There's talk of a statue on the West Side Grounds

36. Cait N. Murphy "Crazy '08: How a Cast of Cranks, Rogues, Boneheads, and Magnates Created the Greatest Year in Baseball History"
Murphy is the assistant managing editor at Fortune magazine. She has a background working in other financial publications. She's a smart woman and writes like a good NPR corespondent. The problem is that she writes like a good NPR correspondent. The prose gets a little too heavy. There are four pages about a female serial killer from Indiana pre-1908. While this data is supposed to help the reader paint a picture of what it was like to live in Chicago in 1908, it doesn't. Instead, we get four pages of well-written but heavy handed information that takes the reader out of the diamond and into the history lesson.

1908 was a crazy season. The Chicago Cubs won the World Series. They played a game that didn't really count but changed the history of the game. Most games were called by only one umpire, allowing teams to run easily. Jerseys didn't include numbers so managers could hit out of order with small chances of being reprimanded. Games were played with one ball. Pitchers had arms that would go for hundreds of innings with n regard for a pitch count or future (think C.C. Sabathia's Brewer's 2008). Games lasted for about 90 minutes. In the era of dead ball, homers were rare. From Tinkers to Evers to Chance became a poem and a reason to induct the three to the Hall of Fame. In other words, Murphy had ample source material. She made the most of it.

Though her writing could get a little too academic for a baseball book, Murphy does an excellent job of putting you in games that happened 100 years ago.

My girlfriend has been giving me guff about reading too many baseball books. I think she wouldn't mind if they were all like this.