Jerome Holtzman: A Career Baseball Writer Reflects on The Trade »

Sportswriter Jerome Holtzman has been around the game of baseball for more than 60 years. During that span he's met and worked alongside most of the greatest writers American sports and the game of baseball have ever known.

In his sixth book, Jerome Holtzman on Baseball, he shares colorfully in—depth stories about the lives and careers of such legendary scribes as Grantland Rice, Red Smith, Jimmy Cannon, Shirley Povich, and many others. Enveloped inside these personality sketches are heretofore hidden tales about baseball's greatest players, managers and characters. Baseball's best personas spring to life in the words of the men and women whose job it was to unearth their flaws and exalt their talents.

These men and women were the Hemingways of baseball sportswriting. Holtzman's unique ability to relate their impact on the game they covered adds a new chapter to our study of the history of baseball. Meet "The Purple Prose Gang," learn of the impact that advanced statisticians had on how the game was covered, and read of the rise of female scribes in sports.

Holtzman dusts off the annals of baseball history in these pages, and places the sport's evolution in a fresh context. Just as baseball itself has progressed from the days of the dead—ball era through the invention of free agency to today's record—shattering times, so too has the art of sportswriting and the artists who man the press box 162 days a year. Jerome Holtzman on Baseball is your passage through the turnstile.