The Comic Book Story of Baseball: The Heroes, Hustlers, and History-Making Swings (and Misses) of America's National Pastime

by Alexander C. Irvine, Tomm Coker (Illustrator), C.P. Smith (Illustrator)

A graphic novel-style history of baseball--providing an illustrated chronological look at the major games, players, and rule changes that shaped the sport--presented in fun, easily understood chunks perfect for casual and diehard fans alike.

Sequential art steps up to the plate and covers all the bases with this illustrated origin of America's national pastime. Writer Alex Irvine and illustrators Tomm Coker (Black Monday Murders) and C.P. Smith team up to present a complete look at the beginnings (both real and legendary), developments, triumphs, and tragedies of baseball. The Comic Book Story of Baseball spotlights the players, teams, games, and moments that have kept the game so popular for so long. Not only does the book define key terms and explain how the game is played, it also breaks down the cultural impact and significance of the sport in America and overseas (including Japan, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic). From the early days of America to the flying W outside Wrigley Field in 2016, the book features members of Baseball's Hall of Fame and modern day stand-outs, including Cy Young, Honus Wagner, Babe Ruth, Jackie Robinson, Hank Aaron, the 1930s New York Yankees, the 2004 Boston Red Sox, the 2016 Chicago Cubs, and more.

Genres: Sports, Baseball, Graphic Novels, Nonfiction, History, Comics, Graphic Novels Comics

171 pages, Paperback

First published May 8, 2018

About the author

Alexander C. Irvine is an American fantasist and science fiction writer. He also writes under the pseudonym Alex Irvine. He first gained attention with his novel A Scattering of Jades and the stories that would form the collection Unintended Consequences. He has also published the Grail quest novel One King, One Soldier, and the World War II-era historical fantasy The Narrows.

In addition to his original works, Irvine has published Have Robot, Will Travel, a novel set in Isaac Asimov's positronic robot milieu; and Batman: Inferno, about the DC Comics superhero.

His academic background includes an M.A. in English from the University of Maine and a PhD from the University of Denver. He is an assistant professor of English at the University of Maine. He also worked for a time as a reporter at the Portland Phoenix.

Reviews

[Stewart Tame · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well … this is certainly a history of baseball, and it's in comics form, so: points for title accuracy. It reads well enough, and seems to do a decent job of getting the facts straight--I’m certainly no expert, but what little I do know of baseball history seems to agree with what I read.

These are, admittedly, text heavy comics. It's at least equally fair to call it illustrated prose. There's a lot of history to cover, though, so it's not as if there's space to devote to the multiple panels necessary to depict famous games or plays.

How compelling is this book? Let's put it this way: I have little interest in sports. What brought me to this book was my love of comics. If it had not been for that, I probably wouldn't have been curious about this book in the first place. Even with such miniscule interest in the topic, I never found myself getting bored or impatient. I never felt the impulse to skim ahead. I’m still largely indifferent to sports, but I feel at least slightly more knowledgeable about baseball. Recommended!

[James · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to love this book and use it in future classes I teach. I really did. It's a shame because the artwork is very incredible and fabulous to imagine yourself in the historical baseball eras that thread through American history. The problem is though, there are tons and tons of factual errors about baseball history in this book. At first I thought I was overreacting, but wow, they really add up from early on. Whoever edited this book for fact checking really failed at their job. It got the essentials right but screwed the pooch on the details.

If there's ever a second edition to this book, please please please go through and fix all the errors so I could use it in a classroom. Just check everything because I lost count of how many times I was like "Uh, that's not right." The worst mistake was "1941 was the last all new york world series until 1999" and then on the same page says the ny yankees and brooklyn dodgers played 4 more times.

[Anthony · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outstanding, fantastic artwork and incredible tales around the mythology of baseball and its players. Highly recommended for anyone with any interest in baseball and its history. Baseball plus the comic style is Americana at its finest.

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Finally a book about sports that actually makes me more interested in the sport! This book is everything I was hoping it to be. Perfect primer for those who know bugger-all about baseball & baseball history. The glossary in the back is very helpful. Do not take the Jeopardy test before reading this book! Highlights how central baseball stats have always been to baseball culture. The story of the game's evolution is very fascinating. The art really feels like it brings the people & places of past eras to life. Also discusses the place of baseball in American culture. I liked the quote from Virginia Woolf about baseball writer Ring Lardner: “He writes the best prose that has come our way… often in a language which is not english”. Packed with info & so is pretty dense reading for a comic book. Maybe that's just because I am so unfamiliar with baseball to start with, & so needed to consult the glossary to understand basic concepts. I now feel ready to read further books about Baseball, or maybe even watch some baseball!

[Rod Brown · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm hardly a fan of baseball, but this intensive info dump of trivia kept me engaged despite being text heavy and not particularly well formatted. Seriously, a graphic novel of this page count would normally take me about an hour to read, but this one took closer to three with its truckload of names and statistics. The book mostly takes a timeline approach throwing out the highlights of each year from page to page, with frequent side bars to highlight particular anecdotes and mini-bio pages for some of the major players. Alas, the side bars sometime blended into the narrative panels and the bios sometimes seemed randomly or poorly placed. I assume there are better histories with actual photographs out there, but I'm sure there is a small intersection in the Venn diagram of baseball and comic book fans who'll get a kick out of this.

[Jim Shaner · Rating 3 out of 5]

The comic book format is easy to digest, with humor at times. I also appreciate the epic scale of this volume, and its inclusion of perspectives from the early days. There is a rich history and tradition of baseball, and this book offers a good sampling of anecdotes and facts that time has passed on to obscurity. Plus, the author shines a light on the way baseball people have reacted to differences in skin color and culture in the sport.

However, the jumping back and forth between events occurring in different years makes it hard to follow “the story of baseball,” which is, after all, rather linear. In addition, finding a few historically inaccurate statements leaves me feeling uneasy about what else may have been stretched or glossed over. For example, the Montreal Expos were NOT anticipating the team’s first playoff appearance ahead of the 1994 strike, as claimed by the author. In fact, they played the Dodgers in the 1981 NLCS.

Despite these shortcomings, the work is packed with information and interesting tidbits. I certainly enjoyed reading this book about the game I love to watch and learn about.

[David H. · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great overview of baseball history (probably the best you'll get in 160 pages of illustrations). I knew a lot of it already as a baseball fan, but there was still a lot that will give me new aspects to research in the future. I also liked that the author included information about the Negro Leagues and about women throughout the book (other works I've seen tend to just give them a chapter separate from the rest), so it was nice to see them integrated (pun intended). The included glossary helps makes this a book you can give any a novice of the sport, but it probably helps to know some of the very basic elements of the sport.

[Steve Roylance · Rating 5 out of 5]

Must read for any baseball fan. Should be required reading for high schoolers

[Samantha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perfection.

[Travis · Rating 3 out of 5]

This edition in "The Comic Book Story of..." series is more akin to The Comic Book Story of Beer: The World's Favorite Beverage from 7000 BC to Today's Craft Brewing Revolution than The Comic Book Story of Professional Wrestling: A Hardcore, High-Flying, No-Holds-Barred History of the One True Sport. Like the story of beer, the story of baseball just contains too much history to efficiently fit into a 160 page graphic novel. There's a lot of words packed into the panels of this comic, while the artwork is workmanlike. I am not as familiar with baseball players' likenesses as I am with those of professional wrestlers, so several of the ball players blend together.

I did appreciate how much less dense this history of baseball is than something like Baseball in the Garden of Eden: The Secret History of the Early Game. That John Thorn book is actually directly referenced in this one. One advantage that prose book has over this graphic novel is treating time linearly. Since this book attempts to cover the entire history of baseball up to the current day, it winds up hopping around a lot. Several stories and facts get repeated. Too many instances of "but you'll read about that later" pop up. The player splash pages rarely line up with the content of the current "chapter." Some people with splash pages are never mentioned outside of their splash page (e.g. Mark Fidrych, George Foster).

There is a good mix of numbers and records versus stories and anecdotes. A book about baseball can easily become a list of statistics and box scores. This graphic novel avoids that issue. It also tries to acknowledge when a story is likely apocryphal. There is understandably a focus on New York teams throughout history, which might show some bias but is also fallout from the actual markets of baseball over the years.

Baseball is game with a storied, mythologized history. There's simply too much for a single book to contain. It has to cover too much time (from the murky origins of the game, to the early leagues, through modernization, to the current day) and too many players (from MLB to the Negro League to Japanese leagues and Latin American leagues). This book attempts that feat and winds up feeling like the CliffsNotes version of that history.

[Joseph R. · Rating 4 out of 5]

The origin of American Baseball goes back at least to the mid-1800s. It become popular in the states during the American Civil War. Formal leagues didn't come till much later and codification of the rules was ongoing into the early 1900s. Gloves, balls, and uniforms evolved over the years too. Many players came and went, often with interesting and eccentric stories. This book is a wide-angle look at the history of this iconic American pastime.

The book is fairly comprehensive, getting into details about the players from the 1870s till now (often with one-page or half-page biographies). It also describes the rules shifts (the pitcher's mound went up and down; how many balls constituted a walk eventually dropped to four; etc.) and some of the larger historical context (the impact of the World Wars and the Civil Rights movement, radio and television broadcasting, among others). The survey is fascinating but a bit scattershot. Occasionally things are just touched upon or there are abrupt shifts into other topics. The biographies and asides about details (like new teams added to the leagues or the difference between "dead ball" and "live ball" eras) make the flow even more choppy. It's hard to compress all that information into 170 pages, especially in a comic-book format.

Recommended for baseball fans or those curious, but be warned it has a little bit of everything.

[Ed Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book lives up to its name and provides fine artwork and highlights along the way. Here are just a few things I learned from reading this one:

+Jack Kerouac "created an entire fictional baseball league and kept meticulous track of its stats and records (https://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/16/bo...)

+ Anti-disco sentiment, which reached its peak (or nadir, depending), with the 1979 Comiskey Park Riot, may have actually been born of prejudice against minority and gay cultures, as those groups were heavily associated with the genre.

+ The Pirates fielded the first all-black nine-man line up in 1971. (September 1--https://andscape.com/features/on-this...)

+ The difference between a "pop up" and a "pop fly" is that the former is on the infield, and the latter is on the outfield.

Really fun book. And on a personal note, the passages on Pete Rose sent me back to YouTube clip heaven, where I watched clips of Charlie Hustle getting milestone hits. And once again, I find myself rooting for him to get into the Hall of Fame. Like one commenter on one of the clips says, MLB wants it both ways: they don't let him in the Hall, but they post his clips.

Good read.

And I almost forgot: Sandy Koufax was a beast. In 1963 he went 25 and 5 with a 1.88 ERA 😳

[matteo · Rating 3 out of 5]

First, the good: the illustrations are fantastic, and the book does cover a lot of ground. Beyond spanning 150+ years of history, they include sections on the Negro Leagues and women's baseball, as well as snippets on specific players throughout.

But: it's too short to cover everything, which means some stuff gets left out and what is included often carries a biased point of view. They frequently provide complimentary looks at certain teams (the Red Sox and Cubs, and Fenway and Wrigley) in particular). They mention the Dodgers/Giants moves from New York but otherwise not much about anything West Coast (they talk about the drought-ending championships of the White Sox, Red Sox, and Cubs while barely mentioning the Giants). They give the usual one-sided view on the steroid era (all blame on the players, with nary a mention of the managers and commissioner who rode their coattails to the Hall of Fame... and then they mention the potential of a DH getting into the Hall of Fame--David Ortiz, who did actually get in trouble for drugs--but he played for the Red Sox!). Expansion teams are barely referenced going back fifty years. The book is 160 pages long, but the last fifty years only get about 20 pages and the last decade gets only 2 pages.

[Kevin Hogg · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed the book. It's the second "Comic Book Story of..." book I've read--it's a great approach. There's a lot of history in this, including some facts and stories that I haven't heard before. There are some interesting perspectives on big moments in the game. I appreciated the include of the Negro Leagues and the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. And, as a Cubs fan, I though the ending was perfect. Overall, the book is a great way to present the story of the game.

Having said that, it's a short book.--too short to go into a lot of detail about the history of some events, and others have to be skipped over altogether. I was disappointed to see some stories (and some major names) left out. Some of the more famous teams are discussed in extensive detail, while a bunch are rarely mentioned (if at all). And then there was the story of a team formed to tour Japan--which was discussed twice. Much of the page was repeated in similar words just a few pages later, which should have been caught by an editor. I thought the portrayal of Kenesaw Mountain Landis was far too positive, and I wished some of the illustrations had been labeled. The book isn't perfect, but it's fun. So fun that it should have been a series rather than a single book.

[Dakota Morgan · Rating 4 out of 5]

While reading The Comic Book Story of Baseball, I realized that I enjoy reading about baseball far more than I enjoy watching the game. This was somewhat surprising considering the density of facts in the The Comic Book Story of Baseball and the fact that reading it takes easily as long as a baseball game. It's all fascinating stuff, though, perhaps moreso for a neophyte like myself. If you can reel off the names of famous players from the 40s and 50s, you probably don't need to read this. Otherwise, there's some definite fun to be had with the endless, chronological list of baseball facts (not to mention informative background entries on how and why the sport is played). Maybe the highest praise I can give The Comic Book Story of Baseball is that it is extremely coherently put together - very easy to follow the long, long, longgg history of baseball in this book. Illustrations are definitely meh, but they keep the pages turning better than if this was all words.

[Rick · Rating 1 out of 5]

I was really looking forward to reading this and when I skimmed it I found the graphics to be very impressive. What killed it for me where the numerous typos. Things that were embarrassingly wrong! One of the last ones that was the worst, by far, was referring to Ford Frick as the National League President who ruled that the record book must have an astrik next to Roger Maris's name when he beat Babe Ruth's single season home run record.

Not only had he been baseball commissioner since 1951 what in God's name would make them think the National League President could set rules for an American League record. So sloppy I can't imagine it ever made it into the book never mind was missed. There are several other mistakes but that one is the worst and makes the book a real waste. Maybe some money should have been spent on the copy and less on the graphics. (which are amazing by the way)

Please don't read this embarrassment of a baseball book

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lately I have found that I enjoy some graphic novels or histories more than I would expect. To some degree this is a chronological presentation of the "story of baseball" but as with many discussions of baseball, it often devolves into recitation of the almost endless different records and other measures of baseball achievement that aren't my favorite part of the game. Still, given the format, a fair amount is said about players and others as people and athletes (briefly - it is a graphic novel) and interesting comparisons of baseball during its history and society and culture more generally.

Reading something like this that moves through the entire long history of baseball in 168 pages, one realizes how crazy it is to compare different eras of play. It's the same game - except it isn't.

Worth a look from the public library, that's for sure.

[Rich Farrell · Rating 2 out of 5]

I guess this is closer to 2.5 starts, but I’m rounding down. I’m a baseball guy, and being that opening day is delayed, I thought this would be a great book to flip through. One of the things I love about baseball is the storylines. Instead of letting the story of baseball flow, this book is littered with panels highlighting stats and records out-of-context because no story ever gets moving. When there is story, particularly in the beginning, there seems to be a lot of repetition through full and half-page highlights of players. I think maybe this would’ve worked better as an informal walking tour of the Hall of Fame, where these stats mean more, but as far as a history of baseball, this fell pretty short.

[Kris Dersch · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a dense graphic history of 170 years of baseball...there's lots here and probably some new tidbits even for die-hards. As with any baseball book there is going to be bias (Bull Durham is the best baseball movie?) and the book could use some organization...it's told chronologically but with no chapter breaks and asides featuring different individuals stuck every which-way...this book could seriously have used a table of contents, although it does feature a glossary and an index. There's a factual error here and there, almost inevitable in a task this big but overall the information is good and entertaining and the art will make you feel that you are right in the game.

[Kyle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great art and lots of great history. Like other reviewers though, I was annoyed by the errors found in the book. At one point, the Arizona Cardinals (yes, NFL) logo was used in place of the St. Louis Cardinals logo. I would’ve also liked some more attention given to the 2000-present era. It seemed rushed, and even the ‘90s expansions teams were ignored, with just their logos on a panel with no mention of their names or feats (namely the Marlins and D’backs winning the World Series).

Great book overall though, and I learned a few new things along the way!

[Jim · Rating 3 out of 5]

This comic book provides a good overview of the history of professional baseball. As a lifelong baseball fan, I expected this read to cover what I already knew about our natural pastime. I was pleasantly surprised by how much I learned from this work, particularly about the early years of the game. More depth to the first half of the book - the second half gets a bit matter of fact, but overall I’m glad I gave it a look. This would be a great book for introducing the history of baseball to a son or daughter - regardless of age!

[Madi · Rating 1 out of 5]

This has been on my "Currently Reading" list since December, and it's officially time to mark this as DNF.

I fact-checked a few things with my baseball obsessed partner as I was reading, and they confirmed that some points were wholly incorrect. After reading other reviews and more about this book in general, I discovered that it's a consistent issue throughout the entire text. Quite disappointing, as I was hoping this would be one to reread or share with others.

DNF, page 45.

[SheMac · Rating 1 out of 5]

Awful. The author doesn’t seem to have a handle on baseball history or history in general. Let’s see... radio broadcasts in 1887, Curt Flood defeating the reserve clause in 1975 and a howler: in 1941, the Dodgers and Yankees played in the last all-New York World Series until 1999. I guess those series in ‘47, ‘49, 51, ‘52, ‘53, ‘55 and ‘56 must have been the all-Chicago series.

[Jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really enjoyed this book, though it might also have to do with the fact that playoffs will soon be underway, so I have baseball on my mind. The asides, the illustrations, and the little-known facts added dynamism to the straightforward chronological survey. An easy book to put down and come back to.

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very enjoyable, clever and well-told history of baseball. Includes facts and stories that even a lifelong fan of the game like myself did not know or hadn't heard. Great illustrations. Structured so readers can pick up and put down easily as well as skip around without problem. Engrossing and enjoyable. Borrowed from the library but will be adding my own copy to my personal collection soon.

[Gabriel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good informative read in one of the most confusing layouts in a book I’ve read. Things that should be labeled aren’t, some fairly lazy artwork and interrupting a narrative with an aside with no indication are a few problems that happen more than once here. Should be a 2 or 2.5 out of 5 but the subject can’t help but be engaging for a baseball game

[Stacy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I checked this out from the library as part of a package of baseball related books, puzzles and games. This is an awesome graphic novel of baseball history and facts. My father was a big baseball fan and I have a lot of fond memories of going to baseball games with him. I am going to purchase a copy for my baseball obsessed adult son but I think any baseball fan, young or old would enjoy it.

[Alex Abboud · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really enjoyed this. The illustrations are very well done. I dock it a star for several inaccuracies that baseball fans (or a fact checker) would catch. On the whole, still worth a read and I expect I’ll come back to it regularly as a light, fun read.

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was exactly that and well done. Some people might feel that the language gets a little salty. What did you expect? Baseball has always been salty. This guy did his homework and it feels like he didn't miss anything.

[Nick Pearson · Rating 4 out of 5]

While the stories are familiar to any serious baseball fan, the artwork adds a fantastic new dimension too them. Richly illustrated, this is a book I recommended to people looking to access the history of the game in a pleasurable and fun format.