Baseball Anecdotes

From its winners to its sinners, two bestselling sportswriters chronicle a dizzying trip through more than a century of baseball lore and legend.

Some of the stories are celebrated—from Ruth’s called shot to DiMaggio’s streak to Mays’s catch. Some of the men are titans of the game—Mantle, Williams, Koufax. But alongside those stories passed from generation to generation, Daniel Okrent and Steve Wulf have assembled tales both hard-to-believe and a pleasure to read. From the Black Sox scandal to Bill Veeck’s bizarre promotions, from its icons and iconoclasts, from the humble origins of the game to the landmark moments that made it the national pastime, Baseball Anecdotes reveals the enthralling (and often amusing) game that goes on both on the field and behind the scenes of baseball.

“A dandy introduction to the game.” —Newsweek

“A must . . . Its greatest value might be to those of us who want to pass along baseball lore to our children.” —San Jose Mercury News

“Beguiling . . . A history of the game in stories . . . Comic, tragic, controversial.” —The New York Times Book Review