The Best Team Ever is part baseball novel, part crime drama, and part love story. The novel follows the 1907 Chicago Cubs from the beginning of the season to the World Series against the backdrop of a wild, corrupt Chicago and a transforming America. Some main characters include Mordecai “Three-Finger” Brown, Joe Tinker, Johnny Evers, Frank Chance, Kid Durbin, an escaped prostitute named Connie Dandridge (okay, so not everybody in the book plays ball), Percy McGill (the evil abducting pimp), and a host of other characters both historical and fictional. In style and structure, it’s reminiscent of E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, in that it features a big cast of characters in short chapters who are all moving through the same time and place (with some interlacing stories). Some really nice baseball writing scattered throughout as well as a lot of historical detail.
Don’t judge a book by its cover, judge it by baseball’s magic numbers:
Page 27
line 9
first 3 words:
“his own child”
The Best Team Ever: A Novel of America, Chicago, and the 1907 Cubs
Alan Alop and Doc Noel
Bascom Hill Publishing Group
978-1935098027
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