The Collected Baseball Stories

Between 1909 and 1919 Charles Emmett Van Loan published an amazing nine collections of short stories, including four baseball books-The Big League (1909), The Ten-Thousand-Dollar Arm (1912), The Lucky Seventh (1913) and Score By Innings (1919). Grantland Rice, in the Introduction to Score By Innings, described Van Loan as "sport's greatest fiction writer and soul (sic) historian," and claimed that "no other man has ever unfolded the romance and humor of baseball half as well." This volume brings together Van Loan's baseball stories, including those in The Big League ("The Crab," "The Low Brow," "The Fresh Guy," "The Quitter," "The Bush League Demon," "The Cast-Off," "The Busher," "A Job for the Pitcher," "The Golden Ball of the Argonauts"); The Ten-Thousand-Dollar Arm ("The Ten-Thousand-Dollar Arm," "Sweeney to Sanguinetti to Schultz," "Little Sunset," "The Loosening Up of Hogan," "The Phantom League," "The Comeback," "Behind the Mask," "McCluskey's Prodigal"); The Lucky Seventh ("A Rain Check," "The Mexican Marvel," "The Good Old Wagon," "For Revenue Only," "The Bachelor Benedict," "'Butterfly' Boggs: Pitcher," "Will a Duck Swim?", "Crossed 'Signs,'" "Won Off the Diamond," "The Pitch-Out"); and Score By Innings ("The National Commission Decides," "Puite vs. Puite," "Chivalry in Carbon County," "The Squirrel," "IOU," "The Bone Doctor," "His Own Stuff," "Excess Baggage," "Nine Assists and Two Errors," "Minster Conley"). Also included are the previously uncollected stories "Mathewson, Incog." and "The Indian Sign."