First published in 1945 as part of the acclaimed Putnam series of team histories, Frank Graham s colorful chronicle presents the Brooklyn Dodgers in all their glory and all their daffiness from the team s beginnings as the Atlantics in 1883 through 1943, with a short summary of the 1944 season.In his foreword, Hall of Fame sports writer Jack Lang writes that in an era that produced for New York sports fans such outstanding sportswriters as Grantland Rice, Sid Mercer, Bill Slocum, Bob Considine, and Tommy Holmes, one of the very best was Frank Graham, whose columns appeared in the "New York...

In January of 1903, American League president Ban Johnson, his pince-nez riding precariously on the bridge of his nose, raised a glass to toast his young baseball league, which had just received permission to purchase the Baltimore organization and establish a team in New York City. That marked the genesis of the fabulous Yankee franchise (known in 1903 as the Highlanders) as well as the opening chapter of Frank Graham s "The New York Yankees: An Informal History. "One of fifteen team histories commissioned by G. P. Putnam s Sons in the 1940s and 1950s, "The New York Yankees "traces the most...

The final chapter of Frank Graham s dynamic history of the New York Giants is entitled With One Swipe of His Bat. For sheer drama and a colossal slice of baseball legend, the core of that chapter cannot be toppedBobby Thomson s shot heard round the world, the three-run homer in the 1951 playoff series that determined that the Giantsnot the Dodgerswould win the pennant.Graham, of course, starts at the beginning, 1883, the year the Giants were born. With characteristic panache, Graham tells us how it was: This was New York in the elegant eighties and these were the Giants, fashioned in...