Cap Anson 1: When Captaining a Team Meant Something: Leadership in Baseball's Early Years, and: Cap Anson 2: The Theatrical and Kingly Mike Kelly, U.S. Team Sport's First Media Sensation and Baseball's Original Casey at the Bat, and: Cap Anson 3: Muggsy McGraw and the Tricksters: Baseball's Fun Age of Rule Bending, and: Cap Anson 4: Bigger Than Babe Ruth: Cap Anson of Chicago (review)

Reviewed by: Cap Anson 1: When Captaining a Team Meant Something: Leadership in Baseball’s Early Years, and: Cap Anson 2: The Theatrical and Kingly Mike Kelly, U.S. Team Sport’s First Media Sensation and Baseball’s Original Casey at the Bat, and: Cap Anson 3: Muggsy McGraw and the Tricksters: Baseball’s Fun Age of Rule Bending, and: Cap Anson 4: Bigger Than Babe Ruth: Cap Anson of Chicago David L. Fleitz Howard W. Rosenberg. Cap Anson 1: When Captaining a Team Meant Something: Leadership in Baseball’s Early Years. Arlington, VA: Tile Books, 2003. 394 pp. Cloth, $28.00. Cap Anson 2: The Theatrical and Kingly Mike Kelly, U.S. Team Sport’s First Media Sensation and Baseball’s Original Casey at the Bat. Arlington, VA: Tile Books, 2004. 438 pp. Cloth, $29.00. Cap Anson 3: Muggsy McGraw and the Tricksters: Baseball’s Fun Age of Rule Bending. Arlington, VA: Tile Books, 2005. Cloth, $30.00. Cap Anson 4: Bigger Than Babe Ruth: Cap Anson of Chicago. Arlington, VA: Tile Books, 2006. 560 pp. Cloth, $33.00. Most casual baseball fans have little idea of how old Major League Baseball really is. They may know that the game was popular when their parents and grandparents were young, but few realize that the organized professional game was already more than half a century old when Babe Ruth belted his record 60 homers in 1927. The fan who goes to a few games a year and watches A-Rod, Big Papi, and the rest on television might be surprised to learn that on June 24, 1876, the day before General Custer and his troops lost their lives at Little Big Horn, Boston defeated Cincinnati by an 8–7 score. [End Page 143] Nineteenth-century ball differed in many ways from the present game, and a recent explosion of activity in baseball scholarship has brought the long-neglected early history of the sport into sharper focus. Now Howard W. Rosenberg, an editor from Arlington, Virginia, has weighed in with his contribution. He set up his own publishing company, Tile Books, and has produced four volumes (to date) of tales, events, and interesting tidbits about nineteenth-century baseball, grouped around the person of that past century's greatest player and manager, Adrian (Cap) Anson of Chicago. In Cap Anson 1: When Captaining a Team Meant Something: Leadership in Baseball's Early Years, Rosenberg studies the role of the captain in nineteenth-century ball. A team captaincy is little more than an honorific in today's game, but Rosenberg describes how the captain of the 1800s was more akin to the modern manager, only with infinitely more responsibility. Rosenberg documents how Anson, who gained his nickname from his position as captain and manager of the Chicago White Stockings from 1879 to 1897, not only dictated strategy on the field but scouted and signed players, served as a one-man coaching and training staff, enforced discipline, and made travel accommodations on the road. Despite all this responsibility, Anson somehow found the time and energy to bat in the cleanup spot, lead the team in runs batted in, and win several batting titles. Rosenberg has performed a voluminous amount of research, which proves to be both the greatest strength and the major weakness of his books. These works are invaluable for their well-indexed clippings from the newspapers of every major-league city, and also from The Sporting News, Sporting Life, and other periodicals. However, the sheer volume of information overwhelms Rosenberg's ability to place his findings into context. The text has little shape or organization; as one reviewer has commented, Rosenberg's books are more like scrapbooks. There are more than fifty pages of endnotes in Cap Anson 1 because nearly every paragraph in the book features a quote from a contemporary newspaper. It's a blessing for the researcher, who can save many hours of digging through microfilm merely by consulting the endnotes, but difficult for the casual reader. In Cap Anson 2: The Theatrical and Kingly Mike Kelly: U.S. Team Sport's First Media Sensation and Baseball's Original Casey at the Bat, Rosenberg divides his focus between...

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