Tinker to Evers to Chance: The Chicago Cubs and the Dawn of Modern America

Most sports fans know that the Chicago Cubs' 2016 World Series championship was that franchise's first since 1908. Significantly fewer know about the 1906–10 Cubs dynasty that captured the previous championships, or its three most famous players: Joe Tinker, Johnny Evers, and Frank Chance. Here, former Congressional Quarterly editor Rapp seeks to amend this by telling the stories of how three remarkable Hall of Famers contributed to America's enthusiastic embrace of baseball as its national pastime at a time when the game was on the verge of degenerate collapse. The title comes from a throwaway verse in a New York newspaper that eventually came to be known as "Baseball's Sad Lexicon," arguably the second most famous poem ever written about baseball (after "Casey at the Bat"). Significantly, Rapp connects these baseball stories to larger cultural themes such as social and economic class, the New York-Chicago rivalry, and the emerging media technologies during this period.