A Clever Base-Ballist: The Life and Times of John Montgomery Ward by Bryan Di Salvatore

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 Americas 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 baseballs establishment to create an outlaw rival organization: The Players League. Team owners, the players felt, treated them like chattel: they dished saltpeter in their sidemeat and gave them shameful financial beatings if they misbehaved, writes Bryan Di 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, Hawaiis King Kalakuau, and Moses Fleetwood Walker, the major leagues first black player.It travels from the groaning boards of Delmonicos restaurant to the boisterous pages of the 1880s entertainment press to the Egyptian desert, where the target of one thrown baseball was the Sphinxs 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 werent branding him a terrorist, owners trumpeted the college-educated Ward as the sports 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.

Author: Bryan Di Salvatore

Language: English

Edition: 1St Edition

Binding: Hardcover

Pages: 496

Publisher: Pantheon

Publication Date: 1999-07-27