The Most Memorable Moments in Major League Baseball History

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The Most Memorable Moments in Major League Baseball History
Sports Book Review

by Harvey Frommer

A member of the Society for American Baseball Research
more info

For page turning, for dreaming, for rummaging, for ogling - "Memorable Moments" by Ken Leiker and Mark Vancil (Ballantine, $29.95, 156 pages) is a book for all baseball fans of all ages and persuasions.

The book celebrates and documents in words and moving visuals moments like Lou's Gehrig's Farewell Address, Reggie Jackson's three straight dingers in the '77 World Series, DiMag's 56 game hitting streak, Jackie Robinson breaking the color line in 1947, Bill Mazeroski's walk off homer that ended the 1960 World Series and enabled the Pirates to beat the Yankees.

The 130 full color and black and white photographs merge with the careful and evocative prose of Ken Leiker to create a book worth buying, owning, keeping.

Where "Memorable Moments" is the kind of book you will want to keep on your bookshelf for a very long time and savor from time to time, the paperback "Baseball Dynasties" by Rob Neyer and Eddie Epstein (Norton, $19.95, 388 pages) is one of those books that one can't wait to put down - literally and figuratively.

Sub-titled "the Greatest Teams" of all Time, this tome padded with all kinds of stats slices and dices away at the Neyer/Epstein choices for baseball's best squads. It is painful reading at the start and gets more painful the deeper one wades through the disorganized, padded extraneous prose. A for example: "The St. Louis Cardinals and the St Louis Browns shared Sportsman's Park, and in 1944 Cardinals manager Billy Southworth and Browns manager Luke Sewell and their wives shared an apartment. This worked out nicely because neither of them was ever in St. Louis at the same time."

For fans of the Philadelphia Phillies, high recommended is "More Than Beards, Bellies and Biceps: The Story of the 1993 Phillies (and the Phillie Phanatic Too). The book happens to have one of the longest titles ever but it is only 225 pages, priced at $22.95 and published by Sports Publishing, L.L.C.

The authors - Robert Gordon, whose beat has been the Phill sports scene for the past 13 years and Tom Burgoyne, the official Phillie Phanatic since 1994, have done a remarkable job bringing back a time and a team. John Kruk, Larry Andersen, Pete Incaviglia, Mitch Williams, manager Jim Fregosi, third base coach Larry Bowa, pitching coach Johnny Podres are just a few from that '93 squad that get the up close and personal and sometimes hilarious look see. The book is a heck of an entertaining read.

"The End of Baseball As We Knew It" by Charles P. Korr (University of Illinois Press, $34.95, 336 pages) is an insightful account of how the Major League Baseball Players Association changed baseball and American sports. Scholarly and also a lively read - this is recommended reading.

ť Harvey Frommer is the author of 32 sports books, including "The New York Yankee Encyclopedia, "Shoeless Joe and Ragtime Baseball,"and "Growing Up Baseball" with Frederic J. Frommer. His "A Yankee Century: A Celebration of the First Hundred Years of Baseball's Greatest Team" was published by Berkley Putnam in October 2002.

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