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Diamonds in the Rough: The Untold History of Baseball
An anecdotal history of baseball reveals many of the forces, events, and people that have shaped Americans' perceptions of the national pastime
433 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 1989
30 people want to read
About the author
Joel Zoss
13 booksZoss' professional life has always balanced between prose and music, sometimes weighted heavily to one or the other, as during the 1980s into the 1990s, when he authored or co-authored over twenty five non-fiction books. Zoss has won several awards for his prose and is an International PEN short story award winner and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow of Creative Writing.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
April 7, 2020
Tried to be forward thinking but didn't quite manage it.
December 20, 2023
The description of this book as "anecdotal" is very accurate. It's a series of short set pieces on many aspects of baseball history, some as brief as a paragraph and none longer than two pages. The anecdotes are packed with information, much of which was familiar to me as a serious baseball fan. But there was enough digging that I learned some things, and I also appreciated the way the two authors stepped in with their own commentaries that were extremely insightful.
The first couple of chapters are not impressive, and I almost put the book down. I'd bought it for a couple of bucks at a used book store, so it wasn't like I had a huge investment. I'm glad I stayed with it past the fluffy chapter about baseball in American culture and the chapter about the game's origins. Those have been told in a lot of books.
The next handful of chapters are more or less chronological, moving from the game's origins to early developments like the curveball and early leagues and gambling scandals, then the Negro Leagues and Jackie Robinson. The infusion of Black players would seem to be another topic that's been chewed over more than enough, but this book does a really good job of it, thanks to the authors' personal insights and commentaries on the game then and now (now being the late 1980s when the book was researched and written). They go into what would have been relatively unknown at the time, as it was only in economic journals, things like that Black players earned less than Whites until they reached All-Star status, and then it evened out. It's interesting because the book was finished at the end of the heyday of Black players. There were Black stars finishing their careers in the late-'80s, whereas there are almost no Black players at all these days.
From there, the book takes on esoteric topics, none of which had little initial appeal to me. But the enduring greatness of the game and the quality of the research brought these topics to light. They include women in the game, baseball music, baseball writing, and baseball and alcohol. There's a shout-out to Bill James, well deserved, as he was rewriting and rewiring the game at the time.
There are a lot of gems in those midsection chapters, such as tales of women college leagues, early painting depictions of baseball, and baseball and beer barons. I like how they pointed out that famous early etchings and paintings repeated the historical errors and myths of the "first game" in Hoboken or Cooperstown, and other stuff like that. The chapter on umpires is good as well, with a quick jump backwards from today's relatively well paid and protected umps to the dangerous conditions under which they used to perform. That umpire chapter yielded a shock to me that baseball didn't have three umps in regular season games until 1933 and four until 1952. Similarly, the music chapter was better than I expected it to be. And with YouTube (not in existence when the book was written), you could look up all of those songs that are mentioned.
The "look it up aspect" is really strong in this book. The authors reference hundreds of books, mainstream articles and journal articles. I'll bet most can be found online these days, and I'm sure there is an astonishing array of new research on every topic in this book. I'm going to read several of the novels the authors mention. I think I can do without the songs, and I know I'll never need to hear "Willie, Mickey and the Duke" ever again, as that was painful back when it was released.
With all that said, there are mistakes in this book, which was surprising to me, given that it was an edited and updated edition. A few were typos, like "of" instead of "off". A couple were more grievous, with the one I remember being a reference to the "Jamestown Flood," which, of course, was the "Johnstown Flood" that was so horrific that the site is now a national historic site in Pennsylvania. (I've been there, and it's interesting.) And it was disconcerting that the book was written as if it was published in late 1989 or early 1990, but the edition I read was allegedly updated in 1996. There are one or two post-1989 references, but only one or two (such as the potential of a woman major league umpire and then what happened), but the rest of the book remained written as if 1990 had not yet happened. So that was weird.
Bottom line. If you're a big baseball fan, add this to your library. It has nuggets you don't know, and even if you know a lot of the stuff in this book, it runs through the topics in an entertaining way.
The first couple of chapters are not impressive, and I almost put the book down. I'd bought it for a couple of bucks at a used book store, so it wasn't like I had a huge investment. I'm glad I stayed with it past the fluffy chapter about baseball in American culture and the chapter about the game's origins. Those have been told in a lot of books.
The next handful of chapters are more or less chronological, moving from the game's origins to early developments like the curveball and early leagues and gambling scandals, then the Negro Leagues and Jackie Robinson. The infusion of Black players would seem to be another topic that's been chewed over more than enough, but this book does a really good job of it, thanks to the authors' personal insights and commentaries on the game then and now (now being the late 1980s when the book was researched and written). They go into what would have been relatively unknown at the time, as it was only in economic journals, things like that Black players earned less than Whites until they reached All-Star status, and then it evened out. It's interesting because the book was finished at the end of the heyday of Black players. There were Black stars finishing their careers in the late-'80s, whereas there are almost no Black players at all these days.
From there, the book takes on esoteric topics, none of which had little initial appeal to me. But the enduring greatness of the game and the quality of the research brought these topics to light. They include women in the game, baseball music, baseball writing, and baseball and alcohol. There's a shout-out to Bill James, well deserved, as he was rewriting and rewiring the game at the time.
There are a lot of gems in those midsection chapters, such as tales of women college leagues, early painting depictions of baseball, and baseball and beer barons. I like how they pointed out that famous early etchings and paintings repeated the historical errors and myths of the "first game" in Hoboken or Cooperstown, and other stuff like that. The chapter on umpires is good as well, with a quick jump backwards from today's relatively well paid and protected umps to the dangerous conditions under which they used to perform. That umpire chapter yielded a shock to me that baseball didn't have three umps in regular season games until 1933 and four until 1952. Similarly, the music chapter was better than I expected it to be. And with YouTube (not in existence when the book was written), you could look up all of those songs that are mentioned.
The "look it up aspect" is really strong in this book. The authors reference hundreds of books, mainstream articles and journal articles. I'll bet most can be found online these days, and I'm sure there is an astonishing array of new research on every topic in this book. I'm going to read several of the novels the authors mention. I think I can do without the songs, and I know I'll never need to hear "Willie, Mickey and the Duke" ever again, as that was painful back when it was released.
With all that said, there are mistakes in this book, which was surprising to me, given that it was an edited and updated edition. A few were typos, like "of" instead of "off". A couple were more grievous, with the one I remember being a reference to the "Jamestown Flood," which, of course, was the "Johnstown Flood" that was so horrific that the site is now a national historic site in Pennsylvania. (I've been there, and it's interesting.) And it was disconcerting that the book was written as if it was published in late 1989 or early 1990, but the edition I read was allegedly updated in 1996. There are one or two post-1989 references, but only one or two (such as the potential of a woman major league umpire and then what happened), but the rest of the book remained written as if 1990 had not yet happened. So that was weird.
Bottom line. If you're a big baseball fan, add this to your library. It has nuggets you don't know, and even if you know a lot of the stuff in this book, it runs through the topics in an entertaining way.
January 14, 2020
This reminds me a lot of "Baseball: The People's Game" by Harold Seymour, which focused on the aspects of the world's greatest sport off the field through about 1940.
This effort does have its moments, particularly with respect to the struggles African-Americans have had with getting a full level of respect. I suppose this works as a one-stop lookup on a particular topic, but it just doesn't flow well (items get repeated ad nauseam), and really a note should be given to the authors that their humor just doesn't go over well.
Finally, while I respect the fact that there have been three editions of this book, a better effort should have been made to make the endpoint more consistent - at various points it seems that it was written in 1989 AND 1995.
This effort does have its moments, particularly with respect to the struggles African-Americans have had with getting a full level of respect. I suppose this works as a one-stop lookup on a particular topic, but it just doesn't flow well (items get repeated ad nauseam), and really a note should be given to the authors that their humor just doesn't go over well.
Finally, while I respect the fact that there have been three editions of this book, a better effort should have been made to make the endpoint more consistent - at various points it seems that it was written in 1989 AND 1995.
February 20, 2010
This was an okay read, but it didn't really add anything to my knowledge of baseball. Trivia mostly.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews