Customer Reviews

The Baseball Timeline: The Day-By-Day History of Baseball, from Valley Forge to the Present Day

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is the best historical baseball book for the value that I have ever read. It does a great job of going through the key happenings from one day to the next, both on-the-field and off-the-field. The evolution of baseball is seen clearly, especially in the 1900's when rule changes were continuously happening. You can see the effects the changes had on the overall statistics. The amount of work that went into putting this book together must have been unbelievable.

The book can be approached in many ways. You can: a) look for a particular day in history to see what happened, b) read through a year of particular interest, c) look at the league leaders in major statistics as well as awards given each year, and d) use the index to read about a particular person, event, etc. Lastly, you can read it cover-to-cover, which is what I did the first time.

There are a few errors here and there (very small amount compared to the total amount of information in the book), but I am sure they will be corrected in the next edition, which I will surely buy!

This book is wonderful! To non-fans, (like my wife), this book is completley trivial and worthless, But this is wonderful. True it is skimpy on the 19th century but what there is is great! It goes year by year discussing major events, and some minor ones in baseball history for that year. It attempts to trace the beginnings of baseball, all the way back to 1776, this book claims. For Baseball Historians this is a priceless work, although it would have been helpful to footnote all of the sources, and the other reviewer is correct the author should have used the Official Encyclopedia, as well as others. It's kind of like he ignored the source.

The Baseball Timeline is an excellent book. It is packed with lots of interesting information about the history of baseball listed by calendar day for each year. However, it has two major flaws. One is that it uses the inaccurate Baseball Encyclopedia instead of the much, much more accurate (and OFFICIAL) encyclopedia, Total Baseball. The other flaw is that Solomon's book is very skimpy in details for the 19th. century. In all honesty, I would recommend that readers who REALLY want a day-by-day type outline of baseball history should get The Baseball Chronology (by Charlton) instead.