The season opens today, but baseball books have been pouring off the presses for weeks. "The 1967 Impossible Dream Red Sox: Pandemonium on the Field," edited by Bill Nowlin and Dan Desrochers (Rounder, $19.95), appears among us to mark the anniversary of the Red Sox' astounding capture of the American League pennant 40 years ago and, for that matter, Carl Yastrzemski's achievement in gaining what may prove to be the last major league triple crown. This was the season that "rescued the franchise," according to Richard Johnson in "Saviors," one of the book's many essays contributed by over 40 writers. Its pages include biographical pieces on the players, coaches, and manager Dick Williams, as well as hundreds of photographs, a detailed season timeline, and an account of the World Series contest with St . Louis, doughtily played until lost in the seventh game.
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This year also marks the 60th anniversary of Jackie Robinson's first season as a Dodger and the breaking of American history's most notorious "gentleman's agreement," that which established professional baseball's color bar. This story has been pored and picked over innumerable times, but Jonathan Eig pulls it all together again in "Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson's First Season" (Simon & Schuster, $26 ). He investigates and sometimes debunks the iconic incidents of this nation-changing season, separating myth from fact, and showing again the sort of courage and determination Robinson displayed on the field and off it.
Few baseball men have shaped the business as Branch Rickey did, not only in putting Robinson in a Dodgers uniform but, earlier in St . Louis, in instituting the farm system, signing players cheap to "let them ripen into money" -- as he put it most characteristically. Then there is his crucial role in the late 1950s in setting up the ultimately unrealized Continental League, which, nonetheless, propelled the major leagues into expansion. "Branch Rickey: Baseball's Ferocious Gentleman," by Lee Lowenfish (University of Nebraska , $34.95), provides a thorough account of the life, character, and exploits of this teetotaler Ohio farm boy, the grandson of a horse trader, and a true "conservative revolutionary."
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