Crazy ’08: How a Cast of Cranks, Rogues, and Boneheads Created the Greatest Year in Baseball History by Cait Murphy will be available in March, 2007.

In Crazy ’08 Murphy writes about one of the most storied years (Next year will be the centennial) in all of baseball. It was the year of “Tinker to Evers to Chance,” the Cubs and Tigers in the World Series, and more people than ever heading “out to the ol’ ball game.” My husband is a baseball fanatic, a baseball book fanatic, and he especially loves baseball from this “dead ball” era. Many a night when I’m suffering insomnia, I ask him to tell me a baseball story and he’s obliged with a tale from 1908 that has put me right to sleep. Since I’ve heard only the beginnings of most of the exploits of characters like John McGraw, Honus Wagner and Rube Waddell, I thought I owed it to him to read up on his heroes and Murphy didn’t disappoint.

Crazy ’08 is told in a semi-chronological style with side trips into some of the contending teams, rivalries, players and towns. Murphy’s energetic writing kept me on the edge of my bleacher seat the whole time and I smelled the dust of the outfields, the cigars from the stands and the beer of the after game revelries. I heard the coarse language and brawling tones of rough and tumble players. I almost begged my husband to put hot dogs and Cracker Jacks on our menu. She vivified the game in a way that made me glad that spring training began a few days ago.

Murphy liberally sprinkled Crazy ’08 with poems and quotes from the time. My favorite was a quote from my husband’s favorite writer, Mark Twain, “Baseball is the very symbol, the outward and visible expression of the drive, and the push, and rush and struggle of the raging, tearing, booming nineteenth century!”

Crazy ’08 is a delightfully fresh telling of the last time those fierce grizzly Cubs won it all and what it took to get there. Despite the fact that the Giants play on the west coast now and there are far more teams than 100 years ago to keep track of them all, I am truly ready for some baseball now that I’ve experienced the foundations of the game and renewed my spirit for the battles in the coming season.