A Delight . The names Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth and Honus Wagner don't resonate as much as they used to.  As the decades go by even the old-timers among us haven't been around long enough to remember them.  They've pretty much become historical, iconic figures, like the stoic-looking George Washington on a dollar bill.  It's a bit of a sad reminder of the inexorable march of time, but what a great relief to know that this treasure chest of a book is around to keep their memories alive.      The author got the idea for it in 1961 when he read that Ty Cobb had died.  Realizing that many of Cobb's contemporaries would soon suffer the same fate, he set out to meet as many of them as he could and record--literally with a tape recorder--their stories for posterity.  Twenty six of them are recounted here.  Some of these guys are hall-of-famers, some of them not even close, but all of them--every single one--had a load of interesting tidbits to share.  Baseball was a different game back then.  America was a different place.      The first great thing about the book is that you get at least several takes on the great ballplayers.  One of the fellows, for example, playing Detroit, talked about being a little nervous about Cobb, whom they had all heard would sharpen his spikes.  A Detroit player, however, mentioned that Cobb never sharpened his spikes.  Not that they didn't discourage the other team from thinking so.        Walter Johnson had an arm like a bullwhip, but he was a nice enough guy and a friend of Sam Crawford.  Late in the game, if his team was ahead by enough runs, he'd toss a meatball in to Crawford and let him belt it.  He never did that for Cobb, though, who he hated.  Cobb could never figure out why Crawford was able to hit him.      Honus Wagner is recalled by many as the best of all of them, with great quickness, great hitting and great fielding.  A couple of the fellows recall that you could usually count on bits of gravel to be flung at you along with the ball he had just scooped up.  Tommy Leach described him as the best fielding third-baseman, shortstop, first-baseman and outfielder in the league--he played all of them--and since he won the batting title eight times between 1900 and 1911 you couldn't really argue that he wasn't the best hitter in the league, either.      For some odd reason, there aren't that many memorable gems about the great Babe Ruth, although there are at least a few.  Harry Hooper (a guy I'd never heard of and a hall-of-famer) remembers Ruth in the first year he came up with Boston as a, "big, overgrown, green pea."  "Nineteen years old, poorly educated, only lightly brushed by the social veneer we call civilization, he was gradually transformed into the idol of American youth and the symbol of baseball the world over . . . If somebody had predicted that back on the Boston Red Sox in 1914, he would have been thrown into the lunatic asylum."    Along with these detailed sketches, including a ton of characters I haven't even mentioned--Germany Schaeffer, Rube Waddell (who didn't like to wear underwear), Lefty O'Doul, Dazzy Vance--the book is also, naturally, loaded with baseball anecdotes.  Some of the more famous plays of the time, for example, are recounted in different ways and with different perceptions.      Take the "Bonehead" Merkle play.  For those of you who don't know, what happened was this.  The Giants were tied with the Cubs for first place with one week to go in the season.  In a game against each other, in the bottom of the ninth of a 1-1 game, the Giants had men on first and third with two outs.  Merkle was on first.  Birdwell hit a single to center, McCormack scored from third, and Merkle . . . ran to the clubhouse.  Without touching second.  The Cubs retrieved the ball from center field, Evers tagged second, and the run didn't count.  Because of the crowd on the field the game had to be replayed on a later date.  The Giants lost it, and lost the pennant.  From then on and forever more, Fred Merkle became "Bonehead" Merkle.        But it's actually a little more complicated than that.  For one thing, Merkle was only nineteen.  It was the first game he'd ever started for the Giants.  And running into the clubhouse when the game was over was something all the guys did--whether touching second was necessary or not--because of the crowd pouring onto the field after the ushers opened the gates at the end of the game.  The players ran off to get away from them.  And Evers never did tag second base with the ball that was hit out to center because someone had heaved it into the left field stands.  Fred Snodgrass doesn't think he ever tagged second with any ball at all.  The umpires weren't around to know this, though;  they had already left the field!  Funny how the mists of history tend to simplify things.  The detail in this book brings these stories back to life.  And there are a ton of them recounted.      Along with all of this baseball lore, you get a pretty good glimpse of America a hundred years ago, too.  People were more humble, but in general confident, and much more direct.  It's fascinating just to consider their nicknames:  "Wee Willie" was the nickname for a short guy, "Specs" was the guy who wore glasses, "Chief," (at least two of them) were American Indians, and, "Dummy" was the guy who was deaf and dumb.  Nobody meant anything by it;  nobody apparently took offense.  Stuff like these speaks volumes.          Here's Jimmy Austin:  " . . . they didn't have clubhouses in most parks, especially not for the visiting team.  We'd get into uniform at the hotel and ride out to the ball park in a bus drawn by four horses.  They used to call it a tally-ho in those days.  We'd sit on seats along the sides and ride, in uniform, to the ballpark and back.    "That ride was always a lot of fun.  Kids running alongside as we went past, and rotten tomatoes once in a while.  Always lots of excitement when the ball club rode by, you know."      Yep.  Thanks in part to this book, we know all right.
Output: POS