The 1934 St. Louis Cardinals: The World Champion Gas House Gang (The SABR Digital Library)

Still reading book.

Quality stuff.

There's good stuff here but again I found that an author takes faulty information from other books and passes it along as fact. When I KNOW one thing is incorrect I begin to wonder what else is. Because I'm an old time Cardinals fan (was the only games we could get on the radio back in the '50s) I usually grab up anything about the early days of the team. Leafing through it I found once again that Dizzy Dean is portrayed as having either been "discovered" in Shawnee Oklahoma or played with the Shawnee Oklahoma team in 1930. He didn't. He had already been signed by the Cardinals and showed up in town to play on the St. Joseph, MO team, in a couple of spring training games, both the St. Joe team and the Shawnee Robins were farm clubs of the Cardinals. He pitched in a couple of games IN Shawnee but not for Shawnee and Branch Rickey had already signed him. According to a book out about Sports in Shawnee OK this information was taken directly from local newspapers.

I am still reading the book and so far, so good. It is very well organized. For example, the 1934 Season Timeline is contained within ONE chapter of the book INSTEAD of being scattered throughout - as it is in the book about the 1964 Cardinals Also included are chapters about St. Louis itself in 1934 (which will help the reader gain a better perspective about what St. Louis was like during the Great Depression), the Cardinals' home - Sportsman's Park (later to be known as Busch Stadium), AND a chapter on the pre-1934 history of the franchise - written by me. The sources used in the compilation of this book are among the best books ever written about the Cardinals. The player biographies will help baseball fans to better understand why this team was called The Gashouse Gang. the biographies on the Deans (Dizzy and Paul) and Leo Durocher were among my favorites. One of the things I found most interesting in ALL of the player biographies was reading about what happened to the various characters after they left the Cardinals AND after their playing days were over. Another reason that the St. Louis in 1934 chapter was enjoyable for me was that my father grew up in Depression Era St. Louis. He lived on Pestalozzi Street - just down form the Anheuser-Busch Brewery. I would recommend this book to any baseball fan and I'm NOT just saying that because I am one of the book's authors.

Another wonderful compilation of player/manager/owner biographies for one of the great baseball teams of the past, the 1934 St. Louis Cardinals! Baseball through and through, baseball, current and past are what the Society of American Baseball Research (SABR) is all about. And this series of "Team Books" is another in the several that have rolled off of the line. A 4-5 page biography of every player is given, even for the 1-game or 1-plate appearance player. SABR members are the contributors to these books, and every chapter represents a biography that has been thoroughly researched and checked for accuracy by other SABR writers. If you love this stuff as I do, I strongly urge you to purchase this book and any of the other Team Books. How about as a gift? When I bought my copy, I also bought one for an elderly friend of mine. My friend, Johnny, growing up in the Dust Bowl of the Texas Panhandle during those terrible drought years, had a special connection to the Cardinals of that time and other major leaguers. When Ol' Diz would bring his band of All-Stars there during the off-season tours, Johnny was the regular bat boy. When Johnny opened the book to the first player chapter, Rip Collins, Johnny's eyes lit up, and he shared with me some of his personal memories that were still with him 70-80 years later.

well done