Crazy ‘08:

How a Cast of Cranks, Rogues, Boneheads, and Magnates Created the Greatest Year in Baseball History

by Cait Murphy (Smithsonian Books)
384 pp. Harper Collins, 2007 $24.95

Reviewed by Jeremy Ohmes

In 2003, the Chicago Cubs were only five outs from a National League pennant when a playable foul ball was batted away by a bespectacled leftfield fan named Steve Bartman. The team would go on to lose the game and the series, and for a World Series–starved town, it was as if someone had punched Chicago in the gut and knocked the wind out of the Windy City. “Bartman” would enter the baseball lexicon, and the Cubbies would continue to be the lovable losers.

In Crazy ‘08, the captivating tale of baseball’s coming-of-age, Cait Murphy, a senior writer and editor for Fortune magazine and an avid baseball fan, takes us out to the ball game and unravels a rambunctious year when the stands were full of Bartmans, when the Cubs were more synonymous with dynasty than doghouse, and when baseball was tattooed onto the epidermis of America. Playing pepper with a cast of oddball events and eccentric characters, Murphy presents one eye-opening anecdote after another detailing the sights, sounds and scandals surrounding the 1908 season. From her nail-biting descriptions of the down-to-the-wire, three-way fray in each league — Chicago, New York, Pittsburgh in the NL; Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago in the AL — to her hilarious portraits of the sport’s larger-than-life personalities — Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner, John McGraw, Christy Mathewson, Mordecai “Three Finger” Brown — to her vivid account of the Merkle muddle, perhaps baseball’s most controversial and highly contested game, in which an absentminded ballplayer and an untouched base affected the outcome of the entire season, Murphy’s prose skips and swaggers like a game-winning trot around the bases, circumventing all of the stodgy history that hobbles so many books on the national pastime.

And by 1908 there’s no denying that baseball was the national pastime, the all-American game. Its popularity was nonpareil as thousands and thousands of people — of various economic strata — packed ballparks across the country, their respective teams becoming a source of solidarity and a point of civic pride. Cities like Cincinnati, Pittsburgh and Detroit matured into major metropolises, necessitating bigger and better ballparks and proudly displaying their teams as a nucleus of urban life. Baseball had become a mass phenomenon, and, as Murphy so deftly illustrates, the game was a symbol of America and its hearty embrace of popular entertainment and leisure — even if, for one luckless city by the lake, that leisure meant losing for another century.