The National Pastime 1995/a Review of Baseball History (015) - Softcover

The National Pastime offers baseball history available nowhere else. Each fall this publication from the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) explores baseball history with fresh and often surprising views of past players, teams, and events. Drawn from the research efforts of more than 6,700 SABR members, The National Pastime establishes an accurate, lively, and entertaining historical record of baseball. A Note from the Editor, Mark Alvarez: Our covers this month emphasize the gently bucolic element of our sport. In these ugly and frustrating times, I thought we could all use an afternoon lolling about on the soft spring grass listening to the crack of the bat, the pop of the mitt, and the chatter from the infield. (Maybe we could even step in and take a few cuts ourselves, amazing everyone with line shots into the alleys before modestly returning to the sidelines.) I'm not very big on nostalgia. It is, after all, a kind of lie, excluding as it does all but the good memories (or worse, turning ugly times and circumstances golden). But there's nothing wrong with good history that also makes us smile. During this awful period for baseball, such history can bring us to a place where the Brattleboro Islanders take on the Twin State League in their picturesque ballpark, or where 14-year-old Dutch Doyle sells "cold drinks"—never lemonade—in the stands at Baker Bowl, or where Billy Loes overmatches the opposition in his first minor league season, or where Roy Face throws his forkball and simply can't lose, or where the big guns are guys named Goslin, Manush, Mayer, Foxx, and Vosmik, not Reinsdorf, Selig, or Fehr. I suspect we all feel a little better just picturing Richie Ashburn and Wally Berger and Swish Nicholson and Mort Cooper. This year, thanks to Geoff LaCasse, we can even glimpse the marvelously talented Hal Chase—before The Fall. In this issue, there are also important articles by Norman Macht, who sets the record straight on the financial relationship between Ty Cobb and Mickey Cochrane (virtually none); by Tom Nawrocki, who discusses Cap Anson's early experiments with platooning; by Jerry Malloy, who gives us a history of baseball in the black 25th Infantry Regiment, and by others who cover SABR's typically huge range of interests and eras. This is by far the largest issue of The National Pastime that we've ever produced, and it is the result of a vastly increased number of good manuscripts flowing into the publications office.