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1921
The Yankees, the Giants, & the Battle for Baseball Supremacy
in New York
Lyle Spatz and Steve Steinberg
University of Nebraska Press: 538 pp., $31.95
Satch, Dizzy
& Rapid Robert
The Wild Saga of Interracial Baseball Before Jackie Robinson
Timothy M. Gay
Simon & Schuster: 368 pp., $26
High Heat
The Secret History of the Fastball and the Improbable Search for the Fastest Pitcher of All Time
Tim Wendel
Da Capo Press: 288 pp., $25
The Empire Strikes Out
How Baseball Sold U.S. Foreign Policy and Promoted the American Way Abroad
Robert Elias
New Press: 448 pp., $27.95
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In 1970, a journeyman pitcher published a memoir with an innocuous subtitle: "My Life and Hard Times Throwing the Knuckleball in the Big Leagues." Written by Jim Bouton (with help from sportswriter Leonard Shecter), "Ball Four" took readers to a heretofore verboten place, offering a controversial, inside-the-bullpen glimpse of drinking, womanizing and drug use in the major leagues.
Bouton was just one of a murderer's row of authors who were simultaneously establishing a brand new territory of contemporary baseball lit. Consider: Robert Coover's "The Universal Baseball Association, Inc." (1968), the first "Baseball Encyclopedia" (1969), Robert Peterson's "Only the Ball Was White: A History of Legendary Black Players and All-Black Professional Teams" (1970), Roger Kahn's "The Boys of Summer" (1971), Roger Angell's "The Summer Game" (1972).
Today, 40 years after "Ball Four," the genre is in historical retreat. With the exception of several recent works about the game's steroids scandals and a glut in numerology for stat geeks (a trend started by Michael Lewis' "Moneyball"), spring's annual parade of baseball books has become a backward-looking stroll into the past.
This isn't about nostalgia, but an almost obsessive desire to parse every nuance of the game's history. The most pervasive trend is to chronicle a single season. According to Lyle Spatz and Steve Steinberg, authors of "1921: The Yankees, the Giants, & the Battle for Baseball Supremacy in New York," "Books have been devoted to nearly two dozen seasons between 1901 and 1966 and to virtually every season of the last four decades."
This did not faze them. "1921" recalls the season that ended with the first all-New...