Description
Jerrold Casway's fascinating biography of legendary baseball player Ed Delahanty (1867-1903) offers a compelling examination of the first "King of Swatsville's" life and career, including the enigma surrounding his tragic and untimely death. Through Delahanty's story, Casway traces the evolving character of major league baseball and its effect on the lives and ambitions of its athletes.
Delahanty's career spanned the last decades of the nineteenth century during a time when the sons of post-famine Irish refugees dominated the sport and changed the playing style of America's national pastime. In this "Emerald Age" of baseball, Irish-American players comprised 30-50 percent of all players, managers, and team captains. Baseball for Delahanty and other young Irishmen was a ticket out of poverty and into a life of fame and fortune. The allure and promise of celebrity and wealth, however, were disastrous for Delahanty. He found himself enmeshed in desperate contract dealings and a gambling addiction that drove him to alcohol abuse. The owner of the fourth highest lifetime batting average, Delahanty mysteriously disappeared and was found at the bottom of Niagara's Horseshoe Falls.
This rich biography, which relies on previously unavailable family papers and court transcripts, as well as the colorful sports reporting of the period, will appeal to anyone interested in baseball, sports, or Irish history.
Author: Jerrold Casway
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
Published: 02/28/2006
Pages: 400
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.39lbs
Size: 9.22h x 6.14w x 1.16d
ISBN13: 9780268022914
ISBN10: 0268022917
BISAC Categories:
- Sports & Recreation | Baseball | History
- Biography & Autobiography | Sports
- History | United States | 19th Century
About the Author
Jerrold Casway is professor of history and chair of the Social Sciences/Teacher Education Division at Howard Community College in Columbia, Maryland. He specializes in early modern Irish history and nineteenth-century baseball.