Red Smith on Baseball: The Game's Greatest Writer on the Game's Greatest Years

"August Adolphus Busch Jr., the new president of the Cardinals, is a chubby gentleman called Gussie, about the size of a St. Louis brewer. He has horn-rimmed glasses, a zillion dollars and an air of pleased bewilderment. He rides to the hounds and travels by bus." It's not hard to pluck a memorable passage from the sportswriting of Red Smith. In more than fifty years as a newspaperman, notably with the New York Herald Tribune and the New York Times, he earned a reputation as the best writer ever to confront the game of baseball—astute, clever, witty, and stylish. In this bountiful selection of his most memorable columns—175 of them, from 1941 to 1981—baseball fans can recapture some of baseball's greatest moments and most unforgettable characters. Jackie Robinson's debut is here, and so is Hank Greenberg hitting home runs; Enos Slaughter scoring the winning run in the seventh game of the 1946 World Series; Stan Musial, Ted Williams, Joe DiMaggio, Lou Boudreau; the sly antics of Charles Dillon Stengel; Durocher's lip; Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra, and scores of others. It's a baseball feast. Readers who are not baseball fans will have to be satisfied with just wonderful writing. With 14 black-and-white photographs.

Red Smith (1905–1982) was born in Green Bay, Wisconsin, was graduated from Notre Dame, and worked at newspapers in Milwaukee, St. Louis, and Philadelphia before coming to New York. His writing on sports won a Pulitzer Prize and a George Polk Award. Ira Berkow, Red Smith’s biographer, is a sports columnist for the New York Times.