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BaseballChronology.com: Dave Moore Award Honorees for 2000

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 1999-2006, 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 2000:

DAVE MOORE AWARD WINNERS & FINALISTS
WINNER		Havana Heat by Darryl Brock "Deaf-mute pitcher Luther "Dummy" Taylor won 115 games for the New York Giants between 1900 and 1908. Darryl Brock's novel picks up Taylor's story in 1911, when Taylor is unsure what to do with his life. He sets his sights on a return to the big leagues, working out with his brother in the evenings and wrestling with the decision to leave his wife temporarily to pursue his dream. Only when he's picked by his old Giants manager John McGraw for an exhibition trip to Havana, where the Giants face the renowned Cuban national team, does he discover what he has to offer after his pitching arm gives way to younger talent. In his new novel, Darryl Brock takes readers back to the glory days of baseball and Cuba to witness a great player's second chance." Read more...
FINALIST		More than Merkle: A History of the Best and Most Exciting Baseball Season in Human History by David W. Anderson A look back at the 1908 season.
FINALIST		Full Count: Inside Cuban Baseball by Milton H. Jamail
FINALIST		How All This Started a novel by Pete Fromm
FINALIST		Lefty Grove: American Original by Jim Kaplan
FINALIST		Past Time: Baseball as History by Jules Tygiel "Drawing on his encyclopedic knowledge of the game, Tygiel uses the game as his doorway for entry into--and airing out--several rooms of the American past. Though the nine essays that make up Past Time reflect the game's nine innings and are presented chronologically, they are each entities unto themselves and can be read in any order. Rarely stepping onto the playing field, they avoid the mushiness and rhapsodizing that baseball tends to evoke. Instead, they take provocative looks at the often overlooked--like why statistics hold the game together, and why holding the game together was crucial to an America emerging from the Civil War--and fresh looks at old warhorses like baseball and the Depression era, baseball and civil rights, and baseball and America's post-World War II geographical shift. The final "inning" examines such recent obsessions as rotisserie leagues and fantasy camps, and the chapter on Bobby Thompson's famed home run and how the ways we would experience the game in the early years of the Cold War would change is thoroughly absorbing. But, then, so is the rest of Past Time. It has you wishing for extra 'innings.'" Read more...
ELYSIAN FIELD'S MOST IMPORTANT WORKS OF BASEBALL LITERATURE