This Side of Cooperstown: An Oral History of Major League Baseball in the 1950s (Dover Baseball) - Softcover

Moffi, Larry

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0486472736 ISBN 13: 9780486472737

Publisher: Dover Publications, 2010

Synopsis

Enshrinement in the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, is the ultimate honor for any major leaguer. This rousing, you-are-there history tells the story of seventeen legendary players who came up just short of Cooperstown: Virgil Trucks, Gene Woodling, Carl Erskine, Frank Thomas, and others. Collectively, the humorous, engaging, behind-the-scenes stories also tell the tale of baseball in the 1950s: a game performed on fields of grass and dirt, divided by segregation, played by men who took trains from city to city and held off-season jobs.
The New York Times applauded this oral history as "great fun," and sportscaster Mel Allen praised it as "a must-read for anyone who wants to know where today's game came from and what it can become once again." Former Commissioner of Baseball Fay Vincent noted that "Oral historians like Moffi do us the service of preserving what these men have to say about their baseball lives. These are players who gave me much enjoyment and so did this fine book. You will agree."

About this title

From the Back Cover

Baseball players are storytellers, and this book is a collection of stories about the game told by players from the 1950s. These are not tales told by the Mickey Mantles or Hank Aarons of the era but the words of excellent ballplayers nevertheless, men like Virgil Trucks, Gene Woodling, Carl Erskine, Vic Power, Frank Thomas, and a dozen other notable players who loved the game and played it very well for many seasons, although not accumulating statistics that would enshrine them in the bronze of Cooperstown. The players' voices reach back with clarity and affection to describe the game as it was in baseball's golden age, an era of transition for baseball and for America: more than three hundred farm teams, train travel, segregation, offseasons of holding down jobs in sales or construction to make ends meet. But the book is more than memories of the ball field. Larry Moffi has transcribed and orchestrated the voices of men who played the game day after day, year after year - the good and nearly great - who have nothing to hide and little to lose by giving us their generous recollections. These are the players who seemed, to the average fan, somehow more human than the superstars and who today - when the lives and events of Hall of Famers are common knowledge - speak to us with confidence and insight, providing a perspective of the game in its entirety.

Edition details

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0486472736
• ISBN 13: 9780486472737
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288