Addie Joss on Baseball

Addie Joss (1880–1911) mowed down batters for the Cleveland Broncos/Naps from 1902 to 1910 before his career was cut short by his tragic death from tubercular meningitis in 1911. With a career ERA of 1.89 and two no-hitters, Joss earned Hall of Fame election despite a career that lasted less than ten years, the only player to do so. In the off-season, Joss also excelled as a sportswriter for the Toledo News-Bee and the Cleveland Press, filling the empty winter months penning stories about the game he knew firsthand. This collection of Joss’s newspaper columns and World Series reports is a treasury of the deadball era with intimate first-person observations of the game and its players from the first decade of the American League. Informative annotations, archival photographs, and a brief biography complete the work.

Rich Blevins is professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, and a member of the Society for American Baseball Research.

Addie Joss. Series Editors Gary Mitchem and Mark Durr
Format: softcover (6 x 8)
Pages: 349
Bibliographic Info: 9 photos, appendix, notes, bibliography, index
Copyright Date: 2012
pISBN: 978-0-7864-6356-5
eISBN: 978-0-7864-8951-0
Imprint: McFarland
Series: The McFarland Historical Baseball Library

Table of Contents


Acknowledgments viii

Preface xi

A Brief Biography xvii

1. “I Have Not Had Better Friends”: Players, Great Players and All the Rest 1

2. “The Sporting Editor”: Baseball Humor 59

3. “The Boys Played Grandly”: Greatest Games and Plays 112

4. Of Fanatics, Kranks and Bugs: The Fans 138

5. “Another Remarkable Instance”: The Inside Game 151

6. Of Spiders and Colonels: The ­Nineteenth-­Century Game 223

7. “Is the American League a Minor League?”: World Series Reports 235

8. “I Should Suggest”: Views from Toledo 273

Appendix: Contributions by Joss to Other Newspapers and Periodicals 295

Chapter Notes 303

Bibliography 309

Index 313

“One of the best but least-heralded developments in the recent history of baseball literature was the inauguration of the McFarland Historical Baseball Library in 2003”—I>Spitball; “invaluable McFarland Historical Baseball Library series”—Edward Achorn, The Providence Journal.