The Cooperstown Chronicles: Baseball’s Colorful Characters, Unusual Lives, and Strange Demises

Russo, coauthor of Bury My Heart at Cooperstown: Salacious, Sad, and Surreal Deaths in the History of Baseball, celebrates the big personalities of baseball’s past, listing some of the game’s Golden Age rascals and their odd deaths. To start, he names two old-school teams, the original Baltimore Orioles and the Cleveland Spiders, whose fans knew they’d see a good brawl along with the base-running. Star players such as Cap Anson, Ty Cobb, and Enos Slaughter were known for their bigotry and hard-charging attitudes as well as their gifts. The rowdy chapter on hell-raisers spotlights personalities like Terry Larkin, King Kelly, Bob Spade, Mickey Welch, Rabbit Maranville, Casey Stengel, and Mickey Mantle, whose followers loved their antics both on and off the field. His section on pitchers, who threw at the batter’s head despite the rules, rates some cringe-worthy alarm along with a chuckle or two over the acts of mound mayhem. Known as a scholar of baseball necrology, Russo tries to top Hollywood Babylon with unattractive sections on mysterious deaths and unusual resting places. This book will be an odd curio for fans of the national pastime. (Nov.)