Letters to the Editor
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Team by Team Encyclopedia a Great Find
I happened to run into it while carrying a 25% off coupon from a large national chain of bookstores that shares its name with the collective term for the Rio Grande and the 49th parallel. It really is a superb reference book, and a helluva lot of fun, too. Just seeing how some teams' all-time records are really impressive (Tigers) or surprisingly unimpressive (White Sox) is fun, and the lists of starting lineups and rotations going back year-by-year is simply mesmerizing (although including fifth starters before about 1970 is rather misleading; fifth starters in those days were the equivalent of spot starters today). The capsule histories are great and the decision to cover entire franchises instead of only when a club moved to a particular city makes for some interesting reading (a large number of "Orioles" top-ten all-time season performances are held by George Sisler and Harlond Clift, who were St. Louis Browns, or by Brady Anderson, whose one good season sticks out like a sore thumb). Bathroom book, indeed!