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.