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BaseballChronology.com: CASEY Award Honorees for 2004

By Patrick Mondout

Spitball: The Literary Baseball Magazine has awarded one baseball book each year since 1983 with their CASEY Award. Awards announced early in the year for the previous year's books. Thus, the 2005 award below was presented in April of 2006. We have a list of the finalists and winner below, including links to the book at Amazon.com for your convenience. We also have a list of all winners and finalists from 1983-2006.

CASEY AWARD WINNERS & FINALISTS
WINNER		Ted Williams: The Life of an American Hero by Leigh Montville "Montville's biography makes a good case that Williams was, if not the greatest hitter ever to play the game, certainly among them. For his focused, scientific approach to hitting, Williams is unmatched in the history of the game. His life, marred perhaps by a temper and occasional immaturity that soured his reputation in Boston, is one of true sports greatness. Early in the book, Montville argues that Williams is less appreciated today than he might be because he played out most of his 19-year career in the era before televised highlights. But with Montville's efforts to capture first-hand accounts of Williams's achievements, The Splendid Splinter's legacy is assured." Read more...
FINALIST		History of the Junior World Series by Bob Bailey "This resource presents a year-by-year account of the longest-running post-season series in minor league history. Each series from the early informal efforts between 1904 and 1919 through the 1920 and 1962 period when the JWS was the culmination of the minor league season to the last thirty years of stops-and-starts is presented." Read more...
FINALIST		The Last Best League by Jim Collins "Every summer, in ten small towns across Cape Cod, the finest college baseball players in the country gather in hopes of making it to"The Show." The hopes are justifiably high: The Cape Cod Baseball League is the best amateur league in the world, producing one out of every six major league players, from Nomar Garciaparra and Frank Thomas to Jeff Bagwell and Barry Zito. Jim Collins chronicles a season in the life of one team-the Chatham A's, perhaps the most celebrated team in the league. Set against the backdrop of a resort town on the bend of the outer Cape, the story charts the changing fortunes of a handful ?of players battling slumps and self-doubt in their effort to make the league playoffs and, more importantly, impress the major league scouts. We learn about everything from the physics of wooden bats and the physiology of elbows to the psychology of slumps and the lure of drugs. In the course of a single dramatic season, with euphoric wins and devastating losses, we come to know the intricacies of the major league scouting network and the rapidly changing profile of major league baseball." Read more...
FINALIST		Joe: Rounding Third & Heading for Home by Greg Hoard "Noted sportscaster Greg Hoard's new biography, Joe, dramatically paints the Depression era background of "Hamilton Joe," closing industrial league games for his athletic father when the boy was barely a teenager, facing feared veteran slugger Stan Musial his first time up, and on to Birmingham, where he watched, astounded, while a lanky Negro pitcher named Satchel Paige warmed up by throwing strikes across a piece of chewing gum tinfoil. "The Old Left-Hander" pitched twenty-two seasons of professional baseball, including an All-Star year in 1955 when he led the league in shut-outs, and even when he retired to the broadcasting booth, he was still pitching batting practice. Greg Hoard's tale of baseball's last great innocent is the story of a charmed life, in which a blue-collar kid from a gritty industrial town, by great athleticism and a disarming guilelessness, found himself an enduring legend." Read more...
FINALIST		Negro League Baseball: The Rise and Ruin of a Black Institution by Neil Lanctot "Negro League Baseball: The Rise and Ruin of a Black Institution presents the extraordinary history of a great African American achievement, from its lowest ebb during the Depression, through its golden age and World War II, until its gradual disappearance during the early years of the civil rights era. Faced with only a limited amount of official league documents and correspondence, Lanctot consulted virtually every sports page of every black newspaper located in a league city. He then conducted interviews with former players and scrutinized existing financial, court, and federal records. Through his efforts, Lanctot has painstakingly reconstructed the institutional history of black professional baseball, locating the players, teams, owners, and fans in the wider context of the league's administration. In addition, Lanctot provides valuable insight into the changing attitudes of African Americans toward the need for separate institutions." Read more...
FINALIST		The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty by Buster Olney "In The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty, Buster Olney tracks the Yankees through these tumultuous seasons and into the scandals and disappointments of 2004, providing insightful portraits of the stars, the foot soldiers, the coaches, the manager, and the Boss himself. With unparalleled knowledge of the game and an insider's familiarity with the team, Olney also advances a compelling argument that the philosophy that made the Yankees great was inherently unsustainable, ultimately harmful to the sport, and led inevitably to that warm autumn night in Arizona -- the last night of the Yankee dynasty." Read more...
FINALIST		The Bad Guys Won! by Jeff Pearlman "It was 1986, and the New York Mets won 108 regular-season games and the World Series, capturing the hearts (and other assorted body parts) of fans everywhere. But their greatness on the field was nearly eclipsed by how bad they were off it. Led by the indomitable Keith Hernandez and the young dynamic duo of Dwight Gooden and Darryl Strawberry, along with the gallant Scum Bunch, the Amazin's left a wide trail of wreckage in their wake -- hotel rooms, charter planes, a bar in Houston, and most famously Bill Buckner and the hated Boston Red Sox. With an unforgettable cast of characters -- including Doc, Straw, the Kid, Nails, Mex, and manager Davey Johnson -- this "affectionate but critical look at this exciting season" (Publishers Weekly) celebrates the last of baseball's arrogant, insane, rock-and-roll-and-party-all-night teams, exploring what could have been, what should have been, and what never was." Read more...
FINALIST		The Numbers Game: Baseball’s Lifelong Fascination with Statistics by Alan Schwarz "In this unprecedented new book, Alan Schwarz - whom bestselling Moneyball author Michael Lewis calls "one of today's best baseball journalists" - provides the first-ever history of baseball statistics, showing how baseball and its numbers have been inseparable ever since the pastime's birth in 1845. He tells the history of this obsession through the lives of the people who felt it most: Henry Chadwick, the 19th-century writer who invented the first box score and harped endlessly about which statistics mattered and which did not; Allan Roth, Branch Rickey's right-hand numbers man with the late-1940s Brooklyn Dodgers; Earnshaw Cook, a scientist and Manhattan Project veteran who retired to pursue inventing the perfect baseball statistic; John Dewan, a former Strat-O-Matic maven who built STATS Inc. into a multimillion-dollar powerhouse for statistics over the Internet; and dozens more." Read more...
FINALIST		The Ticket Out: Darryl Strawberry and the Boys of Crenshaw by Michael Sokolove "The year was 1979 and the fifteen teenagers on the Crenshaw High Cougars were the most talented team in the history of high school baseball. Most of the team were drafted into professional baseball. Two of them, Darryl Strawberry and Chris Brown, would reunite as teammates on a National League All-Star roster. But Michael Sokolove's The Ticket Out is more a story of promise denied than of dreams fulfilled." Read more...
FINALIST		The College World Series: A Baseball History 1947-2003 by W. C. Madden and Patrick J. Stewart "In 1947, the University of California and Yale University baseball teams took the field in Kalamazoo, Michigan, to play the first-ever NCAA Division I College World Series. It was a two-day, three-game Series with an attendance of less than 4,000. Today, it is a weeklong Series held in Omaha, Nebraska, with eight teams, tens of thousands of fans and millions more watching on television. This book covers each College World Series from the first game in 1947 through the 2003 Series, between Rice and Stanford universities. The authors devote a chapter to each decade, and then cover each game of each Series. They also provide information on standout players’ careers (in baseball and other professions) after playing in the College World Series. NCAA Division II and III teams are also covered, and the appendix features short profiles of great college coaches." Read more...
BEST BASEBALL BOOKS OF EACH YEAR ACCORDING TO SPITBALL MAGAZINE