First Fall Classic: The Red Sox, the Giants and the Cast of Players, Pugs and Politicos Who Re-Invented the World Series in 1912 »

MIKE VACCARO is the lead sports columnist for the New York Post and the author of 1941: The Greatest Year in Sports and Emperors and Idiots. He has won more than fifty major journalism awards since 1989 and has been cited for distinguished writing by the Associated Press Sports Editors, the New York State Publishers Association, and the Poynter Institute. A graduate of St. Bonaventure University, he lives in New Jersey.

Acclaimed author Mike Vaccaro presents a riveting, must-read account of what remains, nearly a century later, the greatest World Series ever played.

In October of 1912, seven years before gambling nearly destroyed the sport, the world of baseball got lucky. It would get two teams-the Boston Red Sox and the New York Giants, winners of a combined 208 games during the regular season-who may well have been the two finest ball clubs ever assembled to that point. Most importantly, during the course of eight games spanning nine days in that marvelous baseball autumn, they would elevate the World Series from a regional October novelty to a national obsession. The games would fight for space on the front pages of the nation's newspapers, battling both an assassin's bullet and the most sensational trial of the young century, with the Series often carrying the day and earning the “wood.”

In The First Fall Classic, veteran sports journalist and author Mike Vaccaro brings to life a bygone era in cinematic and intimate detail-and gives fans a wonderful page-turner that re-creates the magic and suspense of the world's first great series.

The Washington Post - Jonathan Yardley

Mike Vaccaro…does not exaggerate when he says that "the World Series was really born in 1912." What up to then had been a rather casual October encounter between the champions of the established National League and the young American League was transformed, by the 1912 series, into a great American institution, a seven-game competition that commanded the rapt attention of the entire nation…[Vaccaro] has written a smart, lively account of the series that goes beyond the games themselves—though his accounts of all of them are vivid—to show how what happened during that series reflected what was happening in the nation.