Customer Reviews

The National Association of Base Ball Players, 1857-1870

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

 

 

There are two types of people: One cannot imagine why any sane person would ever waste time or money on a book with data such as the record of the Atlantics of Brooklyn in 1861 or the Buckeyes of Cincinatti in 1868. The other starts to salivate at the mere mention of such a book. The first group is vastly larger, but you know if you are in the second. If so, you desperately need this!

I have only two complaints (hence four stars instead of five). One is that this really should be in a library binding. Marshall Wright's other books are published this way. It is inexplicable that the publisher went with paperback for this. The quality of the paper and binding is find, but this is a reference work to be used repeatedly.

The second, more serious complaint is the organization of the data. There is a chapter for each year, with the statistics following a short introduction. So far so good. The stats are by team, but the order of the teams is peculiar. They are in order of winning/losing/tie records. Presumably the idea is to run from best to worst teams, but this forces the reader to refer to the index constantly. So to find the record of the Buckeyes in 1868 we first need to note that the chapter on 1868 runs from pages 186 to 237. We can then go to the index and eliminate from consideration any pages outside that range. This still, however, leaves every citation of the Buckeyes as the opposing team in an entry, so we have to sift through these to finally find, on page 195, the section devoted to them. See now why I wish this had a better binding? The shame is that these problems could have easily been avoided. The appropriate index entries could have been in bold type, or each year could have its own index of entries, or there could have been extensive cross referencing.

The person who wants this book at all will be willing to work around this problem, but it is a shame.

This book contains an amazing and thorough collection of facts about the National Association. The plethora of statistics and numbers within makes it a must-have for any fan of baseball history.

Although this book is written on a fairly obscure topic, if you are looking to gain a better understanding of the National Association, I would suggest you begin elsewhere. Of the 329 pages, 70% of the material is of line-scores and box-scores. I was disappointed with the lack of insight and was left with a regurgitation of numbers. I think the author loses the historical context of the league by writing a book purely on numbers. If you are interested in the National Association, I suggest you start with Daniel Ginsburgs The Fix Is In. Scandal and the National Association go hand in hand. Not only do you see how the league functioned, but also why it soon failed. I would also recommend William Ryczeks book on the National Association. I found more substance in both cases than with Wright's book. Unless you are a stat fanatic...I would not buy this book.