Red Smith on Baseball

"August Adolphus Busch Jr., the new president of the Cardinals, is a chubby gentleman called Gussie, about the size of a St. Louis brewer. He has horn-rimmed glasses, a zillion dollars and an air of pleased bewilderment. He rides to the hounds and travels by bus." It's not hard to pluck a memorable passage from the sportswriting of Red Smith. In more than fifty years as a newspaperman, notably with the New York Herald Tribune and the New York Times, he earned a reputation as the best writer ever to confront the game of baseball-astute, clever, witty, and stylish. In this bountiful selection of his most memorable columns-175 of them, from 1941 to 1981-baseball fans can recapture some of baseball's greatest moments and most unforgettable characters. Jackie Robinson's debut is here, and so is Hank Greenberg hitting home runs; Enos Slaughter scoring the winning run in the seventh game of the 1946 World Series; Stan Musial, Ted Williams, Joe DiMaggio, Lou Boudreau; the sly antics of Charles Dillon Stengel; Durocher's lip; Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra, and scores of others. It's a baseball feast. Readers who are not baseball fans will have to be satisfied with just wonderful writing. With 14 black-and-white photographs.