opportunity for the disenfranchised. We also see inside disagreements with Malcolm X and fundraising for Martin Luther King. Overall, the book is a reminder that life goes on after the game is over, and that what comes next can--and should--be even more important.

Ilyasah Shabazz and Kekla Magonn, X. Somerville, MA: Candlewick Press, 2015.

This title is marketed as a young adult novel, but it is really as close to an authorized biography of civil rights activist Malcolm X as could be written.

The author takes her father’s chosen name, Shabazz. Her book tells of him as Malcolm Little, himself the son of a murdered civil rights activist. She tells the story Malcolm glossed over in his Autobiography--the story of Detroit Red. And though she was only three when her father was killed, Ms. Shabazz has a large, close, and proud family full of stories and correspondence to draw from. With Magoon’s help, she brings a brash fifteen-year-old runaway in the 1940’s into focus. She doesn’t ignore her character’s imperfections or the allure of the big-city life-style that brings him low, but uses a concluding author note to explain that Malcolm’s troubles were what allowed him to be such an effective leader--he knew the temptations, the indignities, and the injustice his brothers faced; they knew he could relate to their lives, and they to his. Even without this note, though, Shabazz closes the story with an image of Malcolm taking on his new name, X, and with it his new calling. It’s an uplifting tale of redemption, never mind how important the redeemed would become, and a good fit for any middle- or high-school library.

Old Men in Love

Alasdair Gray, Old Men in Love: John Tunnock's Posthumous Papers. Easthampton: Small Beer Press, 2010.

Old Men in Love is, according to the (fictional?) reviewer invited to provide an epilogue, Gray’s last book.  If so, it is a fitting bookend for his career, which began with Lanark, a sprawling, disjointed mess of a novel hailed as a Scottish Ulysses and the beginning of a Renaissance in Scots literature.  Like Lanark, Old Men weaves several distinct storylines around a common theme (care to guess the theme?), and presents the material, which the narrator claims is that of another writer, in a non-linear, even incoherent, order.  Old Men in Love is supposedly the collected writings of a Glasgow schoolmaster, containing the existing chapters from a planned fiction trilogy, to be called ‘Money at Play’, and chapters from his diary.

Tunnock is a bachelor who, late in life, discovered a taste for young women that is his downfall.  Diary entries describe his youth in Glasgow, his current situation, and his plans for ‘Money at Play’.  It is his fiction, however, that comprises the bulk of the text.  We get stories of a breakaway Scottish Utopianminister, an Italian painter, and a retelling of Socrates’ trial, each done in by a socially-unacceptable desire; each was to be a volume in the trilogy, but none is near complete.  The trial, which is climactic to Old Men in Love, proceeds as a dialogue and differs greatly from Plato’s account.  It is also the last thing Tunnock writes; he is re-energized by the project and making plans to finish it when he dies.

Old Men in Love is not the important book that Lanark was, but it is another fine piece of creative history and quite a bit of fun.  It is easier to digest than Lanark, as well, being half the size and broken into easily-understood segments loosely bound by Tunnock’s story.  It would be a good introduction to the author for those who are interested in literature outside the mainstream.

Hit by Pitch

Molly Lawless, Hit by Pitch.  Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012.

This graphic novelization tracks the weirdly parallel lives of Ray Chapman and Carl Mays from their childhoods in Kentucky, thought the fatal collision of Mays' pitch with Chapman's head, and--for Mays, at least, beyond.  The well-researched story is told though vignettes about the main characters, from varying perspectives, and illustrated with figures reminiscent of Eward Gory.  While the story is a bit dark, telling as it does of the only on-field death during a Major League baseball game, it isn't gruesome or violent, and is an important piece of baseball history, presented in a way that is appropriate and enjoyable for anyone eight or older.

Thomas Healy, The Great Dissent

Thomas Healy, The Great Dissent.  NY: Metropolitan, 2013.

Legislative history--the process of determining what a law was intended to mean--is generally very dull stuff: reading memos, committee reports, and testimony transcripts is only fun for the first few hours.  Healy, though, teaches law (at Seton Hall University), so he both knows how to do that sort of research, and how to make the work engaging.

Which is fortunate, because his subject is one of our most important laws: the first amendment to the United States Constitution, which guarantees our rights of expression, religion, and peaceable assembly.  While this law has been on the books since 1791, it was only in 1919 that we began to understand it as actually limiting the government's ability to prosecute people for what they say.  That we can now disagree openly about government policy or protest against its actions is directly due to a change in the way Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr, interpreted the words.

This book, unfortunately, comes too late.  By recounting one judge's evolution, occurring during the high communist paranoia after World War I, Healy shows the importance of this debate--and the importance of standing against governmental tyranny, something sorely lacking in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, when fear of terrorism and the resulting Patriot Act chilled discourse; something we still struggle with as the NSA vacuums us every scrap of electronic data; something we traded for a false feeling of security.  Holmes' courage--to change his mind, to stand against the majority, and to support freedom over fear--should stand as an inspiration for us all, and Healy presents it as a readable political thriller.  This should be required reading in high school civics classes.

Larry Lester, Rube Foster in His Time. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012.


Not a standard biography, but a documentary history like Dean Sullivan’s Early-Middle-Late-Final Innings series, this portrait of the Negro National League’s founder is not an easy read. While material is presented in an orderly fashion and nicely tied together with clear narrative text, much of it still consists of stilted prose from over a hundred years ago—items transcribed as found in obscure newspapers, court documents, and the other historical source material from which biography is derived.

This approach, while not as easy to read as a pre-digested retelling of a life, has the advantage of showing Andrew Foster as he was seen by his contemporaries—as a truly great pitcher, who threw seven no-hitters (a number equaled by only Nolan Ryan at the Major League level), and an organizational genius who, during a period of intense racial inequality, built and controlled a nation-wide entertainment enterprise through sheer will and perseverance. Lester, editor of the scholarly Negro-Leagues journal Black Ball and CEO of NoirTech Research, has done both us and Foster a service by compiling this material and making possible a fuller understanding of this giant figure in baseball’s development.

Tom Reiss, The Black Count.

Tom Reiss, The Black Count. NY: Crown, 2012.


This detailed biography of Alex Dumas, father to the author of (and inspiration for the title character in) The Count of Monte Cristo, is the first such effort based on documentary evidence. It recounts the tale of a black man from the Caribbean who rose through the Revolutionary French Army to command three armies before running afoul of Napoleon, in the process relating a now-forgotten ugly aspect of The Little Emperor’s reign: reversing the first anti-slavery laws, which had allowed Dumas to show is skills.

With index, notes, and a detailed bibliography, The Black Count is a thorough and scholarly work, yet Reiss has a very readable, almost conversational tone. The book should be enjoyable for all ages—the story is nearly as exciting as a Dumas-pere novel, and should be a good addition to any public library collection.