This rollicking novel of the 1919 Black Sox Scandal is a sort of hybrid of Ragtime, Eight Men Out & You Know Me, Al.  Luther Pond, a sportswriter for William Randolph Hearst's New York Morning Journal, shares the narration with "Buck" Weaver.  Between them they weave a tale that intersperses portraits of John L. Sullivan, Ty Cobb, Hearst, George M. Cohan, etc. (here's a description of Cobb: "watching him play, it was possible to speculate, in defiance of logic, that winning was not his only concern; that Ty Cobb was consumed by another, more primitive objective: to annihilate the egos of other men" ) with the story of how eight players on the best team in baseball came to participate in a scheme to lose a World Series.

For anyone who knows the story of the Black Sox, much of the book will be familiar, but there are some nice set pieces--especially the Jeffries/Johnson fight--& the world of newspapering & Yellow Journalism is as much a focus of the story as baseball.

(Reviewed:)

Grade: (B+) Orrin C. Judd

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