"From Paris Review and New Yorker cartoonist Jason Novak, a history of the scrappy beginnings of baseball, told in 101 one-sentence biographies. I like to think of the book as a visual essay that highlights a little-talked about era of baseball, and specifically the men (and some women) who played then. For the major leagues, the Negro leagues, and the Women's League. Mostly it's just little bios with a kernel of the uncanny, often followed by a tragic end of many of the people who played pro ball before it was a professions. So there are details of their non-baseball lives as well, which really makes the unspoken case for baseball as a game, as it once was, and, when you think about baseball in the context of it being "America's pastime," this really opens up doors to think about this book as a profound essay on work, class, and race in America during that era"--