Frank Chance's Diamond

At one time Ring Lardner’s baseball articles reached millions of readers through more than one hundred newspapers throughout America. Admirers of his writing included F. Scott Fitzgerald, H.L. Mencken, Edmund Wilson, and Virginia Woolf. He was as familiar to Americans in the 1920s as Charles Lindbergh, Calvin Coolidge, Henry Ford, and Babe Ruth. His articles about the players he knew, his World Series coverage, his poems, parodies, and jokes were unlike any other baseball reporting ever written, both in his time and since. Even a hundred years later, Lardner’s baseball journalism makes for delightful, often wildly funny, reading and offers a glimpse of where his ground-breaking baseball fiction came from. This book contains Lardner’s columns about Christy Mathewson, Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Casey Stengel, and Three-Finger Mordecai Brown and some fabulous lesser-known characters like Frank Schulte, Heine Zimmerman, Jim Schekard, Johnny Kling, Rollie Zeider, and Peaches Graham, as well as examples of Lardner’s coverage of a number of World Series—including the notorious 1919 Black Sox Series. Ron Rapoport’s introduction puts Lardner in his time and place and explains how his writing about baseball developed over the years.

Ron Rapoport is a sportswriter and author who lives in Santa Monica, California. He was a sports columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times and the Los Angeles Daily News and was sports commentator for National Public Radio's “Weekend Edition Saturday” for two decades. He also wrote about sports for the Los Angeles Times and the Associated Press in New York and San Francisco. He is the recipient of the Ring Lardner Award for Excellence in Sports Journalism and has written numerous books about sports and show business. His latest book, published in 2019 by Hachette Books, is Let's Play Two: The Legend of Mr. Cub, The Life of Ernie Banks.