num_pages: 496
description: Baseball is not a Summer snap but a business....A player is not a sporting man. He is hired to do certain work and do it as well as he possibly can.John Montgomery Ward nineteenth-century America's most-talked-about (both reviled and applauded) baseball player spoke these words shortly after the failure of the great player rebellion of 1890 a revolution Ward almost singlehandedly fomented. That year four out of every five National Leaguers taking great economic risk deserted professional baseball's establishment to create an outlaw rival The Players' League. Team owners the players felt treated them like they dished saltpeter in their sidemeat and gave them shameful financialbeatings if they misbehaved writes BryanDi Salvatore in this fascinating rigorous and brisk biography.A Clever Base-Ballist is also a keenly observant narrative of late nineteenth-century America. In it can be found the likes of Mark Twain Hawaii's King Kalakuau and Moses Fleetwood Walker the major league's first black player. It travels from the groaning boards of Delmonico's restaurant to the boisterous pages of the 1880s entertainment press to the Egyptian desert where the target of one thrown baseball was the Sphinx's right eye.Handsome erudite and brilliantly talented Ward made front-page headlines across the country when he married New York actress Helen Dauvray. And when they weren't branding him a terrorist owners trumpeted the college-educated Ward as the sport's premier role model. An unblinking antidote to good-old-days syndrome A Clever Base-Ballist is an accessible compelling and unconventional biography of an unconventional and until now obscure American.
language: English
title: A Clever Base-Ballist: The Life and Times of John Montgomery Ward
publisher: Pantheon