Long before strip malls, television and huge retail chains homogenized American culture, minor league baseball clubs represented individual, local ideals. Fans turned out in droves to see their hometown heroes, and teams were sources of civic pride and popular recreation. Gradually, these teams and leagues were either driven under or swallowed up by baseball's vertical integration, and by 1963 a significant piece of the American landscape had all but disappeared. This heavily researched reference work covers every official minor league All-Star team from 1922 (when the first such team was...

This semi-memoir recounts the author's love affair with Topps' 1961 baseball card set and his quest to acquire a complete autographed collection--an effort that took almost 40 years and still is one card short, #555 Sam "Toothpick" Jones. The author describes growing up in the early 1960s and details the backstory behind his mission, from the first autograph he got--Joe DiMaggio's, in an officer's club in Mannheim, Germany--to how he decided, 15 years later, to get signatures on each of the '61s.