Baseball's Greatest Season, 1924

Back Cover

Baseball’s Greatest Season recovers the memory of the one and only time when the championship of the national pastime resided in the nation’s capital. “Was 1924 really the greatest season? In a well-argued account, Browning cites as evidence the close races in both leagues and Walter Johnson’s seventh-game World Series win for Washington over the Giants. . . . Browning weaves an appealing story, alternating his narrative chapters with ones about baseball’s players, business dealings, and other sidelights.”—Library Journal “Browning is a graceful and vigorous writer who has the ability to take you back to the games themselves in a startlingly immediate way. . . . Other writers have focused on individual seasons to good effect. No one has done it better than Browning does here.” —Ronald Story, editor of Sports in Massachusetts: Historical Essays “Baseball’s Greatest Season, 1924 captures the mounting drama of this memorable season while placing the story in a broader context. [Browning] discusses how baseball operated as a business then, who the players were, what fans and parks were like and how the game was played.”—SABR Bookshelf Reed Browning is professor of history and former provost at Kenyon College. He is author of Cy Young: A Baseball Life as well as several books on European history. 1924 FINALISTFORTHESEYMOURMEDALOFTHESOCIETYFORAMERICANBASEBALLRESEARCH No season in the history of baseball has matched 1924 for escalating excitement and emotional investment by fans. It began with observers expecting yet another World Series between the Yankees and the Giants. It ended months later when the Washington Nationals, making their first Series appearance, grabbed the world championship by scoring the season-ending run on an improbable play in the bottom of the twelfth inning of the seventh game. On the eve of the return of the Nationals to major league baseball,
University of Massachusetts Press Amherst & Boston www.umass.edu/umpress ,!7IB5F8-ejeihj!:t;K;k;K;k ISBN 1-55849-487-1 Photos (front cover) Bucky Harris of the Washington Nationals; (back cover) The Washington Nationals posing with President Coolidge just before the World Series. Courtesy of the National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cooperstown, N.Y. ...