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Highly acclaimed author Louis P. Masur has nothing to worry about. His new book, AUTUMN GLORY: Baseball's First World Series, hammers Bob Ryan's tome about the 100th anniversary of the 1903 championship between the Boston Americans and the Pittsburgh Pirates out of the proverbial ballpark.
While Ryan is one of the most renowned sports columnists in the country working for the Boston Globe, his book doesn't even come close to unearthing the full story of professional baseball in America during its infancy at the turn of the 20th-century. Ryan's work largely centers on the relationship between Globe baseball writer Tim Murnane and Boston player-manager and Hall of Famer Jimmy Collins. But there was much, much more to the story of this inaugural World Series than just a friendship between a pro ballplayer and a sportswriter.
Masur's scholarly work, complete with numerous photos, box scores and statistics, tells the story of the breathtaking series, but also examines the off-field doings among legendary baseball men at the time like Charles Comiskey, Ban Johnson, and Henry Killilea.
Even before the first World Series pitch was thrown by immortal hurler Cy Young at the Huntington Avenue Grounds, professional baseball was coming apart at the seams. That is until a Peace Conference in January involving several highly controversial owners at the time realized that the ongoing "war" between the fledgling American League and National League had to come to an end if America's pastime was to continue.
Masur also does a great job of illustrating how controversial Cincinnati Reds owner John T. Brush did all he could to squash the peace negotiations that the owners reached until he realized that doing so would bankrupt his ball club. Brush was so distraught over his defeat that he refused to gather with the rest of the National League owners to sing "In the Good Old Summer Time."
AUTUMN GLORY is an absolute treasure trove of how passionate fans were about their baseball teams in Boston and Pittsburgh during the early days of the game. Masur dedicates eight different chapters to provide in-depth information about each game of the thrilling series that Boston, believe it or not, won five games to three (originally the World Series had a best-of-nine format, as opposed to the best-of-seven format that is used today).
Masur, who is a professor of history at City College of New York, editor of the prestigious REVIEWS OF AMERICAN HISTORY and author of two other previous works, does a fine job at bringing to life numerous ballplayers who were stars of the game 100 years ago. Through tireless research of several newspapers, magazines and diaries by Masur, the importance of players like Boston pitcher Bill Dinneen, who was clearly more dominant than Young during the series, and Pittsburgh Hall of Famer Honus Wagner, is evident throughout the book.
Another fascinating aspect of AUTUMN GLORY is the impact of gambling in the game of baseball by players as well as fans. Masur again does stellar work in narrating the rampant gambling that infected the sport up until 1919 and the great Black Sox scandal.
Certainly both Ryan's book and AUTUMN GLORY overlap in some areas, but Masur crafts his story of this utterly important event in a much finer fashion.
--- Reviewed by David Exum
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