"This is a comprehensive volume capturing the Lardner style and offering a considerable insight into America’s favorite sportswriter… Ron Rapoport has done a superb job in his selection"—The New York Journal of Books
"Frank Chance's Diamond is a time machine. . .Lardner's writing reveals its exuberance and innocence, and exposes its prejudices, all while highlighting the joys of the era's baseball."— Epoch Times
At one time Ring Lardner’s baseball articles reached millions of readers through more than one hundred newspapers throughout America. Admirers of his writing included F. Scott Fitzgerald, H.L. Mencken, Edmund Wilson, and Virginia Woolf. He was as familiar to Americans in the 1920s as Charles Lindbergh, Calvin Coolidge, Henry Ford, and Babe Ruth. His articles about the players he knew, his World Series coverage, his poems, parodies, and jokes were unlike any other baseball reporting ever written, both in his time and since.
Even a hundred years later, Lardner’s baseball journalism makes for delightful, often wildly funny, reading and offers a glimpse of where his ground-breaking baseball fiction came from. This book contains Lardner’s columns about Christy Mathewson, Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Casey Stengel, and Three-Finger Mordecai Brown and some fabulous lesser-known characters like Frank Schulte, Heine Zimmerman, Jim Schekard, Johnny Kling, Rollie Zeider, and Peaches Graham, as well as examples of Lardner’s coverage of the World Series—including the notorious 1919 Black Sox Series. Ron Rapoport’s introduction puts Lardner in his time and place and explains how his writing about baseball developed over the years.