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BaseballChronology.com: Dave Moore Award Honorees for 2004

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 2004:

DAVE MOORE AWARD WINNERS & FINALISTS
WINNER		September Swoon: Richie Allen, the '64 Phillies, and Racial Integration by William C. Kashatus "Based on personal interviews, player biographies, and newspaper accounts, September Swoon brings to life a season and a team that got so many Philadelphians, both black and white, to care deeply and passionately about the game at a turbulent period in the city’s—and our nation’s—history. The hometown fans reveled in their triumphs and cried in their defeat, because they saw in them a reflection of themselves. The ’64 Phillies not only won over the loyalties of a racially divided city, but gave Philadelphians a reason to dream—of a pennant, of a contender, and of a City of Brotherly Love." Read more...
FINALIST		The Last Best League by Jim Collins "Every summer, in ten small towns across Cape Cod, the finest college baseball players in the country gather in hopes of making it to"The Show." The hopes are justifiably high: The Cape Cod Baseball League is the best amateur league in the world, producing one out of every six major league players, from Nomar Garciaparra and Frank Thomas to Jeff Bagwell and Barry Zito. Jim Collins chronicles a season in the life of one team-the Chatham A's, perhaps the most celebrated team in the league. Set against the backdrop of a resort town on the bend of the outer Cape, the story charts the changing fortunes of a handful ?of players battling slumps and self-doubt in their effort to make the league playoffs and, more importantly, impress the major league scouts. We learn about everything from the physics of wooden bats and the physiology of elbows to the psychology of slumps and the lure of drugs. In the course of a single dramatic season, with euphoric wins and devastating losses, we come to know the intricacies of the major league scouting network and the rapidly changing profile of major league baseball." Read more...
FINALIST		The 10th Man: The Fan in Baseball History by Donald Dewey "Acclaimed writer and baseball historian Donald Dewey has written the long-awaited account of the most important and colorful population within America’s pastime, the fans: Season-ticket holders and impulse ticket buyers, gamblers and groupies, the radio audience of Red Barber and Vin Scully, obsessive collectors, even some of the executives and players themselves, all have invested their dollars and passions in a sport that has sometimes repaid them in spades, and at other times broken their hearts." Read more...
FINALIST		Negro League Baseball: The Rise and Ruin of a Black Institution by Neil Lanctot "Negro League Baseball: The Rise and Ruin of a Black Institution presents the extraordinary history of a great African American achievement, from its lowest ebb during the Depression, through its golden age and World War II, until its gradual disappearance during the early years of the civil rights era. Faced with only a limited amount of official league documents and correspondence, Lanctot consulted virtually every sports page of every black newspaper located in a league city. He then conducted interviews with former players and scrutinized existing financial, court, and federal records. Through his efforts, Lanctot has painstakingly reconstructed the institutional history of black professional baseball, locating the players, teams, owners, and fans in the wider context of the league's administration. In addition, Lanctot provides valuable insight into the changing attitudes of African Americans toward the need for separate institutions." Read more...
FINALIST		The Numbers Game: Baseball’s Lifelong Fascination with Statistics by Alan Schwarz "In this unprecedented new book, Alan Schwarz - whom bestselling Moneyball author Michael Lewis calls "one of today's best baseball journalists" - provides the first-ever history of baseball statistics, showing how baseball and its numbers have been inseparable ever since the pastime's birth in 1845. He tells the history of this obsession through the lives of the people who felt it most: Henry Chadwick, the 19th-century writer who invented the first box score and harped endlessly about which statistics mattered and which did not; Allan Roth, Branch Rickey's right-hand numbers man with the late-1940s Brooklyn Dodgers; Earnshaw Cook, a scientist and Manhattan Project veteran who retired to pursue inventing the perfect baseball statistic; John Dewan, a former Strat-O-Matic maven who built STATS Inc. into a multimillion-dollar powerhouse for statistics over the Internet; and dozens more." Read more...
FINALIST		The Ticket Out: Darryl Strawberry and the Boys of Crenshaw by Michael Sokolove "The year was 1979 and the fifteen teenagers on the Crenshaw High Cougars were the most talented team in the history of high school baseball. Most of the team were drafted into professional baseball. Two of them, Darryl Strawberry and Chris Brown, would reunite as teammates on a National League All-Star roster. But Michael Sokolove's The Ticket Out is more a story of promise denied than of dreams fulfilled." Read more...
ELYSIAN FIELD'S MOST IMPORTANT WORKS OF BASEBALL LITERATURE