The Detroit Tigers: An Illustrated History

by Joe Falls

Traces the history of Detroit's baseball team from their beginnings in the late nineteenth century through the 1988 season and offers club records, statistics, and historic photographs.

Genres: Baseball, Nonfiction

Hardcover

First published April 1, 1989

Reviews

[Mark Chadwick · Rating 3 out of 5]

First of all, this book came out circa 1989. The "Dark Ages" of late 20th Century Tigers Baseball were about to begin, an era which featured players like Adam Bernero and Shane Halter (whom I once had the "pleasure" of seeing bat cleanup) so as far as I'm concerned, it's exclusion doesn't hurt much. Second, the book has a lot of great photos of the greatest players in Tiger history. Gotta give it 5 stars for the photo-journalism included. Third, the prose was written by Joe Falls, an old school Detroit sports columnist who passed away 2004. I was a Joe Falls fan as a kid, but this was not his best work. A lot of purely apocryphal stories are passed off as being factual. Having gotten used to the more stringent standards of the Baseball Writers who were inspired by Bill James, I gotta say that you gotta take a lot of the stories from the first part of the book with a grain of salt. Joe is a lot better when he gets to the era (and personalities) he actually covered. That knocks the book down a couple of points, but still, for the most part, a quick enjoyable read!

[Avery · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was a great book, I learned a lot about the tigers after the Detroit riots and how baseball effected it.