Book Log 2010 #15: The First Fall Classic by Mike Vaccaro

Joe Posnanski mentioned this book about a hundred times on his blog (Vaccaro is a friend of his), and so I felt compelled to pick it up when I came across it at the library. It's a very entertaining recounting of the 1912 World Series between the Red Sox and the (then) New York Giants, a rematch of sorts as the teams were slated to play in the 1904 World Series that never happened (there's a pretty good book out there about that, too, which I think I read pre-Log). There's a fair bit about that in this book, of course, and it also gives a bit of a prelude to 1919, between the appearance of gamblers like Abe Rothstein and the team-owner tensions that run throughout the series.

My only quibble is that the book tries to take the Devil in the White City approach by juxtaposing a big criminal case of the time against the subject. In this case it was some sort of police-involved murder trial that I'd never heard of but was apparently a big deal to New Yorkers in 1912. It perhaps merited a mention for color, but wasn't of any particularly good use as a running theme.