Lately I’ve been noticing that baseball books are pretty much divided into a few categories. Many of the latest releases deal with the “new” game by which I mean using metrics such as launch angle or spin rates to determine who the best players are and how to assemble teams. Kind of like Moneyball rebooted. And you remember all the yakking that went on when that one came out.
Me, I gravitate towards the traditional historical volumes. Of course, these days history includes books like Erik Sherman’s latest, Two Sides of Glory: The 1986 Boston Red Sox in Their Own Words. Seems the older I get, the more recent history has become.
There are no small number of books covering events and players from 100 years ago. One of the more engaging for a variety of reasons is Luke Epplin’s new book Our Team: The Epic Story of Four Men and the World Series That Changed Baseball.
Excerpting from the review I did for Bookreporter.com a few weeks back:
Ably researched and entertainingly presented by Luke Epplin, OUR TEAM is a painstaking look at the difficulties in the lives of all these men — [Bob] Feller’s “lost years,” [Bill] Veeck’s leg amputation following his own military service, and [Satchel] Paige and [Larry] Doby trying to make inroads in a sport that did not want “their kind.” But as they worked together for a common goal, many of these differences were set aside.
Books like this are usually written by guys like me, that is older. So it’s interesting to see how a younger author like Epplin goes about telling the story, with none of the personal experience of having seen these men play or how the sport itself — not to mention the rest of the country — treated African-American athletes.
is available on Amazon.com,
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