The Team-By-Team Encyclopedia of Major League Baseball

The obsessive reference for every baseball nut, THE TEAM-BY-TEAM ENCYCLOPEDIA OF MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL is a comprehensive, original, devour-it-like-salted-peanuts single-volume encyclopedia that marries history and statistics and delivers them team by team. Organizing by teams gives the wide view--how do the Murderer's Row Yankees compare to the Big Red Machine? The long view--what team has given the Red Sox the most trouble over the last 100 years? And the hidden view--name the team that went through all the 1990s without a Gold Glove winner. It's how the game is played, and now, finally, it's presented in the way the game is best understood.
Created by baseball historian Dennis Purdy, a true buff's buff, THE TEAM-BY-TEAM ENCYCLOPEDIA offers the history of every existing major league baseball franchise told through narrative, bios, anecdotes, photographs, and the most comprehensive team statistics ever assembled in a single book. Every year's record, standing, attendance, and primary starting lineup for each of baseball's 30 franchises. Top-10 leader lists for every major category (and some minor ones), plus all-time won-loss records versus all opponents. All the awards--MVP, Rookie of the Year, Cy Young, Gold Glove. Manager records. Post-season records. Even retired uniform numbers. But the stats are just the beginning--each chapter contains entertaining thumbnail biographies of every franchise's key players, recalling, for example, how the game's greatest shortstop, Honus Wagner, was ecruited when spotted throwing rocks across a river. And sprinkled throughout are spicy team facts, bizarre anecdotes, statistical anomalies, and little-known gems--like what Babe Ruth said to Lou Gehrig after hitting his "called shot" homerun in the 1932 World Series.