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BaseballChronology.com: Dave Moore Award Honorees for 2003

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 2003:

DAVE MOORE AWARD WINNERS & FINALISTS
WINNER		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		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		Stealing Lives: The Globalization of Baseball and the Tragic Story of Alexis Quiroz by Arturo J. Marcano Guevara and Daniel P. Fidler "Stealing Lives takes a long, hard look at the exploitation and abuse of boys and young men by Major League Baseball teams searching Latin America for cheap baseball talent--placing that hunt in the context of the globalization of baseball. In telling the tragic story of young Alexis Quiroz, a Venezuelan teenager who dreamed of playing for the Chicago Cubs, the authors also reveal Major League Baseball's pattern of violation of human rights and labor standards in its practices in Latin America." Read more...
FINALIST		The Last Good Season by Michael Shapiro "The 1956 Brooklyn Dodgers were one of baseball’s most storied teams, featuring such immortals as Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider, Gil Hodges, and Roy Campanella. The love between team and borough was equally storied, an iron bond of loyalty forged through years of adversity and sometimes legendary ineptitude. Coming off their first World Series triumph ever in 1955, against the hated Yankees, the Dodgers would defend their crown against the Milwaukee Braves and the Cincinnati Reds in a six-month neck-and-neck contest until the last day of the playoffs, one of the most thrilling pennant races in history." 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		Ballpark Blues, a novel by C. W. Tooke "Russ Bryant, a lonely and downtrodden reporter trapped in a job he hates, stumbles onto the story of a lifetime when he is befriended by Casey Fox, a promising rookie catcher on the local minor league team. Possessed of mythic talents but mortal insecurities, Casey isn’t even sure he wants to play in the major leagues (and unless he improves his attitude toward the team’s management, he may never get the option). Still, when circumstances in Boston lead to an offer from the Red Sox, the lure proves irresistible, and Casey moves on the fast track from the anonymity of the minor leagues to stardom at Fenway Park." Read more...
ELYSIAN FIELD'S MOST IMPORTANT WORKS OF BASEBALL LITERATURE

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