20th Century Baseball Chronicle; A Year-By-Year History of Major League Baseball

Lincolnwood, IL: Publications International, LTD, 1992. Updated Edition, First printing [stated]. Hardcover. Good/very good. 592 pages. Illustrations (many in color). Illustrated endpaper. Index. Rear board slightly sprung. David Nemec (born December 10, 1938) is an American baseball historian, novelist and playwright. Nemec drew on his vast knowledge of baseball history to create The Absolutely Most Challenging Baseball Quiz Book, Ever (Macmillan, 1977), it launched a series of popular Nemec baseball quiz books. During the 1990s, Nemec expanded on the research he had done for his historical baseball novel, Early Dreams, to become a scholar on baseball's infancy as a professional sport. Since 1987, Nemec has authored or co-authored over 20 books on baseball, many focusing on the game's embryonic years. In 1994, Lyons & Burford published The Rules of Baseball, Nemec's anecdotal look at the evolution of the rules of the game. The following year the same publisher brought out his The Beer and Whisky League, a history of the American Association during its ten-year existence (1882-1891) as a rebel major league. In 1997. Nemec has received The Sporting News Research Award and the McFarland Baseball Research Award, Nemec is a member of SABR, [the Society for American Baseball Research] and a recipient of a lifetime Henry Chadwick Award, which was established in 2009 to honor baseball's greatest researchers. Sportswriter Graham Womack posted some thoughts on line about the 20th Century Baseball Chronicle, including: "I got a wholesale course in baseball history, learning about players like Johnny Podres and Sandy Amoros, heroes of the 1955 World Series, and Mickey Owen, goat of the 1941 Fall Classic.... The 20th Century Baseball Chronicle served as the foundation for my love of baseball history, my introductory course. It also shaped how I viewed the game for a long time. There are no Sabermetrics whatsoever in the book. I only started learning them in recent years after I began writing about baseball history online. ... I understood how much baseball has changed every decade or so pretty much all of its existence and how it continues to change. Sure, there's some basic degree of continuity, and the game's long history is part of its lure. Otherwise, baseball is constantly reinventing itself.... I've since read so many other baseball books that have changed my life in smaller ways. Bill James's The Politics of Glory inspired me to dig deeper into the Hall of Fame's history. ... It's been a long time since I laid on my bed reading The 20th Century Baseball Chronicle, its spine now almost broken and bits of its cover missing. I'm 32 and establishing myself as a baseball writer. ...I recently looked at the names of the authors who contributed to The 20th Century Baseball Chronicle and discovered I email regularly with one of them, David Nemec, a highly knowledgeable baseball historian who has authored a bunch of other books and is great about answering my questions. It's funny how life comes full circle. My love of baseball history started with The 20th Century Baseball Chronicle,