highly recommended for students of true history

books:

	• Crazy '08: How a Cast of Cranks, Rogues, Boneheads, and Magnates Created the Greatest Year in Baseball History Cait N. Murphy Collins, 2008 - 400 pages average customer review:based on 61 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

More Murphy

Wow! This may be the best baseball book I have ever read (and it seems that I have read them all). I can say for sure that it is the best researched baseball book I have read. I know that the next sentence will not sound right, but here it goes anyhow - I can't believe it was written by a woman (see I told you). I hope Ms. Murphy continues in the baseball mode for a few more books.

highly recommended for students of true history

I'm writing a book set largely in 1908, in Colorado, far removed from the ball fields of the east, but for getting the flavor of the everyday America of the time, this book is the best.

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Crazy 08

This was one of the best books I have ever read. It's amazing how things were the same, yet different in baseball. For instance, the American league had not yet instituted the rule that all meaningful games must be played. The National league had. Therefore Detroit, Chicaggo and Philadelphia all had the same amount of wins but Detroit had fewer losses so they won. There wa only one umpire so the players would do all sorts of things that he couldn't see. Try that with todays instant replay cameras.

Crouching catchers, hidden baseballs

Cait Murphy's witty, sometimes snarky, thoroughly researched and footnoted, but always entertaining review of the 1908 baseball season--which she argues was the greatest ever--charms as it informs. The National League contenders, to whom the author devotes the majority of the book (the AL race is confined to a single chapter) were the New York Giants, managed by John McGraw and with Christy Matthewson as their pitching ace; the Pittsburgh Pirates, who featured Honus Wagner at short; and the Chicago Cubs, of Tinker to Evers to Chance fame.

It's like a trip back in time--to wooden grandstands, flannel uniforms with no numbers on the players' backs, let alone names; bats that might weigh 48 oz; catchers who crouched but did not squat; dirty baseballs; and fields without lights (games would be stopped when it got too dark to play). And--if the game were important enough--two umpires, count 'em two, would be assigned to the game. (On the staff was the now-legendary Bill Klem, then in his fourth year--he would remain on the job for 32 more.)

The book's dual centerpieces revolve around a Giant rookie utility man named Fred Merkle. The first "Merkle game" ended in a tie (darkness, darkness) on a technicality when Merkle neglected to touch second base on a play that should have given his team a walkoff win. As a result of the mistake, the poor guy would forever after be known as Bonehead Merkle (the author includes two images of him, one in his rookie season and one from the following decade--the contrast is telling).

The replay of the game occurred after the official end of the season, when the Giants and Cubs tied for first place. The game, played at New York City's long-gone Polo Grounds, featured overflow crowds (they stood behind ropes in the outfield), the tossing of bottles at the Cubs' catcher when he tried to catch a foul popup, and an attempt to bribe umpire Klem.

Throughout, the author gives brief sketches of the major players, owners, baseball execs, and managers; and she sprinkles in "time outs," which give the reader a glimpse of the goings-on in the wider world. The impatient may wish to skip these. I didn't wish.

Baseball fans can and will argue about whether 1908 was in fact baseball's best year (it certainly was for Cubs' fans) but Ms. Murphy has made a convincing case for the year that, as she notes in the epilogue, was the year that turned the corner into what would be the modern game. She calls it, in homage to Churchill, "the end of the beginning."

Notes and asides: In what I very much suspect was a global search and replace gone wrong, plural possessives have somehow been rendered thus: Cubs's. This is annoying more than somewhat. The late-20th-century Philadelphia ballyard was Veteran's Stadium, not Veteran's Park. There is an interview with the author in the back that's worth a read.

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reviews: 1, page 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11

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