About the Author

Art Black

Art Black collected autographs at Rickwood Field as a boy — and still has them. Now he writes about Rickwood and baseball. While researching his books, he scrolled through microfilm of two local newspapers, day by day, page by page, year by year, from the early 1900s to the mid-Sixties, looking not only at baseball reports but at events — large and small — occurring in the world. Ninety percent of material in his books came from newspapers of the day.

    “My objective in writing these books,” Art Black says, “was not to write game-by-game, year-by-year histories but instead to focus on people of the early twentieth century. The books are less about balls and strikes and more about people and their stories. Each chapter is as much a story about someone as it is a history of the period. I hope I make the characters come alive for the reader, that the reader feels like a part of history rather than an observer.”

Art Black is “a meticulous researcher, a knowledgeable baseball historian, and a consummate American storyteller.”