Mark Durr - Böcker

"From time to time fragmentary accounts of the origin and progress of baseball, as it existed in our community, have appeared in the papers and magazines, but it has remained to the writer to present for the first time a full and complete history of the game of baseball from its first organization in our midst until the present day"--from the Preface.Harry Ellard's Base Ball in Cincinnati, published in 1907, is an invaluable resource for those interested in the early years of professional baseball and the city that was its hometown. Ellard was uniquely positioned to write the definitive book on this topic: as a Cincinnati journalist, he knew of and consulted the best photographs and documents relating to the Cincinnati Club, and had the cooperation of several Red Stockings players. Readers will find information on stand-out clubs and games, and many of the important men who were instrumental to early baseball in Cincinnati and so to professional baseball in general.

C.H. Claudy might have trouble finding a publisher for his Battle of Base-ball today. His yoking of baseball to warfare--accounts of ways to "cripple the enemy" and descriptions of managers as "battlefield generals"--to teach the young and inexperienced about the game would not likely be applauded in the age of political correctness. But as Claudy says in his preface, "The points of similarity are actual, not imagined," and he spends most of the book, meant to be both instructional and historical, demonstrating his assertion.Originally published in 1912, this work consists of chapters on batting, running, offensive game planning, the pitcher-catcher battery, fielding, defensive strategy, umpiring, drills (titled "Battlefield and Arms"), major league regulations, and A.G. Spalding's organizational rules. Christy Mathewson's "How I Became a Big-League Pitcher" is also included.

Published in 1910, Base-Ball Ballads was Grantland Rice's first book of poems, and the only one that contained baseball verse exclusively. The book includes some of the best-known poems about baseball ever written, including "Casey's Revenge" (a sometimes-anthologized piece that redeems Ernest Thayer's unlucky slugger), "Mudville's Fate," and the original version of "Game Called" (later revised on the occasion of Babe Ruth's death).An immensely popular writer of sports columns and essays, Rice was also well regarded for his humorous and sometimes touching verse. It is as the author of a couplet, in fact, that Rice may be best remembered: "For when the One Great Scorer comes to mark against your name / He writes--not that you won or lost--but how you played the Game." These lines, so strongly associated with baseball--though in fact they come from a poem about football--find their earliest expression in Base-Ball Ballads, where three poems ("Play Ball," "Game Called," and "The Test") provide different wordings of the same idea.

If Cap Anson was baseball's first star, King Kelly was the first player whose celebrity extended beyond the diamond. The dashing mustachioed Kelly was a favorite of newspapermen, who lionized him as "King of the Diamond" and "The $10,000 Beauty"; of fans, who celebrated his daring in song ("Slide, Kelly, Slide") and his grace in poetry ("Beautiful Mike"); and certainly of the baseball establishment, which was willing to pay outrageous sums for his services. Off the field, he pursued an interest in acting, and played parts in a number of theatrical productions. And in 1888, reacting to what he described as the bookishness of his new baseball home in Boston, Kelly even tried his hand at writing.Play Ball: Stories from the Diamond Field was the first-ever memoir by a player. One of the most popular baseball titles of all time, Play Ball is a casual, often humorous stroll through Kelly's ball-playing past, with chapters on the teams he played for, the men he played alongside, his relationships with baseball figures such as Anson and Albert Spalding, his early involvement with John Ward's Brotherhood, his legendary contract with the Beaneaters, and his barnstorming adventures in the South and West.