A Game of Inches: The Stories Behind the Innovations That Shaped Baseball
...the book is simply enthralling, and amounts to a history of the game and its place in American society refracted through innumerable unlikely lenses. Morris is attentive to the rich and intricate context--cultural, social, and economic--of every innovation from playing fields to broadcasts, from technique to equipment, and would seem to relish the hunt as much as the quarry. He is also a virtuoso of period quotation, bringing us joy in the mock-heroic cadences and flowery bombast of sportswriters of yore, whose plentitude and variety remind us that this was once a nation of newspapers and that baseball was spread as much through their pages as on the field.   --Katherine Powers, Boston Globe