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BaseballChronology.com: Dave Moore Award Honorees for 1999

By Patrick Mondout

Elysian Fields Quarterly annually bestows one baseball book each year with their Dave Moore Award. A panel of up to six judges decide which book was the "most important work of literature on baseball" during the preceding year. We have a list of all winners from 1999-2005, including links to the book at Amazon.com for your convenience. Awards announced early in the year for the previous year's books. Thus, the 2005 award below was announced in March of 2006. Here are the results for 1999:

DAVE MOORE AWARD WINNERS & FINALISTS
WINNER		The Pride of Havana: A History of Cuban Baseball by Roberto Gonzáles-Echevarria "The "national" in "national pastime" is a relative term in Yale literature professor and former semi-pro catcher Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria's meticulous examination of baseball in the land of his birth. A respected scholar, Echevarria is also a fan, and he manages to weave both objectivity and appreciation throughout a carefully researched and multi-layered narrative that draws from numerous first-person reminiscences. If Echevarria's prose is dry at times, it manages to cover plenty of interesting territory as he threads the game through the fabric of Cuban history, culture, and lore." Read more...
FINALIST		Baseball's Pivotal Era, 1945-1951 by Bill Marshall "With personal interviews of players and owners and with over two decades of research in newspapers and archives, Bill Marshall tells of the players, the pennant races, and the officials who shaped one of the most memorable eras in sports and American history." Read more...
FINALIST		A Clever Base-Ballist: The Life and Times of John Montgomery Ward by Bryan DiSalvatore "No matter how far back you go, the state of the game has always been remarkably similar to what it is today: greedy owners, economic imbalances among franchises, unequal markets, grumbling players. Using the multilayered life of 19th-century Hall-of-Famer and lawyer John Montgomery Ward as his way into the story, Bryan Di Salvatore roots around in the contemporary sources of the game's early years. For the record, Ward's career on the diamond spanned from 1878 to 1894, split between shortstop and the mound. As a pitcher, he sported an impressive 164-102 mark, won a staggering 47 games in 1879, and even hurled a perfecto; at short, he fielded his position well and hit with authority if not power. "Ward was the sort of player that other players appreciate as a teammate and curse as an opponent," Di Salvatore explains. "He beat you invisibly as often as he beat you visibly." He later managed, and like DiMaggio, he wooed and wed one of the leading actresses of the day." Read more...
FINALIST		Where They Ain't: The Fabled Life and Untimely Death of the Original Baltimore Orioles, the Team That Gave Birth to Modern Baseball by Burt Solomon "A fine reporter and writer, Solomon does a remarkable job of bringing the past into the present, exploring how little has changed in terms of baseball business and organizational stupidity through the years. With its marvelous cast of real--and fully realized--characters, Where They Ain't reads as much like a novel as it does like history, and though we know how it ends, it remains an important story worth telling, learning from, and certainly remembering." Read more...
FINALIST		The Independent Carolina Baseball League, 1936-1938: Baseball Outlaws by R.G. "Hank" Utley and Scott Verner "Shortly after the independent Carolina League was formed in 1936, officials of the National Association of Professional Baseball—which oversaw what was known as “organized baseball,” including the major leagues—began a campaign to destroy the league. The NAPB declared the Carolina League “outlaw” and blacklisted its players because their teams were pirating professionally-contracted ballplayers with the lure of higher wages, small-town hero worship and a career off-season." Read more...
FINALIST		Where Garagiola Waits and Other Baseball Stories by Rick Wilber
ELYSIAN FIELD'S MOST IMPORTANT WORKS OF BASEBALL LITERATURE