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BaseballChronology.com: CASEY Award Honorees for 2004

By Patrick Mondout

Spitball: The Literary Baseball Magazine has awarded one baseball book each year since 1983 with their CASEY Award. Awards announced early in the year for the previous year's books. Thus, the 2005 award below was presented in April of 2006. We have a list of the finalists and winner below, including links to the book at Amazon.com for your convenience. We also have a list of all winners and finalists from 1983-2006.

CASEY AWARD WINNERS & FINALISTS
WINNER		Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis "Lewis was in the room with the A's top management as they spent the summer of 2002 adding and subtracting players and he provides outstanding play-by-play. In the June player draft, Beane acquired nearly every prospect he coveted (few of whom were coveted by other teams) and at the July trading deadline he engaged in a tense battle of nerves to acquire a lefty reliever. Besides being one of the most insider accounts ever written about baseball, Moneyball is populated with fascinating characters. We meet Jeremy Brown, an overweight college catcher who most teams project to be a 15th round draft pick (Beane takes him in the first). Sidearm pitcher Chad Bradford is plucked from the White Sox triple-A club to be a key set-up man and catcher Scott Hatteberg is rebuilt as a first baseman. But the most interesting character is Beane himself. A speedy athletic can't-miss prospect who somehow missed, Beane reinvents himself as a front-office guru, relying on players completely unlike, say, Billy Beane. Lewis, one of the top nonfiction writers of his era (Liar's Poker, The New New Thing), offers highly accessible explanations of baseball stats and his roadmap of Beane's economic approach makes Moneyball an appealing reading experience for business people and sports fans alike." Read more...
FINALIST		Beyond the Shadow of the Senators by Brad Snyder "In a time when the country was divided into black and white, our soldier boys battled against the evils in Europe, and war-weary Americans gathered around green fields to forget their troubles in the joys of our national pastime, the greatest baseball dynasty you've probably never heard of electrified the game and set an unstoppable revolution in motion. So begins the fascinating and often surprising story of the Homestead Grays, the Negro League's most successful franchise, and how the fight to integrate baseball began not in Brooklyn with Jackie Robinson but in our nation's capital." Read more...
FINALIST		Foul Ball: My Life and Hard Times Trying to Save an Old Ballpark by Jim Bouton "In his first diary since Ball Four, Jim Bouton recounts his amazing adventure trying to save Wahconah Park, in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Host to organized baseball since 1892, Wahconah Park was soon to be abandoned by the owner of the Pittsfield Mets who would move his team to a new stadium in another town - an all too familiar story." Read more...
FINALIST		Glove Affairs: The Romance, History, and Tradition of the Baseball Glove by Noah Liberman "Glove Affairs: The Romance, History, and Tradition of Baseball Glove will help you recall your fist glove as it shares similar memories from the game's greats. Glove Affairs also provides informative and surprising details about the history of the glove, its evolution, and its place in American culture. More than just an ode to the glove, however, Glove Affairs serves as a practical guide to purchasing, breaking in, maintaining, and repairing a glove. Dozens of current and former major leaguers offer their battle-tested advice about getting the most out of a glove. They also share countless stories, from the passionate to the hilarious, about the glove and their relationship to it, including their superstitions and rituals, some of which are downright bizarre." Read more...
FINALIST		Me and My Dad: A Baseball Memoir by Paul O'Neill "In Me and My Dad, O'Neill writes from the heart about the man who inspired in him a love for the game and a determination to always play his best. O'Neill remembers the highlights of his own amazing career: the Cincinnati Reds calling him up to the majors, his first World Series, being traded to the Yankees -- and taking part in their recent championship wins. He also reflects on his father's untimely death during the 1999 World Series and on the farewell tribute his fans gave him during his last game in Yankee Stadium." Read more...
FINALIST		The Perfect Game: America Looks at Baseball by Roger Angell, Elizabeth V. Warren "For the ardent baseball fan, what sets the sport apart--what makes it "the perfect game"--are the treasured memories it evokes of a time gone by. This wonderfully nostalgic visual history celebrates more than 150 years of baseball's--and America's--past. Beginning in the 1840s and continuing through the end of the 20th century, the book and the American Folk Art Museum exhibition that it accompanies capture in portraits, watercolors, carvings, painted sign, lithographs, and a wide variety of everyday objects that are reminders of baseball the way it used to be." Read more...
FINALIST		The Road to Cooperstown: A Father, Two Sons, and the Journey of a Lifetime by Tom Stanton "The Road to Cooperstown is a true story populated with colorful characters: a philanthropic family that launched the museum and uses its wealth to, among other things, ensure that McDonald’s stays out of the turn-of-the-century downtown; the devoted fan who wrote a book to get his hero into the Hall of Fame; the Guyana native who grew up without baseball but comes to the induction ceremony every year; the librarian on a mission to preserve his great-grandfather’s memory; the baseball legends who appear suddenly along Main Street; and the dying man who fulfills one of his last wishes on a warm day in spring." Read more...
FINALIST		Taking on the Yankees: Winning and Losing in the Business of Baseball by Henry D. Fetter "In time for the franchise centennial in 2003, Taking on the Yankees chronicles the team's rise to dominance from the vantage point of the Bronx Bombers' three greatest rivals: the New York Giants, the St. Louis Cardinals, and the Brooklyn Dodgers. Based on extensive research in primary sources, this book focuses on the off-the-field circumstances and decisions—the management strategies, economic forces, social changes, and political and legal pressures—that played a decisive role in shaping the Yankees' achievements on the diamond. Henry D. Fetter sheds new light on some of baseball's most memorable events, commanding personalities, and enduring controversies, from the upstart Yanks' purchase of Babe Ruth and their showdown against John McGraw's swaggering Giants to Branch Rickey's organizational revolution in St. Louis, from the Dodgers' heartbreaking move to Los Angeles to George Steinbrenner's revitalization of the Yankee dynasty. The result is an exceptional history of baseball's past century and a riveting exploration of the often-misunderstood relationship between business and sports. 16 pages of photographs." Read more...
FINALIST		The Teammates: A Portrait of a Friendship by David Halberstam "As baseball legend Ted Williams lay dying in Florida, his old Boston Red Sox teammates Johnny Pesky and Dom DiMaggio piled into a car and drove 1,300 miles to see their friend. Another member of the close-knit group, Bobby Doerr, remained in Oregon to tend to his wife who had suffered a stroke. Besides providing a poignant travelogue of the elderly Pesky and DiMaggio's trip, David Halberstam's The Teammates goes back in time to profile the men as young ballplayers. Although it is enlightening to learn about Doerr, Pesky, and DiMaggio, the leader of the group and star of the book is Williams. Halberstam portrays the notoriously moody and difficult Williams as a complex man: driven by a rough childhood and a fiercely competitive nature to become perhaps the greatest pure hitter of all time while also being a magnetic personality and loving friend. While there is nothing exceptionally unusual about old men who have stayed friends (plenty of people stay friends, after all), baseball gives this particular relationship a unique makeup." Read more...
FINALIST		The Tour to End All Tours: The Story of Major League Baseball’s 1913-1914 World Tour by James E. Elfers "This book follows the two teams, whose members include Christy Mathewson, Jim Thorpe, and half a dozen other future Hall-of-Famers, as they barnstorm across the United States and sail the seas to Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, finishing with a game before twenty thousand fans and King George V. Along the way, baseball’s envoys meet such dignitaries as Pope Pius X, tea magnate Thomas Lipton, and the last khedive of Egypt. They play the tables of Monaco, survive a near-shipwreck, and cram a lifetime’s worth of adventures into six months. Their story, told here for the first time, gives readers a glimpse into baseball history and the innocence and spirit of a long-gone era." Read more...
BEST BASEBALL BOOKS OF EACH YEAR ACCORDING TO SPITBALL MAGAZINE

Note: Reviews from Amazon.com or the book's publisher (which have quotes around them above). appear courtesy of the publisher or Amazon.com.