Grand Old Game: 365 Days of Baseball [Hardcover]

Joseph Wallace (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 28, 2005

Baseball is the great American pastime, and every year millions of people follow the annual rituals of their favorite teams: the off-season, spring training, the long season punctuated by the All-Star Game, the late-season pennant races, and the World Series. In this unique collection, 365 rare and timeless images from the National Baseball Hall of Fame's unparalleled photographic archives are drawn together to evoke the familiar rhythm of baseball's year. Ranging from the turn of the 20th century to the mid-1960s, these photographs capture the thrilling daily life of the game.

Exciting action shots, humorous moments, publicity stunts, players in the off-season, colorful shots of minor-league and armed-forces baseball, and personal snapshots are only a few of the fresh images assembled here by Joseph Wallace, author of four highly praised books on baseball. Accompanied by Wallace's lively commentary, these telling images-Lou Gehrig with the Marx Brothers in the 1930s, small-town spring-training games in 1909, Ted Williams, Ty Cobb, and others in action-evoke the true texture and flavor of the classic American sport. AUTHOR BIO: Joseph Wallace is the author of Abrams' The Autobiography of Baseball, The Baseball Anthology, and World Series: An Opinionated Chronicle, as well as A Gathering of Wonders: Behind the Scenes at the American Museum of Natural History. He lives with his family in New York.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Joseph Wallace is the author of Abrams' The Autobiography of Baseball, The Baseball Anthology, and World Series: An Opinionated Chronicle, as well as A Gathering of Wonders: Behind the Scenes at the American Museum of Natural History. He lives with his family in New York.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 744 pages
• Publisher: Harry N. Abrams (January 28, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0810955946
• ISBN-13: 978-0810955943
• Product Dimensions: 6.6 x 9.5 x 2.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,038,179 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

The best thing about being a writer is getting the chance to live inside the worlds I write about. For example, I spent so much time researching dinosaurs for my first book that I sometimes found myself looking over my shoulder for rogue Velociraptors. When I started writing about baseball history, I dreamed of sitting in the grandstands, watching old-time baseball deities in person. Finally, for my first novel, Diamond Ruby, I became immersed in New York City during one of the wildest eras in its history: the Roaring Twenties. Recreating that world allowed me to portray the great Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, and other real-life characters as I imagined them to be. Even more fun was the chance to place my teenage heroine, Ruby Lee Thomas, smack in the middle of a world bristling with gangsters, rum-runners, and hucksters. I loved following Ruby through those exciting, dangerous times--which is why I'm already writing her next adventure, set in Hollywood in 1927.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Trip Back in Time, March 13, 2005

By 

David Solomon (East Brunswick, NJ USA) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Grand Old Game: 365 Days of Baseball (Hardcover)

This is one of the most entertaining and clever books I've come across.

The idea of presenting rare baseball pictures in a photo album format with short-paragraph captions is brilliant.

And rare these photos are! I own many books of baseball photography, and there's not one picture in this book that I've seen before.

These photos take you back in time and give you an excellent look at what baseball was like throughout the early decades of the 20th century.

The most amazing and provocative photos are the ones depicting people standing outside a newspaper office or on some main street watching a mechanical scoreboard that's re-creating what's happening in some far-off baseball game. There are many of them from different decades (1910s, 1920s).

What I find fascinating about them is if you look at the mechanical scoreboard--which consists basically of a diamond, wooden players that move around the bases, the teams' lineups, and a linescore--it resembles exactly what baseball fans see on their computer screens today when they click on any of the Game Tracker apps to follow a ballgame over the Internet.

To me, these pictures represent the fact that you can make the delivery system more high-tech and faster, but, in the end, baseball is still the game it was 80 or 90 years ago.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars From the author, Joseph Wallace, April 15, 2007

By 

Joe W - See all my reviews

This review is from: Grand Old Game: 365 Days of Baseball (Hardcover)

In putting together GRAND OLD GAME, I got to spend weeks rooting through the photo archives of the National Baseball Hall of Fame Library in Cooperstown. I loved it! It was a true treasure hunt, allowing me to find hundreds of photos that hadn't been seen in decades--if ever--and put them in this book. Even the biggest fan of baseball history won't ever have seen most of these photos before. I know I hadn't.

There was just one downside: many of the old images had incomplete or inaccurate captions, or even no captions at all. I chose to use these photos anyway, because they deserved to be seen. Then both I and a team of professional baseball researchers (who checked every caption) worked very hard to correct mistakes and identify mystery players. In many cases, we did--but sometimes, clearly, we didn't. (I wish I'd had M. Fimoff there, since he/she is clearly so knowledgeable!)

Recognizing the possibility of mistakes, I included a paragraph in the book's foreword, asking anyone with further information about the images to please email me through my website. That offer is still open, of course. (You can find the URL in the book.) The information will go into the collection of the Hall of Fame and into future editions of GRAND OLD GAME, and you'll have the pleasure of knowing you've added to baseball's rich history. Thanks--J.W.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Study the Photographs, August 20, 2008

By 

C. W. Emblom "Bill Emblom" (Ishpeming, Michigan USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Grand Old Game: 365 Days of Baseball (Hardcover)

I rank this book five stars as I did for the author's companion volume mainly for the photographs. It is interesting to take note of the way fans dressed at ball games (suits, ties, and bowler hats). I also found it interesting to see photographs of players not in uniform from my initial decade of baseball interest, the 1950s. I would like to point out three dates (the method in which the pages are listed). June 14th shows three fans, two of which are a young girl and boy with pop bottles about seven years of age expressing their displeasure at an umpire's call. October 27th shows Leo Durocher's son giving The Lip a kiss. Author Joe Wallace states "no one since Babe Ruth left a bigger mark on baseball than Durocher." Wallace obviously forgot about Jackie Robinson. November 27th shows a group of Little Leaguers at a tryout camp in Scarsdale, New York in 1959. Somewhat below the center of the photo is a boy wearing a catcher's chest protector with a bent elbow extending his middle finger on his right hand. The book provides a good mixture of photographs from each decade from the beginning of the 20th century through the 1950s. A few of them I have seen in other books, but for the most part, the photographs are new to me. This is a very worth while photographic book on baseball history.