Ed Delahanty in the Emerald Age of Baseball

Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006. Paperback edition, presumed first printing. Trade paperback. Very good. xii, 369, [3] pages. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Name Index. Subject Index. Inscribed by author on half-title page. Frontis. Cover has slight wear and soiling. The author is a professor of history. He specialized in nineteenth-century baseball. Edward James Delahanty (October 30, 1867 - July 2, 1903), nicknamed "Big Ed", was a Major League Baseball player from 1888 to 1903 for the Philadelphia Phillies, Cleveland Infants and Washington Senators. He was known as one of the game's early power hitters, and while primarily a left fielder during his career, he also played as an infielder. Delahanty won a batting title, batted over .400 three times, and has the fifth-highest batting average in MLB history. He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1945. He died falling into Niagara Falls or the Niagara River after being kicked off of a train while intoxicated. His biographer argues that: Baseball for Irish kids was a shortcut to the American dream and to self-indulgent glory and fortune. By the mid-1880s these young Irish men dominated the sport and popularized a style of play that was termed heady, daring, and spontaneous.... [Delahanty] personified the flamboyant, exciting spectator-favorite, the Casey-at-the-bat, Irish slugger. Jerrold Casway's fascinating biography of legendary baseball player Ed Delahanty (1867-1903) offers a compelling examination of the life and career of the first "King of Swatsville". Casway traces the evolving character of major league baseball and its effect on the lives and ambitions of its athletes. Delahanty's career spanned the last decades of the nineteenth century, a time when the sons of post-famine Irish refugees dominated the sport and changed the playing style of America's national pastime. Baseball for Delahanty and other young Irishmen was a ticket out of poverty and into a life of fame and fortune. The allure and promise of celebrity and wealth, however, were disastrous for Delahanty; he found himself enmeshed in a gambling addiction that drove him to alcohol abuse. Delahanty mysteriously disappeared and was found at the bottom of Niagara's Horseshoe Falls.