Following up on Professor Wood's 2016 Beyond the Ballpark: The Honorable, Immoral, and Eccentric Lives of Baseball Legends, which was listed in Sport's Collector Digest's top forty baseball books of 2016, he examines twenty-five additional legends.
When high jumper Alice Coachman won the high jump title at the 1941 national championships with "e;a spectacular leap,"e; African American women had been participating in competitive sport for close to twenty-five years.
This sensitive commentary on Jackie Robinsons life describes his childhood in Pasadena, through his years as a sports hero, to his later involvement in politics and the Civil Rights movement.
The small and midsized cities of western Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia reached their peaks of population and prosperity in the second quarter of the 20th century.
When Babe Ruth was sold by the Boston Red Sox to the New York Yankees at the beginning of the Roaring Twenties, the stage was set for one of baseball's greatest dynasties.
Founded in 1869, the Chicago Cubs are a charter member of the National League and the last remaining of the eight original league clubs still playing in the city in which the franchise started.
Despite the big market, bright lights and World Series rings, many Hall of Fame level players from the Mets and Yankees have been passed over by voters, often by good margins.
Night games transformed the business of professional baseball, as the smaller, demographically narrower audiences able to attend daytime games gave way to larger, more diversified crowds of nighttime spectators.
Widely acknowledged as the preeminent gathering of baseball scholars, the annual Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture has made significant contributions to baseball research.
One of the greatest outfielders of his generation, Hazen "e;Kiki"e; Cuyler (1898-1950) was working as a roof assembler in an auto plant in Michigan when he seized an opportunity to realize his dream of playing major league baseball.
After many disappointing seasons during the 1930s, the 1938 Pittsburgh Pirates looked like they were finally poised to claim their first National League pennant since 1927.
For more than a century Johnny Evers has been conjoined with Chicago Cubs teammates Frank Chance and Joe Tinker, thanks to eight lines of verse by a New York columnist.
From their ignominious 40-120 debut in 1962, to the "e;Miracle Mets"e; of the shocking 1969 season, to the teams of Darryl Strawberry, David Wright, and Jacob deGrom, the New York Mets have in nearly sixty years become the city's other beloved baseball franchise, with its fan base stretching well beyond the New York suburbs.
