Customer Reviews

Barbary Baseball: The Pacific Coast League of the 1920s

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The author has researched his subject well, capturing the era of the 1920s as few other writers have. Accurate and brutally honest. My only criticism is that I wish the author would have cut loose with his considerable writing talent. The style is fairly close to the vest but highly readable. Having read hundreds of baseball books, this stands as a classic.

I'm not obsessive about baseball history, even though there's a lot of baseball in my family. My mother's uncle Fred McMullin was one of the Black Sox, and my dad and his brother both played in the minors in the '50s. But for me it's not enough to have the history down right: I also need a book that's well-written and makes me want to keep reading.

OK ... I admit it: I may actually be more involved than a casual fan of either history or baseball. Look in my closet: Two Ebbetts Field Flannels throwback jerseys: One from the SF Seals, the other from the Sacramento Solons.

That probably explains why a friend gave me a copy of this book as a gift, that and because he knew the author also lived in Sacramento and he wanted to support a local author. I loved the book, and found it clearly a labor of love by the author, a talented writer, researcher and story-teller. (In a strange twist of fate, I actually ended up working with the author for a while after I'd read his book.)

If you love classic California, the sun-kissed paradise everyone dreamed of before everyone moved here and no one could afford to live here you need to buy this book. And if you never have heard of the Solons, the Seals or the other teams ... then you REALLY need to buy this book. You're in for a real treat, a look at California in a simpler time, when our boys of summer all had major-league dreams.