The Reading Season

For those of you who can hardly wait for the 2018 baseball season to start, we’d like to call attention to something we hope will make the waiting period less agonizing.

It’s a new feature we’re adding to our blog. We’re calling it “The Reading Season” and essentially turning ourselves into book-reviewers. With scores of new baseball books on the market, this is the perfect time to grab one of them and start reading. There’s a catch, however. The books we’ll be reviewing are out of left field and not ones ordinarily found in a bookstore. Many, if not most, are books you’ve never heard of because they are old, no longer in print and have long-been forgotten.

So why are we bothering? Because they are special. Reading them is like opening a time capsule, a trip back in time, back to when our fathers, grandfathers and great grandfathers played baseball. The writing is out of date and often hard to digest. As for political correctness, well, you can forget about that. But that’s what makes these books so fascinating to read.

The seeds for our new feature were planted a couple of years ago when we wandered into a Goodwill Thrift store in Phoenix. (We were in the city for the Men’s Senior Baseball World Series.) There was the usual junk: used dishes, used clothes, used furniture as well as odds and ends of other stuff donated by stores which no one wanted to buy.

As we were snooping around killing time before the baseball tournament began, we came across a dust-covered book called “Fred Fenton The Pitcher.” It was written in 1913, a year before World War I, by someone named Allen Chapman. The book was a ratty old thing and in terrible shape. It’s cover was torn, the pages were yellowed and the binding was coming apart. I had to have it.

“That’ll be 75 cents,” said the clerk. I didn’t quibble. “Fred Fenton The Pitcher” will be one of the books we review, even though it may be the worst baseball book ever written. But that’s the charm of it. “Fred Fenton” is so old-fashioned, so turgid and so poorly composed that you just want to close your eyes, clutch the book to your chest and wish that Allen Chapman had never been born.

Actually, he wasn’t. Chapman was just a name made up for use by a writer’s syndicate.

Nevertheless, we hope you’ll relax and join us as we introduce you to baseball books that have all but disappeared and been forgotten.

The first will be one written in 1909 by Zane Grey called “The Shortstop.”