Crazy 08

Crazy '08
Cait Murphy (2007)

Crazy '08 is the story of the 1908 pennant races. That National League race is immortal because of the famous "Merkle boner", when a game tied because Giants rookie Fred Merkle failed to touch second base on the otherwise game-winning single had to be replayed. The American League race was decided only by the teams running out of games, and by the absence of a rule requiring all games possibly affecting a pennant race be made up. It is also most notable as being the last season to date when the Chicago Cubs won the World Series. Theodore Roosevelt was president, radio was an experiment, Ford was just introducing the Model T, and the Cubs were repeat champions.

Murphy's long, engrossing story is mostly well-written and, as far as I can tell, quite accurate. It is a welcome addition to the baseball bookshelf. The only quibbles I have are a tendency by the author (a business writer and daughter of the longtime author of Prince Valiant) to excessively colloquial writing, and a similar tendency to use archaisms like "hard by" for "next to" in the text. I suspect this is just a tic picked up from her poring over all the purple prose that passed for sports-writing in the first decade of the 20th century.