Overview

Connie Mack (1862–1956) was the Grand Old Man of baseball and one of the game's first true celebrities. This book, spanning the first fifty-two years of Mack's life, through 1914, covers his experiences as player, manager, and club owner and will stand as the definitive biography of baseball's most legendary and beloved figure.   Norman L. Macht chronicles Mack's little-known beginnings. He tells how Mack, a school dropout at fourteen, created strategies for winning baseball and principles for managing men long before there were notions of defining such subjects. And he details how Mack, a key figure in the launching of the American League in 1901, won six of the league's first fourteen pennants while serving as manager, treasurer, general manager, traveling secretary, and public relations and scouting director (all at the same time) for the Philadelphia Athletics. This book brings to life the unruly origins of baseball as a sport and a business. It also provides the first complete and accurate picture of a character who was larger than life and yet little known: the tricky, rule-bending catcher; the peppery field leader and fan favorite; the hot-tempered young manager. Illustrated with family photographs never before published, it affords unique insight into a colorful personality who helped shape baseball as we know it today.

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9780803240032

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Reviews

Richly enjoyable. -- Roanoke Times --Bob Willis The Roanoke Times

The tale Macht offers is often riveting Library Journal. [A] comprehensive and interesting portrait of one of baseball's most successful managers... A compelling look at a legend and an era Kirkus Reviews. [Includes] many fascinating details of baseball from the 1880s to 1914 Boston Globe. Richly enjoyable Roanoke Times. Masterful... A must read for all historians of the national pastime, particularly those with an interest in Philadelphia sports Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography. No other baseball manager is going to win or lose as many games as Connie Mack did in his fifty years managing the Philadelphia Athletics. A biography of Mack cannot help but be a history of baseball in the first half of the twentieth century, and this biography is a feast of interesting facts and judgments George F. Will, syndicated columnist and author of Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball.

Author Information

Norman L. Macht is a member of the Society for American Baseball Research and the author of more than thirty books, including biographies of Rowdy Richard (with Dick Bartell) and Rex Barney's Thank Youuuu (with Rex Barney).

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