Baseball As I Have Known It

From Honus Wagner to Johnny Bench, Baseball As I Have Known It covers sixty-six seasons of America’s national sport. Fred Lieb, the dean of baseball writers, tells about its heroes, rogues, controversies, and grand plays. He broke in as a sportswriter in the Polo Grounds press box in 1911. In 1933, in the midst of the Depression, Lieb was fired from the New York Post and began a freelance career writing about his beloved sport.

Baseball As I Have Known It , first published in 1977 when Lieb was eighty-nine years old, remains a vital record of a glorious bygone era. In superb style, he comments on changes in baseball over the decades and tells inside stories about great events and immortal players.

Fred Lieb, who covered his first ballgame in 1911, continued on to prowl pressboxes across the land for nearly seven decades. His Baseball as I Have Known It, is aptly titled; over a long and distinguished career, he knew just about everyone worth knowing in the game, and saw pretty much everything worth seeing. His recollections of the 1919 Black Sox, the Yankee dynasties of the '20s and '30s, and his affectionate reminiscences of Christy Mathewson and Lou Gehrig make Baseball as I Have Known It particularly worth knowing, too.