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Carregando... The Black Prince of Baseball: Hal Chase and the Mythology of the Gamede Don Dewey
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Registre-se no LibraryThing tpara descobrir se gostará deste livro. Ainda não há conversas na Discussão sobre este livro. Being the life of Hal Chase, deadball baseball's foremost scapegrace. In their rather crabbed introduction, the authors explain that they're going to rectify the errors of previous biographers (strangely not mentioned in their bibliography) who have succumbed to either the Scylla of demonizing Chase or the Charybdis of offering him their forgiveness as an unfortunate scapegoated by baseball's powers-that-be for doing nothing more than was commonly winked at in his day; however, the latter approach is precisely what they end up doing. Which is not to say that this is a bad book; the authors are exceptionally talented writers who have researched the source material exhaustively. The book's main, if not only, problem is its considerable length. For deadball obsessives like myself, this isn't much of a problem. But it did take me three weeks to wade through this, an expenditure of precious reading time which I find it difficult not to resent, and, more to the point, makes it hard to recommend this to those not similarly obsessed, particularly since there is at least one other perfectly acceptable biography which is less of a doorstop. Moreover, it isn't difficult to suss out why the book is overlong, viz., the rather extended account of the Black Sox affair, which Chase appears to have had only a rather tenuous connection with, though many a baseball luminary, then and since, has tried to damn him into a more significant role. Chase's long career of thrown games and point man for various gambling schemes have kept him out of the Hall of Fame despite the many who claim that he was baseball's greatest first baseman. Surely that's obloquy enough. ( ) sem resenhas | adicionar uma resenha
As America lurched into the twentieth century, its national pastime was afflicted with the same moral malaise that was enveloping the rest of the nation. Players regularly bet on games, games were routinely fixed, and league politics were as dirty as the base paths. Against this backdrop, Hal Chase emerged as one of the game's greatest players and also as one of its most scandalous characters. With charisma and bravado that earned him the nickname The Prince, Chase charmed his way across America, spinning lies in the afternoon, dealing high-stakes poker at night, and gambling with beautiful women until dawn. Most notoriously of all, he undermined his stature as the era's greatest first baseman by conniving with gamblers to fix games and draw teammates into his diamond conspiracies. But as Donald Dewey and Nicholas Acocella reveal in their groundbreaking biography, The Black Prince of Baseball, Chase was also a scapegoat for baseball notables with hands even dirtier than his. These included league officials who ignored facts in an attempt to pin the 1919 Black Sox scandal on him and--a previously unknown twist--the fabled John McGraw, who perjured himself on a witness stand against the first baseman. Although Chase, contrary to popular belief, was never banned from the major leagues, meticulous research by the authors implicates him in other shady enterprises as well, not least an attempt to blackmail revivalist Aimee Semple McPherson. As The Black Prince of Baseball makes clear, in his protean talents and larcenies, Hal Chase personified all the excesses of Ragtime. Não foram encontradas descrições de bibliotecas. |
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