Connie Mack (1862-1956) was the Grand Old Man of baseball and one of the game's first true celebrities. This book, spanning the first fifty-two years of Mack's life, through 1914, covers his experiences as player, manager, and club owner and will stand as the definitive biography of baseball's most legendary and beloved figure.

Norman L. Macht chronicles Mack's little-known beginnings. He tells how Mack, a school dropout at fourteen, created strategies for winning baseball and principles for managing men long before there were notions of defining such subjects. And he...

On September 26, 1981, millions of viewers watched on NBC television as Nolan Ryan pitched his fifth no-hitter. Late in the game, commentator Tony Kubek asked Joe Garagiola, "Did you ever see anybody throw faster than Nolan Ryan?" Without hesitating, Joe replied, "Sure. Rex Barney." This is the story of Rex Barney, the man who threw faster than Feller and Ryan; and whose pitching career sped by quicker than his fastball because he could not control it. Barney became a legend as part of the most exciting era of the Brooklyn Dodgers--1943 to 1951. In his own inimitable style, Rex tells the...

Hall of Fame member Wilbert Robinson began his career as a catcher. As a Baltimore Oriole in the 1890s the hard-nosed but congenial receiver joined John McGraw, Wee Willie Keeler, and other greats on the roughest team of the game s toughest era. He went on to make a reputation with McGraw s New York Giants as a great developerof pitchers. Subsequently he took over the Brooklyn Dodgers, quickly turning them into pennant winners and gradually becoming the borough s beloved Uncle Robbie."

The Philadelphia Athletics dominated the first fourteen years of the American League, winning six pennants through 1914 under the leadership of their founder and manager, Connie Mack. But beginning in 1915, where volume 2 in Norman L. Macht's biography picks up the story, Mack's teams fell from pennant winners to last place and, in an unprecedented reversal of fortunes, stayed there for seven years. World War I robbed baseball of young players, and Mack's rebuilding efforts using green youngsters of limited ability made his teams the objects of public ridicule.
At the age of fifty-nine...

Connie Mack (1862 1956) was the Grand Old Man of baseball and one of the game s first true celebrities. This book, spanning the first fifty-two years of Mack s life, through 1914, covers his experiences as player, manager, and club owner and will stand as the definitive biography of baseball s most legendary and beloved figure. Norman L. Macht chronicles Mack s little-known beginnings. He tells how Mack, a school dropout at fourteen, created strategies for winning baseball and principles for managing men long before there were notions of defining such subjects. And he details how Mack, a key...

In The Grand Old Man of Baseball, Norman L. Macht chronicles Connie Mack's tumultuous final two decades in baseball. After Mack had built one of baseball's greatest teams, the 1929-31 Philadelphia Athletics, the Depression that followed the stock market crash fundamentally reshaped Mack's legacy as his team struggled on the field and at the gate. Among the challenges Mack faced: a sharp drop in attendance that forced him to sell his star players; the rise of the farm system, which he was slow to adopt; the opposition of other owners to night games, which he favored; the postwar...