The Boys of Spring

He was called the "greatest money pitcher in baseball." And although that phrase sounds up-to-the-minute, it was actually used of Charles Albert "Chief" Bender in 1914, when he was the pitching ace of Connie Mack's Philadelphia Athletics. Bender's father was of German descent, his mother is believed to have been Ojibwe, and the son grew up on the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota. Despite his talent on the field (he is credited with having developed an early form of the slider and was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1953), Bender had to put up with racial slurs and stereotyping throughout his career. On the other hand, notes Tom Swift in Chief Bender's Burden: The Silent Struggle of a Baseball Star (Univ. of Nebraska, $24.95), "Even American Indian people who had never seen him pitch were inspired by Bender's success."

The 1950s was the period in which two of the winningest teams -- the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers -- were uprooted. But New York's loss was the West Coast's gain and baseball's as a whole, making it a sport that represented the whole country, not just the historically more populous eastern third. Along with the 1960s, this was also an era rich in great players: Ted Williams and Stan Musial, Jackie Robinson and Don Newcombe, Whitey Ford and Warren Spahn. Former baseball commissioner Fay Vincent has mined those years by interviewing 11 of its greats for We Would Have Played for Nothing: Baseball Stars of the 1950s and 1960s Talk About the Game They Loved (Simon & Schuster, $25). According to one of his sources -- the Phillies Hall of Fame pitcher Robin Roberts, who ought to know -- the greatest of them all was Willie Mays, "and to this day, there's nobody who could play baseball like him."

Toward the other end of the spectrum from Vincent's stars are the journeymen who bounce around from team to team: A recent TV commercial centers on one such pilgrim, Kenny (What Team Am I on This Year?) Lofton. Even farther on the margins are the minor leaguers who come back year after year, playing single-A ball, double-A, triple-A, eating bad food, riding old buses from town to town, barely supporting their families as they struggle to get into the bigs. In The 33-Year-Old Rookie: How I Finally Made It to the Big Leagues After Eleven Years in the Minors (Ballantine, $25), Chris Coste recalls his apprenticeship on teams as obscure as the Brandon, Manitoba, Grey Owls before he eventually landed with Philadelphia as a backup catcher. He's still on the Phillies' roster as of this writing, so his decision to put all that time in "to catch the dream that had been so elusive my entire career" looks like the right one.

-- Dennis Drabelle