Baseball at the Abyss

Dan Taylor is a sports historian, baseball broadcaster, and former award-winning television sportscaster. He is the author of seven books, his most recent being Out of the Rough: Ted Rhodes and His Fight Against Golf's Color Barrier. Previous works include Walking Alone: The Untold Journey of Football Pioneer Kenny Washington and Lights, Camera, Fastball: How the Hollywood Stars Changed Baseball, which was a finalist for the Casey Award for baseball book of the year. Taylor is a member of the Society for American Baseball Research and contributes to their Biography Project. He lives in California.

• AcknowledgementsIntroduction1 Sour Grape Grower 2 Landing the Big One3 Tarnished Stars4 The Very Important Hero5 Ty Swings Away6 Baseball at the Abyss 7 Decision Day8 The Red Faced Cardinal 9 Stealing the Show 10 Reinvigorating Babe Ruth 11 Digesting a Cobb Salary 12 That’s a Wrap 13 The Plan Goes Awry 14 A Different Babe 15 Dawn of a New Day16 Move Over Babe17 Reviews Are In18 Rewrite the Record Book19 The Greatest Season20 From Disdain to AcclaimBibliographyAbout the Author

The Great Bambino sucking it up and adapting to the shift by hitting to the opposite field is one of many tasty morsels in Dan Taylor’s Baseball at the Abyss. It’s the story of how the rollicking home run chase between Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in 1927 gave baseball a shot in the arm after multiple gambling scandals had (supposedly) soured the public. The Yankees teammates went back and forth all summer, with Ruth reaching the immortal 60 in the season’s penultimate game. But the heart of Taylor’s book is the relationship between Ruth and Christy Walsh, an adman who became the Babe’s personal manager before that sort of thing really existed. In 1921, a flailing Walsh came up with the idea to syndicate ghostwritten newspaper columns under Ruth’s byline, a sports first, to capitalize on the slugger’s ever-expanding popularity…. Taylor delivers the Ruthian goods. A particular favorite detail was random fans sending Ruth weight-loss tips, including a woman from Cleveland who “urged Ruth to eat ten pineapples a day."