July 2, 1903: The Mysterious Death of Hall-Of-Famer Big Ed Delahanty [Hardcover]

Mike Sowell (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1992

Investigates the death of one of baseball's earliest all-stars, whose ""accidental"" fall into Niagara Falls occurred just a few months before the team's corrupt owners organized the first World Series.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A drunken and abusive Ed Delahanty, baseball's best-known slugger at the turn of the century, was put off a train on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls and either jumped, fell or was pushed to his death. This study by Sowell ( The Pitch That Killed ) adds nothing to the information previously available, and it is only secondarily about Delahanty in any case. The book concerns the baseball wars of the period 1890-1905, with the National League well established, the American League struggling for recognition and a league founded by players done in by the owners. It's a story of athletes leaping from one team to another in the search for big bucks ($4000 a year) and a good examination of an exciting era in baseball history. Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

The author of a well-received book about a lethal beanball incident in the 1920s ( The Pitch That Killed , Macmillan, 1989) here writes about Big Ed Delahanty, a turn-of-the-century slugger who met his death under peculiar circumstances. Thrown off a train while in a highly intoxicated state, Big Ed staggered and plunged into the Niagara Falls on July 2, 1903. Was the death an accident, or was it engineered by the many enemies he had made at a time when the brand-new American League was challenging the stalwart National League for players and recognition? Both a mystery and a history of baseball's early years (about which there is growing interest), this book should appeal to many readers. Recommended for popular collections.
- Paul Kaplan, Dakota Cty. Lib., Eagan, Minn.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Macmillan Pub Co; 1st ed edition (July 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0026124157
• ISBN-13: 978-0026124157
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.8 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,689,818 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Well written! Kept me interested from start to finish., July 22, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: July 2, 1903: The Mysterious Death of Hall-Of-Famer Big Ed Delahanty (Hardcover)

Considering how very little information is available about Ed Delahanty, I thought Mike Sowell did a terrific job. One could have written about Ed and others in chapters, but not Mr. Sowell. His intelligence is such that even he realized that one could never write a bonifide biography with little information. Therefore, he did what any true baseball historian would do...fill in the blanks with the times and events that surrounded your subject. Mike Sowell did an excellent job of this and I credit him with giving me enough insight of the time and characters to research them further. Today, there is not much that I do not know about the era. I still continue to read about everything baseball and the players of the time. Sad how they are being forgotten. Today's players owe them much. Thank you, Mike! Anthony DeMedeiros, Toronto, Ontario

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars July 2, 1903 revisited, June 21, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: July 2, 1903: The Mysterious Death of Hall-Of-Famer Big Ed Delahanty (Hardcover)

I first reviewed Mike's book when it was published some years ago, when we both worked at The Tulsa Tribune in Tulsa, Okla. At the time (early '90s), baseball was at the crest of a resurgence in popularity: The sparkle of movies like "Field of Dreams" and "Bull Durham" had not yet faded - even John Sayles' unblinking "Eight Men Out" put only a slight negative spin on the sports' image. In my review then, I skirted some issues that bothered me, attributing them to what I saw as a lack of focus. Upon recent rereading, however, I would classify "July 2" as the strongest and bravest of Sowell's three books - and the other two are quite courageous, indeed. What Mike did was to take us back to professional baseball's beginnings, to present us with the ugly truth. The 1919 "Black Sox" scandal was only a slight sore that, if peeled away, would have revealed the disease at the heart of the game and would have been traced to the shocking practices of team owners, who handled the lives of players like so many kids trading cards. They could not afford this, and it was fearful to speculate what they might do to protect their interests. Once read, "July 2" makes a book like Ken Burns' and Geoffrey C. Ward's "Baseball" make more sense.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars An exhaustive if unfocused account of a baseball tragedy., October 30, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: July 2, 1903: The Mysterious Death of Hall-Of-Famer Big Ed Delahanty (Hardcover)

"July 2, 1903" is an apt title for this book because it tells practically all that's known about the circumstances of the death of baseball great Big Ed Delahanty: We know when it happened, but not much else. The title is also an adept parallel to the book itself, because the book isn't really about his death. It reads less like Agatha Christie than like an Inquiry into Our National Pastime, 1880-1910. What Sowell is trying to do, it seems, is to locate Delahanty's tragedy within a cultural and socio-economic context; not so much to sleuth out the whodunit of the case (accident? foul play? suicide?) as to understand the ethos in which it could occur. That very little is known of Delahanty beyond his ballplaying forces Sowell to focus that much more keenly on the environment surrounding Delahanty's death, rather than on Delahanty-the-Man. It's an intriguing approach, and Sowell has done exhaustive research. The book is full of colorful anecdotes, evocative details, and revealing sidebars. He's clearly fascinated by the political and economic maneuvering and lowlife rowdyism that defined baseball in its early days. For awhile, so was I. Eventually, though, the accumulation of amusing stories, surprising trivia and unusual nicknames grows stale, because it never adds up to anything more than the sum of its parts. Delahanty's death, in fact, gets lost in the shuffle, and the book's last chapter isn't even about him. Sowell could have arranged his information into a tight frame around the mystery of Delahanty's death, which would have evoked the feel and rhythm of the atmosphere surrounding it. Instead, he allows the trivia to overwhelm the ostensible subject of the book, and in the end I didn't learn much about the death of Big Ed Delahanty. Sowell should be commended for digging up so much information and for discovering so many interesting tidbits about baseball in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Many of them are fascinating, and it's good to have them collected in one book. Sowell himself is obviously excited by them too -- so excited that he didn't want to leave any of them out, so... he didn't.