They Played the Game
Memories from 47 Major Leaguers
Noted baseball historian Norman L. Macht brings together a wide‑ranging collection of baseball voices from the Deadball Era through the 1970s, including nine Hall of Famers, who take the reader onto the field, into the dugouts and clubhouses, and inside the minds of both players and managers. These engaging, wide-ranging oral histories bring surprising revelations—both highlights and lowlights—about their careers, as they revisit their personal mental scrapbooks of the days when they played the game.
Not all of baseball’s best stories are told by its biggest stars, especially when the stories are about those stars. Many of the storytellers you’ll meet in They Played the Game are unknown to today’s fans: the Red Sox’s Charlie Wagner talks about what it was like to be Ted Williams’s roommate in Williams’s rookie year; the Dodgers’ John Roseboro recounts his strategy when catching for Don Drysdale and Sandy Koufax; former Yankee Mark Koenig recalls batting ahead of Babe Ruth in the lineup, and sometimes staying out too late with him; John Francis Daley talks about batting against Walter Johnson; Carmen Hill describes pitching against Babe Ruth in the 1927 World Series.
"No matter how long his career lasted or how he compiled his statistics, a baseball player is always eager to share his experiences. Author Norman Macht has collected anecdotes from 47 former players who played from the Deadball Era of the early 20th century up to the 1970’s in this fast-paced book."
—Lance Smith, Guy Who Reviews Sports Books
"[An] excellent oral history for fans with a taste for the game's past."
—Wes Lukowsky, Booklist