3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Don't buy this book at any price, April 9, 2007
This review is from: Twilight Teams (Paperback)
The author of this book has a job with an imposing title - "senior cartographer with the National Ocean Service," according to a brief bio on the back page. One can only hope lives don't depend on his accuracy and attention to detail, because this book is so sloppily done that he could flunk two high school courses - English and history - simply by turning in the manuscript.
Given the promising subject matter - the final seasons of six doomed major league baseball franchises from 1952 to 1971 - this book perhaps could have been salvaged and maybe even have some literary value if the author had employed an editor with some knowledge of grammar, syntax and spelling (not to mention baseball history). But it's pretty obvious that he didn't, and even though there are some interesting kernels of information and trivia in this book, it was put together with all the precision of a ransom note. It is written on an elementary-school level, and many of the factual mistakes not only eliminates any possible credibility within the first two dozen pages, they would be laughable if I hadn't paid $15.95 plus shipping and handling for it.
On Page 4, in the scene-setting chapter, the 1919 Black Sox scandal is touched upon briefly. In his two-paragraph synopsis of that scandal, which threatened the very existence of professional baseball and is one of the sport's most-chronicled events, the author states that the players involved collectively were known as the "Chicago Seven." There were eight players - "Eight Men Out," as they were described in Eliot Asinof's landmark book on the subject - and the author hilariously seems to have confused them with the group that disrupted the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Farther down on the page, it is stated that the St. Louis Browns in 1941 "sought approval to shift the franchise to Los Angeles after reaching a tentative accord with the minor league Pacific Coast team there." According to the definitive book on the St. Louis American League team, "Even the Browns," by William B. Mead, the Browns did not seek approval from the other seven American League owners to move until the day after Pearl Harbor, at which time it was permanently tabled because of the events the previous day. And the accord was not "tentative." It was a done deal (a 1942 schedule with the Browns in Los Angeles had been drafted, according to the Mead book) and the Browns would have moved into Wrigley Field in Los Angeles in 1942 had the Japanese not intervened. Also, the Browns and the AL didn't have to seek approval from the Los Angeles Angels to move to L.A. The Angels were owned by Phil Wrigley, who also owned the Chicago Cubs, and he was set to move the franchise elsewhere (most likely Salt Lake City) if the Browns came West.
On Page 5, the author writes that the Pacific Coast League in 1946 petitioned the National and American leagues for recognition as a third major league. This happened, but not in 1946 ... it happened in 1952, after the PCL had functioned for six years as an "open classification" league, meaning its members couldn't have Player Development Contracts with major league franchises, and that a player who was placed on NL or AL waivers also had to clear PCL waivers before becoming a free agent. (This is according to "Bush League," an exhaustive history of minor league baseball written in 1975 by Robert Obojski.) It also is stated in "Twilight Teams" that the PCL in 1946 consisted of six franchises - Portland, Oakland, Hollywood, Sacramento, Los Angeles and San Francisco. There were eight teams in the PCL, as there were throughout most of its pre-1958 history; the other two were the Seattle Rainiers and San Diego Padres, and Seattle can't be left out of any discussion of the "open classification" PCL because it led the league in attendance more often than not. According to Bill Weiss, who has written many books on West Coast minor league baseball history and has served as official statistician and historian for several leagues, the plan in 1952 was to move the Hollywood Stars to Houston and the Sacramento Solons to Dallas, with the other six cities assuming major league status. The author of "Twilight Teams" indicates the owners of all three leagues dropped the plan after it was determined that only Los Angeles and San Francisco could support major league teams in 1946. In reality, the measure failed - six years later - by a single vote at a combined NL/AL meeting.
On Page 7, the author says that the franchise shifts of the 1950s created a parallel trend in the NFL, NBA and NHL. It did no such thing. Only one NFL franchise (the New York Yankees/Dallas Texans/Baltimore Colts in 1951 and 1952) changed cities during the 1950s, and only one (the Chicago/St. Louis Cardinals) moved during the 1960s. The NBA, which had only eight franchises from 1954-61, had four of them move during that time (Milwaukee-St. Louis, Rochester-Cincinnati, Fort Wayne-Detroit and Minneapolis-Los Angeles), but all were small-market-to-large-market moves that were necessary because the NBA could not have survived with the minor-league look it had in the early 1950s. The NHL operated as a six-team league from 1943 to 1967, and the "Original Six" franchises all stayed in the same locations - the same locations in which they operate today.
I could go on - and on and on and on - regarding the inaccuracies and absolute lack of research in this book (for example, it's not "Tinkers" to Evans to Chance), the absence of any kind of professional editing ("it's" where "its" should be, commas sprayed indiscriminately all over the place even in the middle of obvious single clauses, glaring math errors such as "the Giants won a pennant in 1962, their fourth season in San Francisco," and literally hundreds of egregious typos that a simple spell-check would have uncovered), but you get my drift.
Don't waste your money on this book ... it's a great idea that has been mangled beyond recognition. It promises nostalgia, and delivers mostly nonsense. I expected to savor it. I couldn't even finish it ... and I wish I could get my money back.
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good Book,some flaws, July 17, 2001
This review is from: Twilight Teams (Paperback)
The book covers a subject I had wanted to see for a long time and generally does a good job.It covered the final year very well and provided good background.The reader is given a behind-the-scenes look at the business of baseball as far back as 50 years ago.The in-depth look at the last years players and the financial moves of the owners are often overlooked in other books or compressed into a few lines. However,the book does have a few flaws,the most annoying is the factual errors that are found thoughout the book.It makes you wonder about the facts you don`t know about when the author gets wrong things that you do know.Also,why not make the book complete by including the 1965 Millwaukee Braves and the 1967 Kansas City A`s?. Still,I recommend this book to all baseball fans and fans of these former teams.
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