The Reading Warehouse

At the dawn of the roaring twenties, baseball was struggling to overcome two of its darkest moments: the death of a player during a Major League game and the revelations of the 1919 Black Sox scandal. At this critical juncture for baseball, two teams emerged to fight for the future of the game. They were also battling for the hearts and minds of New Yorkers as the city rose in dramatic fashion to the pinnacle of the baseball world.

1921 captures this crucial moment in the history of baseball, telling the story of a season that pitted the New York Yankees against their Polo Grounds landlords and hated rivals, John McGraw's Giants, in the first all-New York Series and resulted in the first American League pennant for the now-storied Yankees' franchise. Lyle Spatz and Steve Steinberg recreate the drama that featured the charismatic Babe Ruth in his assault on baseball records in the face of McGraw's disdain for the American League and the Ruth-led slugging style. Their work evokes the early 1920s with the words of renowned sportswriters such as Damon Runyon, Grantland Rice, and Heywood Broun. With more than fifty photographs, the book offers a remarkably vivid picture of the colorful characters, the crosstown rivalry, and the incomparable performances that made this season a classic.

Lyle Spatz is the author of many books, including Bad Bill Dahlen: The Rollicking Life and Times of an Early Baseball Star and Yankees Coming, Yankees Going: New York Yankee Player Transactions, 1903 through 1999. Steve Steinberg is the author of Baseball in St. Louis, 1900-1925 and numerous articles on early twentieth-century baseball, including feature articles for the annual New York Yankees official yearbooks. Charles C. Alexander is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at Ohio University. He is the author of several baseball books, including Spoke: A Biography of Tris Speaker and John McGraw (available in a Bison Books edition).