I had heard of Ring Lardner before, though there is a chance I was actually thinking of Ring Lardner Jnr, his screenwriting son (blacklisted as part of the Hollywood Ten and the model for the writer in BBC Screen Two film Fellow Traveller). Lardner is one of those writers who are lumped in with the early twentieth-century American greats, Fitzgerald and Hemmingway. Still, there isn't that much to look at, unless you were willing to delve into the archives of the newspapers he was a syndicated sports writer for. This is exactly what Rapoport has done here, presenting a book full of baseball columns from 100 years ago, with the lightest of touch editing and occasional footnotes to explain some references, these are riffs and satires on semi-household names of which probably only Babe Ruth still lingers.

I know very tittle about baseball, but there is something sparkling about the prose here, full of purposeful misspellings, vernacular, ridiculous jokes, and puns. He's banging out and making up scurrilous gossip, and certainly, as time moves on, you can see him praying for rainy days so he can pretty much write whatever he was divorced from the actual game. Rapoport in particular highlights a break in the writing, before and after the Black Sox scandal, after which Lardner is a lot more cynical about the whole of baseball. That said, his World Series coverage in 1921 ends up turning into one long soap opera about buying his wife a fur-coat over the actual baseball, taking on the prospects of three kittens who might save him money after his initial predictions have gone askew. (He calls the World Series the World Serious in a joke that surprisingly never gets old)

This is niche stuff and I am not sure the joy in the writing often transcends the fact that he is writing about a sport over 100 years old that I have no investment in. But good writing is its own reward, and there are certainly columns here that I would pull out to show what a good writer he was. Rapoport's aim is the bundle up as much as possible, and does that admirably and with useful context and apologia (Lardner was a stinky racist and Rapaport often calls him out in footnotes particularly if his racism is esoteric). It does what it says in the time - except perhaps having Ring Lardner's name in its actual title, but it is in the end still pretty niche.