Baseball Books for Baseball Fans

09/03/2026

Herb Score struck out 245 men as a rookie in 1955, more than any first year pitcher in the history of the game had ever managed. He had just turned 22. ⚾

He was born in Rosedale, on the Queens edge of Long Island, and was hit by a bakery truck at three, which left him in bed for long stretches of childhood. He was sick constantly as a kid. His family later moved to Lake Worth, Florida, and he came out the other side of all that throwing as hard as anyone alive. Cleveland signed him for sixty thousand dollars, and by his second season he had won 20 games and struck out 263, and the Red Sox offered a million dollars in cash to buy him. Cleveland said no.

On May 7, 1957, Gil McDougald of the Yankees hit a line drive back through the middle in the first inning. It struck Score in the right eye. He went down on the mound bleeding from the nose and the eye, and McDougald reached him before anyone else and said afterward that he would walk away from the game entirely if Score lost his sight. Score kept the eye. He missed the rest of that season, and he was never the same pitcher again. 🧢

The convenient story is that the line drive ended him. Score spent decades saying that was not it. He insisted he came back throwing well in 1958 and then hurt his elbow that spring trying to push through a cold wet night in Washington, and that the arm, not the eye, was what actually finished him. He won seventeen more games in the rest of his career and was done at 28.

Then he sat in a Cleveland broadcast booth for thirty four seasons. A whole generation in Ohio knew his voice long before they ever learned what his arm had been.

09/03/2026

The most valuable baseball card ever printed is rare because the man pictured on it asked for it to be pulled. ⚾

Honus Wagner came out of Chartiers, Pennsylvania, the borough later folded into Carnegie, one of nine children of a German immigrant who worked the coal mines. He went into the mines himself around twelve years old. He was bow legged and barrel chested with hands people kept comparing to shovels, and he did not look remotely like an athlete until the ball was actually in play. Then he was the best shortstop anyone had ever seen, and it was not close.

He won eight National League batting titles, finished at .328 across twenty one seasons, and collected 3,420 hits in an era of dead baseballs and gloves that were barely more than padding. In 1936 he was part of the very first class elected to the Hall of Fame, and he tied Babe Ruth in the voting. John McGraw, a man who spent his life finding reasons to complain about other teams, called Wagner the best he ever saw and never revised it.

Around 1909 the American To***co Company put his likeness into cigarette packs, and Wagner told them to stop. Historians still argue about why. One version says he did not want children buying to***co to get his picture. Another points out that he endorsed plenty of products when he was paid properly, and that the fight was about money. Either way the card came out of production early, somewhere between fifty and sixty are known to exist, and one of them has sold for more than seven million dollars. 🧢

Wagner spent his later years coaching in Pittsburgh, hitting fungoes and telling stories in the dugout that got a little longer every season.

09/03/2026

This Day in the Old Ball Game: September 3

A cup won with the bases full, a victory the league took back, a record ended on purpose, and an out recorded by a piece of leather.

Rube Foster Wins the Cup (1906) On Labor Day at Columbia Park, the Philadelphia Giants and Cuban X-Giants played for the title of a one-season league that put white, Cuban, and Black clubs on the same schedule. Foster loaded the bases twice, escaped twice, and Philadelphia took the Freihofer Cup, 3 to 2, before the largest crowd black baseball had ever drawn. The Cuban X-Giants never played another season.

The Yankees Beat the Clock and Lose Anyway (1939) Massachusetts law barred any inning starting after 6:15 on a Sunday, and any play at all after 6:30. New York scored twice in the top of the eighth at Fenway to lead 7 to 5, then had to make outs fast enough for those runs to survive. George Selkirk and Joe Gordon each jogged home from third into a tag. Boston fans answered with straw hats and bottles until the field was unplayable, and umpire Cal Hubbard forfeited to New York. Five days later, league president Will Harridge threw the forfeit out, called it a 5 to 5 tie, and fined three Yankees $100 each.

Billy Williams Calls It (1970) He had not missed a game since September 1963. In 1970 he led the majors in hits, runs, and total bases and finished second in the MVP voting, and he was worn down enough to ask Leo Durocher at Wrigley for the afternoon off. The streak stopped at 1,117, a National League record until Steve Garvey passed it in 1983. Most great streaks end with an injury or a manager's decision. This one ended because the man inside it decided he had had enough.

The Glove Throw (1986) Terry Mulholland was a rookie left-hander when Keith Hernandez opened the third with a chopper to the mound. He backhanded it, and the ball wedged into the webbing so tightly he could not pry it out. So he trotted toward first and threw the whole glove to Bob Brenly, who caught the thing and got the out. Hernandez has said he would have forgotten a routine out. Nobody has let him forget this one.

Ed. 09.03.26

08/31/2026

Jerry Coleman is the only man in history who played major league baseball and flew combat missions in two different wars. ⚾

He was a San Francisco kid who enlisted in the Marine Corps out of high school in 1942 and received his aviator wings in April 1944. He flew 57 combat missions in the SBD Dauntless, a dive bomber, in the Solomons and over the Philippines. He was 19 and 20 years old for most of it.

He came home, worked his way up through the Yankees system, and took over at second base in 1949. New York won the World Series in each of his first five seasons. He made the All-Star team in 1950 and was given the Babe Ruth Award that October as the outstanding player of the World Series. He was 26 and had the exact job he had wanted his whole life. 🎖️

Then Korea. He was recalled to active duty in 1952 and flew 63 more missions in the Corsair, close air support and interdiction strikes, much of it low and slow over ground fire. That is 120 combat missions across two wars, along with two Distinguished Flying Crosses and thirteen Air Medals, and roughly two full baseball seasons taken out of the middle of his prime. He returned at 29 and was never quite the same player. He spent the next forty years in the San Diego broadcast booth talking almost entirely about baseball, and people who worked beside him for decades said he brought the war up about as often as never.

08/31/2026

https://www.jewishlives.org/books/hank-greenberg

By Mark Kurlansky Published March 29, 2011 192 pages “A graceful appreciation” —USA Today One of the reasons baseball fans so love the sport is that it involves certain physical acts of beauty. And one of the most beautiful sights in the history of baseball was Hank Greenberg's swing. His calm

08/31/2026

With Diamond Chronicles – I just got recognized as one of their top fans! 🎉

08/31/2026

https://inspiringquotes.com/16-babe-ruth-quotes-on-what-it-takes-to-be-great/?lctg=1db473d4-b645-4783-b382-e83f1ff906f2

Many consider the "Sultan of Swat" to be the greatest baseball player ever — and undoubtedly one of the greatest athletes in American history.

08/31/2026

The 1927 Yankees are usually called the greatest team ever assembled. One man in that rotation won 18 games while his heart was failing, and hardly anyone in the ballpark knew it. ⚾

Urban Shocker was born Urbain Shockcor in Cleveland in 1890, came up as a catcher, broke a finger, and moved to the mound because of it. The Yankees traded him to the St. Louis Browns in 1918 after a falling out, which turned into one of the worst deals the franchise ever made. He won 20 or more games four years running for a bad Browns club, including 27 in 1921, more than any other pitcher has ever won in a season for that franchise. He was also one of the seventeen pitchers allowed to keep throwing a legal spitball after the pitch was outlawed in 1920.

New York brought him back in 1925, and by then something was wrong. A valve in his heart was failing. He could not lie flat without his chest filling up, so he spent nights sitting upright in his Pullman berth on train trips, and he told the sportswriter Bill Corum that his heart had been bad for some time. He kept it from nearly everyone else. 🫀

In 1927, on a roster with Ruth and Gehrig and Lazzeri, he went 18 and 6 with a 2.84 earned run average that ranked third in the American League. By that September he was too sick to hold his place in the rotation. He made his last appearance on May 30, 1928, two innings in relief; the Yankees released him that July. He tried to work himself back into shape, caught pneumonia, and died on September 9 of that year at 37 years old. He finished with 187 career wins, and he is a footnote on the most photographed roster in baseball history.

08/31/2026

This Day in the Old Ball Game: August 30

Nine innings in half an hour, a fastball on a stopwatch, a skipper out of time, and a voice that waited fifty one years.

The Fastest Game Anybody Ever Played (1916) Last day of the Class D season in Asheville, and the visiting Winston-Salem Twins had a train to catch. So both clubs agreed to start early and play fast. Pitchers lobbed it in, batters swung at the first pitch, runners ran until tagged, fielders sprinted on and off. Nine innings took 31 minutes. Nobody told the umpire, who turned up in the fourth. Fans arriving on time found it already over. The game was nearly lost to history until a SABR researcher dug it out decades later. It still stands as the quickest professional game on record.

The Fastest Pitch Anybody Had Measured (1939) A crude velocity box made the rounds of ballparks that summer, and in Cleveland it got pointed at Yankees rookie Atley Donald. The favorite was Bob Feller. Donald threw 139 feet per second, or 94.7 miles per hour, and beat Feller's number. He was in the middle of a rookie year he opened by winning his first 12 decisions. Feller took the mark back a few years later, which surprised nobody except possibly Feller.

Casey Runs Out of Clock (1965) Stengel had been in professional baseball since 1910. He broke his hip in a fall in late July, and after surgery he gave his players the truth: he had figured on strutting out of the hospital in four weeks, then knew he could not make it. The last of the 3,753 games he managed was already behind him. Ten pennants with the Yankees, four seasons of glorious wreckage with the Mets, Cooperstown the following year.

The Voice Comes Back Around (1972) In 1921, Westinghouse engineer Harold Arlin sat in a box seat at Forbes Field with a converted telephone and became the first man to call a big league game on the radio. He left broadcasting in 1925. Fifty one years later Bob Prince handed him the Pirates microphone again, because the starter for San Diego that day was his grandson Steve, who spent his winters practicing dentistry. Some circles take a while to close.

Ed. 08.30.26