Polman: Books for baseball’s Indian Summer
From SABR member Jeff Polman at The Huffington Post on September 8, 2015, with mention of SABR members Mike Lynch, Bill Nowlin, and Bob Brady:
Baseball books tend to come out in March or April, along with returning Eastern meadowlarks, daffodils, and the sweet smell of spring training. Quite often, though, I don’t get a chance to read new ones until late summer or early autumn — when the specter of four baseball-deprived months appears on the chilly horizon.
This year, three published works on the Grande Olde Game cooperated by releasing themselves on the later side, and all three are worth exploring.
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Lynch has also written a chapter on Tom Hughes’ 1916 no-hitter in a marvelous collection of stories called Braves Field: Memorable Moments at Boston’s Lost Diamond. A SABR e-book compiled by Bill Nowlin and Bob Brady, it spotlights a long-lost ballpark that has never been given a worthy literary treatment — until now.
Braves Field consists of 80 chapters, written by 43 SABR members, and they cover everything that ever happened on the park on the shores of the River Charles, from its origin in 1915 to its Braves’ abandonment for Milwaukee in 1952. In between, we learn of “Hank Gowdy Day” in 1919, the first radio broadcast from Braves Field in 1925, a monster day for Wally Berger in 1930, Babe Ruth returning as a Brave in his final year of 1935, the 1948 National League pennant, African-American Sam Jethroe’s first Braves Field game in 1950, the 1951 “Greatest Rhubarb” in the history of the park, and many other moments.
Read the full article here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-polman/books-for-baseballs-india_b_8099774.html
Originally published: September 9, 2015. Last Updated: September 9, 2015.