Major League Baseball Profiles, 1871-1900, 2-volume set

In its infancy, major league baseball was anyone's game, open to a dizzying array of rogues and scamps, athletic giants and captains of industry, hustlers, managers, and umpires who transformed club-based teams into the first professional federations with formalized rules - and commercial considerations. This two-volume work - with its profiles of every key contributor to the Major League game from May 4, 1871, through December 31, 1900 - is truly "inside baseball," with its fact-filled chronicle. Volume 1 profiles all the key position players and pitchers of the nineteenth century, giving detailed information about each player's role in the game, his debut and finale, high points and low, most important achievements, and relationship to ground-breaking diamond occurrences. Volume 2 features Hall of Famers who played in this era, as well as twenty other figures who haven't been enshrined but arguably should have because of their considerable impact on the game. It also profiles early day baseball's crooks, madcaps, homicide victims, suicides, and missing persons, in addition to the managers, team owners, and umpires who helped give the game its structure and shape as we know it. More than a collection of mere facts and statistics, Major League Baseball Profiles provides a unique history of the evolution of Major League baseball, from the date of the first Major League game in 1871 through the 1900 season, which marked not only the close of a century but also the unofficial end of what many believe to be the formative period of the game.