Baseball's 2007 media: Part IV

Continuing our reviews of what's new in baseball media:

The book: "Crazy '08: How a Cast of Cranks, Rogues, Boneheads and Magnates Created the Greatest Year in Baseball History," by Cait Murphy (Collins/Smithsonian Books, 368 pages, $24.95).

The windup: The title doesn't even mention that it's the year the Chicago Cubs won a World Series, so that's how out of wack that 1908 season must have been. Fred Merkle ring a bell?

The pitch: Murphy is an assistant managing editor at Fortune magainze who also worked at The Economist in London and The Wall Street Journal Asia in Hong Kong. And she's written a baseball history book? It's right up there with Laura Hillebrand's book on Seabiscuit. Plus, any book that can get the words "cranks," "rogues" and "boneheads" into the title has to draw attention and raise our curiosity. Somehow, she forgot to use the phrase "loopy shenanigans." Of all the baseball books out there this year, this is the one we've looked forward to finishing first. The tone itself is wisecracking, which fits the year in question.

Another brief review: From Bryce Christensen of Booklist: "A writer of exceptional verve when recounting the heroics of the diamond, Murphy evinces a shrewd intelligence when scanning the cultural forces remaking the world beyond the ballpark. She unravels the malign dynamics behind Ty Cobb's violence against blacks, and she limns the parallels between early-twentieth-century anxieties about immigrant anarchists and twenty-first-century fears of foreign terrorists. A book that will long claim the attention of serious sports enthusiasts."

If you like this one, try: "Level Playing Fields: How the Groundskeeping Murphy Brothers Shaped Baseball," by Peter Morris ($24.95, University of Nebraska Press, 194 pages), which gets into the dirt and grass aspects of the game's history;
"The Kansas City A's and the Wrong Half of the Yankees: How the Yankees Controlled Two of the Eight American League Franchises During the 1950s," by Jeff Katz ($24.95, Maple Street Press, 250 pages), on how the A's were considered the Yankees' farm team, since K.C. owner Arnold Johnson was a joint owner of Yankee Stadium with Del Webb and Dan Topping;
"The Gashouse Gang: How Dizzy Dean, Leo Durocher, Branch Rickey, Pepper Martin and their Colorful, Come-From-Behind Ball Club Won the World Series and America's Heart During the Great Depression," by John Heidenry ($24.95, Public Affairs Publishing, 321 pages).