Christopher Devine

Being a biography of influential baseball pioneer Wright. In its way the biography is workmanlike and contains solid information, but suffers from odd emphases and shoddy production. The author plods doggedly, almost game-by-game, through Wright's famed Red Stockings years, especially their historic winning streak, but then races through Wright's later stops in Boston (with an arguably better team), Providence, and Philadelphia, in the lastmost case doing a whiparound mushing together various seasons so that it becomes extremely difficult to follow the team's work on the field. The publisher should be ashamed of the book's workmanship; a running problem with extra spaces within words comes up throughout the book every two or three lines and is somewhere beneath 'amateurish'. Wright's life is pretty well documented by the standards of early baseball and his importance merits a biography; this one will do but could have been a better work.… (mais)