Customer Reviews

The Redheaded Outfield and Other Baseball Stories

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Zane Grey hits it out of the ballpark with this collection of short stories about baseball in olden times. It is suspensful, funny and also romantic at times. Fun to read.

Written almost a century ago, these baseball stories are very much a flashback to how the game was played back then as well as to how writers expressed themselves. The game was much simpler then, although the players were much rougher. Most of the players were largely uneducated, baseball was their life and if they could not play, most of them would end up working as manual laborers. There was no pension plan and players were property, to be bought and sold based on the needs of the ownership.
Shortly after the beginning of the twentieth century, baseball was truly the national pastime; it was the only major national sport. The professional players formed teams in the off-season and barnstormed everywhere, in the era before television, it was the only way most people could possibly see their heroes in action.
These stories capture all of those features of baseball in that era, from the struggling minor league teams to the crippled boy with an extraordinary understanding of the game to the mega-fan that will risk death to root for his favorites. There is also mention of how the owner of the team can force the players to play an exhibition game even though they are dead-tired from their grueling schedule.
While the stories are fiction, this book is very much an accurate rendering of how baseball was integrated into the American social structure as well as how the players approached the game. They are a bit simplistic, but at the time that was the level of the readership.