Customer Reviews

Honus Wagner

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

 

 

I eagerly awaited this book, as it was touted as THE definitive bio on arguably the greatest player in baseball history. Most of the book dealt merely with game summaries and rivalries. It wasn't until the last pages that I felt any real understanding on Wagner the man. It was a struggle to finish, and is a big disappointment

Well researched. Well written. It just lacked something resembling a solid base hit up the middle. I really enjoyed the history and background on the Pirates. At times I was not sure if the authors were writing a book about Tommy Leach, Fred Clarke, or Honus Wagner. Not until the end did you actually get an appreciation for Honus the man. At that, perhaps you understand why they stuck so closely to developing the story behind the Pirates rather than just Wagner. If that is all that is available about Honus, then the title of the book should have been, HONUS AND THE PIRATES. Good effort, but just another baseball history book with inconsistencies and missing information.

If took almost 100 years for us to get Wagner biograhy. Unfortunately, we're still waiting for an effort worthy of the man universally considered the greatest shortstop ever.
The main problem with the book is that it gets too bogged down in detail. It goes through tedious information, like his getting three hits in an Iron & Oil League game.
Also, there's not enough about what kind of person Wagner was. Generalities are mentioned, but few specifics.
In defense of the authors, it would be tough to paint a portrait of a man when there is almost no one left who knew him pesonally. Then again, with such a handicap, they probably shouldn't have tried it in the first place.

It's sad that this book has gotten such poor reviews. I tore through the entire thing cover-to-cover and was riveted the entire time. What others see as weakness I see as a strength of the book: you come away knowing not only Johannes Peter Wagner but also Fred Clarke, Deacon Philippe, Tommy Leach, Barney Dreyfuss, and many others. The book takes you on the journey of Honus The Ballplayer, from the early days through each year he played, chronicling not only his ups & downs but also the fortunes of the Pirates teams of those early years along with the city itself. If people were expecting some tabloid revelations about illicit dealings or some scandalous dirt it reveals their own failings, not the book's. Remember, this is the guy who insisted his tobacco card be pulled (the famous T206) because he had moral objections about peddling cigarettes to kids. So enjoy the book as a great period-piece about the people, places, and times of that early 20th-century baseball era. It really is a treat.

Honus Wagner was one of the greatest baseball players of the dead ball era before Babe Ruth. Although known to few beyond the diehard baseball fan, he was a member of the first class of inductees into the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame in 1936. His career batting average of .327 is one of the highest in MLB history, as is his 722 career stolen bases. Indeed, Wagner earned eight National League batting titles, tied with Tony Gwynn for the most in league history. Wagner's 101 home runs is less impressive, but his 3,430 career hits is outstanding. Small wonder he is enshrined in Cooperstown.

Playing in Pittsburgh for much of his career, Wagner never achieved the fame that other stars of his era, playing in larger cities, attained. Nonetheless, he led the Pirates to four National League pennants in his career--1901, 1902, 1903, and 1909--and a World Series victory in 1909.

This biography of Honus Wagner is a reasonable and straightforward account of the life of a terrific ballplayer who also happened to be an honorable individual. Dennis DeValeria and Jeanne Burke DeValeria have offered here the basic story, well-told and sometimes dramatic in its presentation. Like so many of these types of books, while it is well researched, it does not contain citations and the reader will e forced to decipher sources for any given incident from a bibliography. As it is, however, this is a creditable work and useful for anyone seeking to make sense of the deadball era of MLB and the origins of the baseball as a major sport in the first part of the twentieth century.

This work is useful for the baseball fan interested in the game's history. An enjoyable read but it falls prey to a critical error in any baseball biography -- it fails to include Wagner's career statistics. Not that you can't find them elsewhere, but most folks reading baseball history (such as myself) will want to leaf through and check out the stats as they read the narrative.

One lapse in the DeValerias' work is the preparation of their bibliography, which is incomplete, failing to list many works cited later under chapter sources. An examination of the bibliography, therefore, provides future researchers with a very incomplete picture of the extent of their work. Moreover, they eschew footnotes in favor of a general listing of sources for each chapter. Trying to pinpoint the source of the authors' conclusions or a particular quotation, consequently, is virtually impossible, and weighing the number of sources they used to establish a point even more frustrating. The result is often the impression that a thin foundation of a single quotation or story supports many of the DeValerias' conclusions.

I see some tough criticism on this page, but I cannot accept that the book has too much baseball detail. When I think of other, more recent biographies of Whitey Ford, Gabby Hartnett, and others that read like a series of several hundred box scores in prose, I think of this book as just the opposite. It paints a good picture of Wagner the man and his family, and how he spent his non-baseball hours and seasons. It retells good anecdotes in proper context, and as my fellow reviewer, Eddie Waddell notes, it doesn't try to gloss over any weaknesses the man may have had - a fault of so many baseball biographers whose goal is to get their man into the Hall of Fame by their book's building up his stats.

The de Valerias obviously love their man, and you will too before you are done with the volume. Just the right amount of baseball detail, I'd say. And not just about Honus. You learn a great deal about his lesser known teammates. And the stats are almost always on target. The de Valerias may not have included a Wagner stats sheet, but at least they seem to have researched all stats they use in the book well. Yes, I wish the footnotes were more specific to the quotes, but that shouldn't deter the majority of readers.

Their is way too much detail in the book. The authors' even took the time to write in Wagner's statistics as a kid, on what date he got a double, when he hit for the cycle, what inning he got each hit and whom was playing first base when the ball was hit to left field. I was truly disappointed by what was originally claimed as THE Wagner book.

The book is an enlightening look at the life and baseball history of one of the great players in the history of the game. It is detailed to describe Wagner's contributiuons to nearly every game he played which was a bit more than I was seeking. But it is a remarkable biography of a remarkable player.