"Boston later had Babe Ruth, and in recent years Ted Williams, but to many Boston fans Tris Speaker still is the number one player who ever wore the crimson socks of the Red Sox. He was the game's matchless center fielder... He was the player without a weakness; he could hit, run, and field and had the daring, aggressive winning spirit of a real champion. But for the fact that his career was contemporaneous with Cobb's, he would have stood out even more strongly." |
 Tris Speaker The Rough-and-Tumble Life of a Baseball Legend by Timothy M. Gay "Easily the finest center fielder of his generation and one of the best ever... Speaker has been forgotten; somehow he's fallen out of baseball's pantheon," writes biographer Timothy Gay, who laces a line drive up the middle with his story of the rough-hewn Texan whose fielder's glove was known as the place "where triples go to die" and whose career batting average (.345) ranks 4th all-time. This book, like its subject, deserves our attention.  The Boston Red Sox by Frederick G.Lieb Southern Illinois University Press "There has been a glorious past for the Red Sox, some cruel intervening years, a satisfying present, but the greatest Red Sox years are still ahead," wrote Fred Lieb in 1947, when this history of the team was first published. Whether Lieb's forecast was accurate is certainly debatable, but the glory years of 1903-1918 are recounted and the team's renaissance in 1946 is enthusiastically documented in this book, recently republished in the Southern Illinois University Press Writing Baseball series.. |
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