The National Pastime has made big news and big money since its Silver Age (1900-1920), but what old-timer would have dreamed of TV networks bidding tens of millions for camera time, of baseballers getting paid like movie stars, or of all concerned--players, managers, owners, even umpires--having their lives exposed in intimate detail by keyhole journalists? So far the great American game has survived media hype, as this book shows, with the same vitality that brought it through the doldrums of World Wars I and II and the Great Depression and that withstood the shocks of racial integration...

Organized baseball from the establishment of the National Commission in 1903 to the period of national expansion in the 1950s and 1960s--buffeted by the winds of two world wars and a Great Depression--is chronicled here in colorful detail.

The glories of the Silver Age--Ty Cobb's record-setting, Ed Walsh's pitching innovations, Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance fielding orchestration--might have been eclipsed by World War I and the 1919 "Black Sox" scandal. Instead, the Roaring Twenties boomed for baseball as well as the stock market. Baseball stars like Babe Ruth rivaled movie stars like...

How did "America's National Game" evolve from a gentlemen's pastime in the 1850s to a national obsession in the Roaring Twenties? What really happened at Cooperstown in 1839, and why does the "Doubleday legend" persist? How did the commissioner system develop, and what was the impact of the "Black Sox" scandal? These questions and many others are answered in this book, with colorful details about early big league stars such as Mike "King" Kelly and pious Billy Sunday, Charles Comiskey and Ty Cobb, Napoleon Lajoie and "Cy" (Cyclone) Young.

The author explores historically the four...