They Played the Game

Noted baseball historian Norman L. Macht brings together a wideranging collection of baseball voices from the Deadball Era through the 1970s, including nine Hall of Famers, who take the reader onto the field, into the dugouts and clubhouses, and inside the minds of both players and managers. These engaging, wide-ranging oral histories bring surprising revelationsboth highlights and lowlightsabout their careers, as they revisit their personal mental scrapbooks of the days when they played the game. Not all of baseballs best stories are told by its biggest stars, especially when the stories are about those stars. Many of the storytellers youll meet in They Played the Game are unknown to todays fans: the Red Soxs Charlie Wagner talks about what it was like to be Ted Williamss roommate in Williamss rookie year; the Dodgers John Roseboro recounts his strategy when catching for Don Drysdale and Sandy Koufax; former Yankee Mark Koenig recalls batting ahead of Babe Ruth in the lineup, and sometimes staying out too late with him; John Francis Daley talks about batting against Walter Johnson; Carmen Hill describes pitching against Babe Ruth in the 1927 World Series.