Cobb Would Have Caught It: The Golden Age of Baseball in Detroit

Great Lakes Books Series

by Richard Bak

The period from 1920 through the early post-World War II years remains the greatest in the long history of the Detroit Tigers Baseball Club. Between 1920 and 1950 the club won four pennants and two World Series, placed second seven times, and regularly fielded exciting, competitive teams.

Richard Bak spent ten years recording the life stories of nearly two dozen Tigers players from Detroit's "golden age." There was no pattern to how life had treated them since their playing days―some had stayed in the game as broadcasters or scouts; others had slipped into quiet anonymity as milkmen or machine repairmen. Bak retains the flavor of each man's speech and the integrity of his character. Players' interviews are prefaced with a short history of the parallel paths the city and professional baseball took from the end of World War I through the early 1950s.

Genres: Baseball

392 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

RICHARD BAK is a Detroit-based journalist and the author of twenty-five books, including 'Henry and Edsel: The Creation of the Ford Empire' and 'Peach: Ty Cobb in His Time and Ours.' He has received three ForeWord magazine Book-of-the-Year awards, the Stuart D. and Vernice M. Gross Prize for Literature, and two Emmys for his work as writer and coproducer of "Stranded at the Corner," a feature-length documentary about the fight to save Detroit's Tiger Stadium.

Reviews

[Roger Piasecki · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book on Detroit Tigers players both famous and not.

[Chris Dean · Rating 4 out of 5]

Detroit baseball's "Glory of Their Times." A must for Tiger fans in specific and baseball fans in general. Great first person narratives of early 1900's ballplayers. Even if Flea Clifton never got his photos back from the author. :-)