New Book heads-up: The First Fall Classic

[Kawika]

I finished the book the other night. Whenever there's a thread about what game or era in baseball history one would like to time-travel back to, my answer is the 1912 World Series. There's something about the convergence of the Giants and the Red Sox, Joe Wood and Tris Speaker, Christy Mathewson and John McGraw, that gets my baseball heart fluttering. The cover alone was enough to sell me at the bookstore. The First Fall Classic wasn't quite as terrific as I wanted it to be but aside from a few complaints I would recommend it to anyone who wants an interesting read about this historic match-up.

As indicated in my previous post I was having some misgivings about the book once I started reading. The pretense of recreated dialogue worked well once I got used to it, and, fortunately, the author did not make too much of a habit of employing anachronistic jargon. I think he did a very good job of reconstructing the Series itself, not belaboring the reader with a pitch-by-pitch account but focusing on the critical points of each game and coloring in the periphery with dugout banter and matters like getting the games in before daylight expired and the antics of the Royal Rooters. He was also successful in evoking the mania that swept both cities, huge crowds gathering in public squares in Boston and New York watching mechanical scoreboards fed by telegraph updates. Where I think the author went wrong was trying to bring a concurrent murder trial and the 1912 Presidential election into his narrative in an attempt to create some sort of grand context as if the 1912 World Series wasn't big enough by itself. That part weakened the book, just got in the way. All things considered there's a lot I didn't know about the Series that I know now, Devore's bare-handed catch, O'Brien's hangover, the alleged Game 7 laydown, for instance, and I feel better acquainted with the likes of Harry Hooper and Red Murray and Nuf Ced McGreevey and Muggsy McGraw.