BaseballChronology.com: CASEY Award Honorees for 2007

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...

He was not much of a player and not much more of a manager, but by the time Branch Rickey (1881–1965) finished with baseball, he had revolutionized the sport—not just once but three times. In this definitive biography of Rickey—the man sportswriters dubbed “The Brain,” “The Mahatma,” and, on occasion, “El Cheapo”—Lee Lowenfish tells the full and colorful story of a life that forever changed the face of America’s game. As the mastermind behind the Saint Louis Cardinals from 1917 to 1942, Rickey created the farm system, which allowed small-market clubs to compete with the rich and powerful. Under his direction in the 1940s, the Brooklyn Dodgers became truly the first “America’s team.” By signing Jackie Robinson and other black players, he single-handedly thrust baseball into the forefront of the civil rights movement. Lowenfish evokes the peculiarly American complex of God, family, and baseball that informed Rickey’s actions and his accomplishments. His book offers an intriguing, richly detailed portrait of a man whose life is itself a crucial chapter in the history of American business, sport, and society. Read more... (or read our review!)

Norman L. Macht chronicles Mack’s little-known beginnings. He tells how Mack, a school dropout at fourteen, created strategies for winning baseball and principles for managing men long before there were notions of defining such subjects. And he details how Mack, a key figure in the launching of the American League in 1901, won six of the league’s first fourteen pennants while serving as manager, treasurer, general manager, traveling secretary, and public relations and scouting director (all at the same time) for the Philadelphia Athletics. This book brings to life the unruly origins of baseball as a sport and a business. It also provides the first complete and accurate picture of a character who was larger than life and yet little known: the tricky, rule-bending catcher; the peppery field leader and fan favorite; the hot-tempered young manager. Illustrated with family photographs never before published, it affords unique insight into a colorful personality who helped shape baseball as we know it today. 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...

Recovering a nearly lost and decidedly quirky chapter of baseball history, Level Playing Fields tells the engaging story of Tom and Jack Murphy, brothers who made up baseball’s first great family of groundskeepers and who played a pivotal role in shaping America’s national pastime. Irish immigrants who tirelessly crafted home-field advantages for some of baseball’s earliest dynasties, the brothers Murphy were instrumental in developing pitching mounds, permanent spring training sites, and new irrigation techniques, and their careers were touched by such major innovations as tarpaulins and fireproof concrete-and-steel stadiums. Level Playing Fields is a real-life saga involving craftsmanship, resourcefulness, intrigue, and bitter rivalries (including attempted murder!) between such legendary figures as John McGraw, Connie Mack, Honus Wagner, and Ty Cobb. The Murphys’ story recreates a forgotten way of life and gives us a sense of why an entire generation of American men found so much meaning in the game of baseball. Read more...

In Opening Day, Jonathan Eig tells the true story behind the national pastime's most sacred myth. Along the way he offers new insights into events of sixty years ago and punctures some familiar legends. Was it true that the St. Louis Cardinals plotted to boycott their first home game against the Brooklyn Dodgers? Was Pee Wee Reese really Robinson's closest ally on the team? Was Dixie Walker his greatest foe? How did Robinson handle the extraordinary stress of being the only black man in baseball and still manage to perform so well on the field? Opening Day is also the story of a team of underdogs that came together against tremendous odds to capture the pennant. Facing the powerful New York Yankees, Robinson and the Dodgers battled to the seventh game in one of the most thrilling World Series competitions of all time. Read more...

In Senior Year, Dan Shaughnessy focuses his acclaimed sports writing talents on his sons senior year of high school, a turning point in any young life and certainly in the relationship between father and son. Using that experience, Shaughnessy circles back to his own boyhood and calls upon the many sports greats has known over the years. Ted Williams, Roger Clemens, Larry Bird to capture that uniquely American rite of passage that is sports. Sam Shaughnessy was born a natural hitter and quickly ascended the ranks of youth sports. Now nicknamed the 3-2 Kid for his astonishing ability to hover between success and failure in everything he does, Sam is finally a senior, and its all on the line: what college to attend; how to keep his grades up and his head down until graduation; and whether or not his final high school baseball season, will end in disappointment or triumph. Read more...

Ty and The Babe is the story of their remarkable relationship. It is a tale of grand gestures and petty jealousies, superstition and egotism, spectacular feats and dirty tricks, mind games and athleticism, confrontations, conflagrations, good humor, growth, redemption, and, ultimately, friendship. Spanning several decades, Ty and The Babe conjures the rollicking cities of New York, Boston, and Detroit and the raucous world of baseball from 1915 to 1928, as it moved from the Deadball days of Cobb to the Lively Ball era of Ruth. It also visits the spring and summer of 1941, starting with the Masters Tournament at Augusta National, where Cobb formally challenged Ruth, and continuing with the golf showdown that saw both men employ secret weapons. Read more...

As one of New York's legendary news photographers, Barney Stein covered everything from popes to presidents, from gangsters to glamour girls. But no job brought him more joy and fame than as the official team photographer for the legendary Brooklyn Dodgers. For two decades, his camera captured the Dodgers in all their glory, both on and off the field. Now, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Dodgers' last season in Brooklyn, Barney Stein's photos live again. Read more...