You know me Al

I greatly enjoyed this fictional collection of letters, primarily because of the humor and the history. Ring Lardner's character Jack Keefe writes these letters as the country bumpkin, ala Mark Twain's Keokuk Post letters. This was apt for ballplayers of the deadball era, who were less educated than today's players. Shoeless Joe is a near contemporary example for Jack.

A lot of the humor comes from the manipulations of Jack by his manager and other players. Lardner emphasizes this by having Jack declare in one letter that he absolutely won't do something and in the next that he is, and of course it was his choice. I also derived quite a bit of humor in Jack's descriptions of left handed pitchers and other players on both teams.

The history of baseball in a two year period, 1913 and 1914, is well told by what happens behind the scenes. When the fictional Jack reports on a game, the outcome is based on a real game played by the Chicago White Sox, and the players he mentions performed as described. This is especially telling when, towards the end of the story, Jack is convinced to participate in the 1913-1914 World Tour. The US stops are covered and, again, accurate, including two games in Seattle and Tacoma cancelled on account of rain.

The only drawback for me was the extensive offseason coverage of Jack's trials, including a repeated discussion of a lease in Bedford. I understand this collection has also been turned into a series of comic strips - I would wager that most of the non-baseball stuff was left out.

The letters were first published in the Saturday Evening Post, and had a large following. The book, reprinting these, sold less well at the time, but it is in that form that this work survives. Highly recommended for fans of baseball's deadball era.