"Now there's three things you can do in a baseball game. You can win or you can lose or it can rain." -- Casey Stengel This is one of my favorite books on the history of baseball, because it has so many amazing pictures from the Baseball Hall of Fame, and Robert Lipsyte is such a fantastic storyteller. From the very beginnings of baseball (and whether or not Abner Doubleday really is the father of modern baseball), Lipsyte takes readers on a who's who tour of baseball history. Ty Cobb and Honus Wagner start off the players, with stories of how games were played so differently at the beginning of the 20th century. Cobb had a football attitude in his baseball game! Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle, Lou Gehrig, and Jackie Robinson also appear, along with the stories of the early segregated Negro Leagues. There are tales of hard-fought, well-played games, well-known and not-so-well-known Hall of Famers, and the players who changed the rules of the game -- often at great personal cost, like Curt Flood, who ended up in the Supreme Court over his rights as a player. This is excellent nonfiction for anyone who enjoys the game, and it's a perfect read for the start of the 2011 season! 6th grade and up. ( )

great details on baseball's historical players, Includes index, YA, Booklist, Chapter Book