Baseball in the Afternoon

Book excerpt: "Everyone who loves the game of baseball carries with him a memory of the game's golden age: when players played the game for love; when they were loyal to their teams; when they were a part of their community; when long train rides on road trips bred close friendships and cruel practical jokes; when they were with and among us as heroes, but as people, too. Baseball under the blazing sun, on God's green grass. Baseball played with heart, and with joy. Baseball in the Afternoon." "For most of us, those memories are cherished, but they are false; the baseball world was really not so different when we were young. For Robert Smith, though, those memories - augmented by a lifetime of friendships with the greats and near-greats of the game - are of a truly different age. The memories of the men Smith came to know in his youth reach back to the infancy of the game, back to when men in whiskers and knickers rode from town to town taking on all comers; to when the self-proclaimed Greatest Feller on Earth, Chris von der Ahe, bankrupted himself throwing grand parties to celebrate the latest triumph of the team he owned, his beloved St. Louis Browns; to the real first black players in baseball, Oberlin-educated Moses Fleetwood Walker and his brother Welday, who played briefly for Toledo in the American Association in 1884; and on through the reminiscences of Waite Hoyt, one of the many men able to say, "I didn't room with Babe Ruth; I roomed with his suitcase." Smith's rich, evocative prose reminds us all of why we fell in love with baseball in the first place, and shows us pieces of the game's history we may never have seen before." "Once every ten years or so a book with this kind of charm and appeal comes along: Lawrence Ritter's The Glory of Their Times. Fred Lieb's Baseball As I Have Known It. And now Baseball in the Afternoon. It's the baseball book of a lifetime."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved