BaseballChronology.com: CASEY Award Honorees for 2006

For more than three decades, artist David Levinthal has examined American popular culture and social mores as reflected through toys and miniatures. For Levinthal, the playful surface and shiny sheen of children’s objects shroud other meanings, which he cleverly uncovers in large format photographs that are equally stunning for both their beauty and irony. In series, like Wild West, American Beauties or Modern Romance, Levinthal pierces the mythology of quintessentially American subjects while also playing to our collective nostalgia. His is a vision that not only underscores our country’s uniqueness but also its desire for iconic representations and recognizable heroes. Read more...

Babe Ruth was more than baseball’s original superstar. For eighty-five years, he has remained the sport’s reigning titan. He has been named Athlete of the Century . . . more than once. But who was this large, loud, enigmatic man? Why is so little known about his childhood, his private life, and his inner thoughts? In The Big Bam, Leigh Montville, whose recent New York Times bestselling biography of Ted Williams garnered glowing reviews and offered an exceptionally intimate look at Williams’s life, brings his trademark touch to this groundbreaking, revelatory portrait of the Babe. Read more...

Unlike many biographers, Maraniss scrutinizes his subject's history and dispels myths through critical analysis. For example, he relates the commonly accepted story that Branch Rickey—General Manager of the Pirates when Pittsburgh claimed Clemente from the Dodgers in the Rule 5 Draft—immediately recognized Clemente's potential and told him that he would be a star. Maraniss presents Rickey's own notes on Clemente, which clearly declared Rickey's reservations about Clemente's base running ability and his excessive cautiousness in the outfield. Although impressed with Clemente’s potential as a batter, those notes indicate that Rickey thought that Clemente was years away from being able to help a Major League club. In a beautiful piece of investigative history, Maraniss points out that Rickey missed the fact that Clemente's tenuousness may have been the result of a recent car accident in which he hurt his neck and back. Read more...

The story of Bobby Thomson’s home run off Ralph Branca to end the 1951 season and send the New York Giants to the World Series is perhaps the most famous in baseball history. Even casual baseball fans know that Thomson’s home run reached mythical status as “the shot heard round the world,” thereby equating it with world changing political events described with those same words. Therefore, you would think that there remains little to say about this most famous of home runs. Joshua Prager’s The Echoing Green (due out September 19, 2006) proves otherwise. In a beautifully documented and intensely engaging narrative, Prager retells a story that everyone supposedly knows and makes it interesting and surprising. Read more...

Every spring, millions of Americans prepare to take part in one of the oddest, most obsessive and engrossing rituals in the sports pantheon: rotisserie baseball, a fantasy game where armchair fans match wits by building their own teams. Starting with a player “draft” before the Major League season, contenders spend six months scouring the box scores to see if their handpicked players can outperform the opposition. It’s a pastime that threatens to overtake traditional baseball in the passions it generates.

In 2004, Sam Walker, a sports columnist for The Wall Street Journal, decided to explore this phenomenon by talking his way into Tout Wars, a private league generally reserved for the nation’s top experts. Using his baseball contacts and access to locker rooms, Walker spent a year trying to dredge up information that might give him a competitive edge over his eccentric cast of competitors. But in his quest for victory he also endeavored to settle the great question that divides modern baseball thinkers: Can excellence be predicted by statistics alone or is the human element more important? Read more...

Money Pitcher is not just another baseball book. It is a book about social justice and Native Americans’ tragic pursuit of the white American Dream at the expense of their own identity. Having arrived in the major leagues only thirteen years after the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890, Bender experienced the disastrous effects of governmental assimilation policies designed to quash indigenous Indian culture. Yet his remarkable athleticism and dignified behavior disproved popular notions of Native American inferiority and opened the door to the majors for more than 120 Indians who played baseball during the first half of the twentieth century. Read more...

With talented young Japanese players signing to the American Majors, interest in Japanese baseball is at an all-time high. Sayonara Home Run! introduces curious fans to Japan's national pastime through the lens of the country's playfully beautiful baseball cards. A fascinating text traces the roots and cross-cultural history of the Japanese game, while hundreds of illustrations showcase gorgeous vintage cards. Woven throughout are profiles of key Japanese players, features on important U.S. team tours of Japan (with Japanese cards of players such as Babe Ruth and Joe DiMaggio), and insights into the social history of the cards. Including primers on Japanese player nicknames and baseball terms, and the fine points of the Japanese game, Sayonara Home Run! is a must-have for anyone interested in baseball, Japan, or this unique chapter in popular design. Read more...

In October 1888, Albert Goodwill Spalding--baseball star, sporting-goods magnate, promotional genius, serial fabulist--departed Chicago on a trip that would take him and two baseball teams on a journey clear around the globe. Their mission had two goals: to fix the game in the American consciousness as the purest expression of the national spirit, and to seed markets for Spalding's products near and far. In the process, these first cultural ambassadors played before kings and queens, visited the Coliseum and the Eiffel Tower, and took pot shots with their baseballs at the great Sphinx in Egypt. Read more...

Few people have the special expertise required to write the life of Curt Flood because much of Flood’s historical import comes from his lawsuit’s prominence and his complex personality. Flood’s biographer needs legal expertise to understand and represent his court case properly and he should have the critical honesty to portray Flood as a highly courageous yet deeply flawed person. Brad Snyder’s biography of Flood, A Well Paid Slave does this with dexterity and honesty. Read more...