The National Game.

• Author: BARRETT, WAYNE M.
• Position: Review

* Two stylish sportswriters check in with a pair of reprints from Southern Illinois University Press.

Originally published in 1910, The National Game (by Alfred H. Spink, 498 pages, $19.95) is the first important history of baseball, predating Albert Spalding's better-known America'S National Game by a year. Spink, the founder of The Sporting News, provides a history of baseball before 1910; position-by-position biographies of every major league player; sketches of managers, magnates, journalists, and umpires; and a complete record of the championship games played from 1884 through the 1910 World Series.

James T. Farrell, more famous for his Studs Lonigan trilogy, nevertheless wrote...