This is the perfect gift for any fan of Texas history. "Big Foot" Wallace was one of a kind. Our family is related to him and would like to hear from anyone else who may be related to him.

this is my husbands great great great uncle it was something reading about pure american history

One of the best baseball books ever! If you thought holdouts, violence, labor disputes, money woes were only modern era problems, check this book out. Well organized chapters covering the protaganists in Ray Chapman and Carl Mays but also good stuff on the player who replaced Chapman--Joe Sewell.The whole thing was like a time travel trip back to 1920 and gave me a particularly good feel for the era. (NOTE: The background on the 1919 Black Sox World Series scandal that was exposed during the 1920 season was also revealing in shedding light on the atmosphere surrounding the majors at that time.)

Mike Sowell is a unique baseball writer. He writes on the sport based not solely on the sport itself, but on the historical context in which the events he is documenting take place. Thus, with "The Pitch That Killed", the reader discovers the perspective that each of the principles have in the tragedy, from Carl Mays to the mayor of Cleveland in 1920. In addition, the Communist scare, the Harding administration, and the carefree lifestyle of that era are all examined as to how they apply to the primary topic. Certainly other baseball writers have tried this, but Sowell makes it readable and avoids the trap most writers fall into. In other words, Sowell makes it relevant without reverting and tainting his subject matter with personal nostalgia. And that is why this book is such a great read.

The 1986 playoffs were some of the best games that baseball has seen. Authour Mike Sowell has tried to capture the excitement and suspense of those playoffs in "One Pitch Away"

While not a bad book, one can't help leaving this book feeling that much more could have been done with it. The problem I have with the book is that 2/3 of it is spent interviewing the players of those playoffs. I didn't really care about hearing about Doug DeCinces and his investment company. Sowell probably could have gone into greater detail about the whole season and the effect the 86 playoffs had on baseball.

Not a bad book, but there are better.

Without even being a huge baseball fan I was intrigued by this well told story of the 1986 League Championships and World Series. The history of the games was very dramatic and well written. It also gave very in depth and personal accounts from the players of those series and the impact they had on their lives. It told of the heartbreak and happiness that one postseason could inflict on so many people.

This and his best book, "The Pitch That Killed" are great baseball books. What has happend to Mike Sowell? Why are these great books out of print? I was amazed by the in-depth research in both of these books, and I want to read more by this writer. Does anyone have news about this author and what he is currently working on?

"July 2, 1903" is an apt title for this book because it tells practically all that's known about the circumstances of the death of baseball great Big Ed Delahanty: We know when it happened, but not much else. The title is also an adept parallel to the book itself, because the book isn't really about his death. It reads less like Agatha Christie than like an Inquiry into Our National Pastime, 1880-1910. What Sowell is trying to do, it seems, is to locate Delahanty's tragedy within a cultural and socio-economic context; not so much to sleuth out the whodunit of the case (accident? foul play? suicide?) as to understand the ethos in which it could occur. That very little is known of Delahanty beyond his ballplaying forces Sowell to focus that much more keenly on the environment surrounding Delahanty's death, rather than on Delahanty-the-Man. It's an intriguing approach, and Sowell has done exhaustive research. The book is full of colorful anecdotes, evocative details, and revealing sidebars. He's clearly fascinated by the political and economic maneuvering and lowlife rowdyism that defined baseball in its early days. For awhile, so was I. Eventually, though, the accumulation of amusing stories, surprising trivia and unusual nicknames grows stale, because it never adds up to anything more than the sum of its parts. Delahanty's death, in fact, gets lost in the shuffle, and the book's last chapter isn't even about him. Sowell could have arranged his information into a tight frame around the mystery of Delahanty's death, which would have evoked the feel and rhythm of the atmosphere surrounding it. Instead, he allows the trivia to overwhelm the ostensible subject of the book, and in the end I didn't learn much about the death of Big Ed Delahanty. Sowell should be commended for digging up so much information and for discovering so many interesting tidbits about baseball in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Many of them are fascinating, and it's good to have them collected in one book. Sowell himself is obviously excited by them too -- so excited that he didn't want to leave any of them out, so... he didn't.

I first reviewed Mike's book when it was published some years ago, when we both worked at The Tulsa Tribune in Tulsa, Okla. At the time (early '90s), baseball was at the crest of a resurgence in popularity: The sparkle of movies like "Field of Dreams" and "Bull Durham" had not yet faded - even John Sayles' unblinking "Eight Men Out" put only a slight negative spin on the sports' image. In my review then, I skirted some issues that bothered me, attributing them to what I saw as a lack of focus. Upon recent rereading, however, I would classify "July 2" as the strongest and bravest of Sowell's three books - and the other two are quite courageous, indeed. What Mike did was to take us back to professional baseball's beginnings, to present us with the ugly truth. The 1919 "Black Sox" scandal was only a slight sore that, if peeled away, would have revealed the disease at the heart of the game and would have been traced to the shocking practices of team owners, who handled the lives of players like so many kids trading cards. They could not afford this, and it was fearful to speculate what they might do to protect their interests. Once read, "July 2" makes a book like Ken Burns' and Geoffrey C. Ward's "Baseball" make more sense.

Considering how very little information is available about Ed Delahanty, I thought Mike Sowell did a terrific job. One could have written about Ed and others in chapters, but not Mr. Sowell. His intelligence is such that even he realized that one could never write a bonifide biography with little information. Therefore, he did what any true baseball historian would do...fill in the blanks with the times and events that surrounded your subject. Mike Sowell did an excellent job of this and I credit him with giving me enough insight of the time and characters to research them further. Today, there is not much that I do not know about the era. I still continue to read about everything baseball and the players of the time. Sad how they are being forgotten. Today's players owe them much. Thank you, Mike! Anthony DeMedeiros, Toronto, Ontario