The 1934 St. Louis Cardinals were one of baseball’s most colorful gangs of players, a combative bunch who rallied at season’s end to overtake the New York Giants for the National League crown and then proceeded to defeat the Detroit Tigers in a storied World Series. John Heidenry’s The Gashouse Gang is a solidly researched and warmly told account of that team and season, with special focus on star hurler Dizzy Dean, who won 30 games and provided newspapermen with reams of copy that recorded his attention-getting antics both on and off the field. Other Cardinals who come alive in Heidenry’s well-written text are Leo Durocher, Pepper Martin, Frankie Frisch, Joe Medwick and Dean’s younger brother, Paul, who, as a rookie, won 19 games and played a critical role in the team’s success. Cardinals honcho Branch Rickey the same man who later ushered Jackie Robinson into baseball is a key figure in this story as well, emerging as a skilled front-office manipulator of men and money.

Jackie Robinson’s hardships enduring bigotry are well known. But after him came a slow stream of other African Americans who, with less publicity, entered the major leagues yet still had to put up with ugly racist attitudes and practices. Steve Jacobson’s Carrying Jackie’s Torch: The Players Who Integrated Baseball and America offers profiles of 19 such players, whose value as pioneers should never be underestimated. Once Robinson opened the door, these stalwart individuals still had to walk through it, and, as Jacobson relates, it was never an easy path. Monte Irvin, Larry Doby, Mudcat Grant, Elston Howard, Frank Robinson and Hank Aaron are among the subjects here, as is Emmett Ashford, the first black man to umpire a major league game. Jacobson’s accounts are pithy, inspiring and informative, and they shed necessary light on a part of the integration process that has been somewhat overlooked.

Jonathan Eig’s Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson’s First Season recalls events of 1947 when, under intense media and public scrutiny, Robinson made history as the opening day first baseman for the Brooklyn Dodgers and major league baseball’s first African-American player. Eig sets up the reader nicely with personal background on Robinson, charting his multi-sport college success at UCLA, his stint in the Negro Leagues and his singular relationship with Branch Rickey, the legendary executive who determined that Robinson was the right man to break the color barrier. Then follows a blow-by-blow account of Robinson’s inaugural season, including his experiences (both bad and good) with fellow players and fans throughout the National League. Robinson had a key role in leading the Dodgers to the World Series at season’s end, while also winning the first-ever Rookie of the Year Award for his stellar play. Moreover, he proved that a black man could combine courage with skill and earn respect on his own terms.

Like any modern business, baseball utilizes increasingly sophisticated methods for assessing the abilities of its personnel and gauging the nature of success on the diamond. Statistical analysis as a baseball tool has grown primarily through the efforts of Bill James, whose series of published abstracts have examined player performance and plotted new paradigms for evaluating it. Newspaper editor and baseball researcher Bill Felber has the same interest, and with The Book on the Book: A Landmark Inquiry into Which Strategies in the Modern Game Actually Work he serves up a thoroughly credible deconstruction of the effects of the game’s strategies and the ultimate value of a player’s worth when it comes to winning and losing. Felber’s text gets unrelievedly technical sometimes, with almost every area of the game reduced to mathematical formulas. It’s hard to take issue with the conclusions, though, since Felber’s methodology is well supported. Full-blown fanatics will probably read the book straight through, but casual fans will find plenty of reward simply browsing through selected chapters, such as The Decline and Fall of the Starting Pitcher, Highly Paid Irrelevance and Rating the General Managers. Useful appendixes lay out the facts in all their numerical glory.

Perhaps no baseball player has been as lionized as Lou Gehrig, whose well-known battle with the disease that now bears his name was almost as prodigious as his hitting feats for the Yankees in the 1920s and ’30s. Jonathan Eig’s Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig is a major biography that benefits from excellent research, stylish writing and a fierce determination on the part of the author to get beyond mere legend. Playing in the shadow of Ruth, Gehrig nonetheless carved out his own place in the baseball record books. Eig doesn’t stint on the sporting anecdotes, and the era of the early Yankees dynasty comes fully alive. But equally interesting are his accounts of the battles between Gehrig’s doting mother, Christina, and his strong-willed, ex-flapper wife, Eleanor. Finally, there is the story of Gehrig’s illness, still riveting in its pathos, which Eig covers with revealing medical and personal details. A frailer, more human and less-iconic Gehrig emerges here, but one no less courageous.

Award-winning sportswriter Frank Deford has been contributing to Sports Illustrated since 1962, and has also done his share of TV and radio work, including weekly commentaries for NPR. In The Old Ball Game: How John McGraw, Christy Mathewson, and the New York Giants Created Modern Baseball, Deford trips down memory lane to the first decade of the 20th century, when the game gained serious commercial strength and distinctively captured the imagination of the American public. His primary focus is New York Giants great Christy Mathewson, a handsome, strapping, Bucknell-educated pitcher who embodied the virtues of integrity, good sportsmanship and hard work. Mathewson came to his well-earned matinee-idol persona under the tutelage of rough-and-tumble manager John McGraw. Deford adroitly describes their lives, careers, and surprisingly devoted friendship, offering along the way a vivid slice of social history.

Dan Shaughnessy’s Reversing the Curse: Inside the 2004 Boston Red Sox is a blow-by-blow account of the unlikely 2004 Sox triumph. Shaughnessy, a writer for the Boston Globe, profiles the colorful members of the team, including long-haired wildman center fielder Johnny Damon, stalwart fireballing right-hander Curt Schilling, and the Latin Mafia of Pedro Martinez, Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz, all instrumental in making history as the Sox snatched victory out of the jaws of certain defeat against the Yanks, and then swept the St. Louis Cardinals in four straight games in the World Series. Shaughnessy also runs down in detail the critical personnel changes enacted by youthful Sox general manager Theo Epstein in the wake of Boston’s gut-wrenching 2003 playoff loss to who else? the Yankees.

If ever there were cause for baseball’s rebound in the public consciousness, it was last fall’s performance by the Boston Red Sox, who miraculously defeated the dreaded New York Yankees on their way to their first world championship since 1918. New York Post columnist Mike Vaccaro’s Emperors and Idiots: The Hundred-Year Rivalry Between the Yankees and Red Sox, From the Very Beginning to the End of the Curse is an eminently readable history of the combative Yankees-Red Sox relationship, from the turn of the 20th century (back when they were the Highlanders and Pilgrims, respectively) through the recent era, with special focus on the infamous 1920 trade that brought Babe Ruth from the Sox to the Yankees and supposedly initiated more than 80 years of jinxed Boston baseball. Vaccaro’s narrative highlights the dominance of Yankee dynasties (Ruth/Gehrig, Mantle/Maris, Jackson/Munson, etc.), pits Joe DiMaggio’s uncanny winning ways vs. Ted Williams’ endless disappointments and details the Sox’s heartbreaking postseason collapses. Inexorably, the book winds down to October 2004, when at last the Red Sox broke the Yankee spell and thrilled their many devoted, long-suffering loyalists.

Celebrating basketball’s past and future Real old school Cousy’s style of play arguably led to a string of great players, including Julius Erving, Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan, as “new school values” flourished. But there are a few places where fundamentals, conditioning and above all else winning are still stressed. Such a place is St. Anthony’s High School in Jersey City, New Jersey. There you’ll find one of the legends of high school basketball, Bob Hurley, no doubt modestly sweeping the floor of the gym. New Jersey sports writer Adrian Wojnarowski spent the 2003-2004 season following the St. Anthony Friars; his resulting book is The Miracle of St. Anthony.

Hurley has won about 90 percent of his games and several championships over his years at St. Anthony’s. Hurley (the father of ’90s Duke guard Bobby Hurley) has always done it his way: yelling, screaming and pushing. His St. Anthony team is well prepared and always ready to accept a challenge in short, a reflection of the coach and it has worked. What makes the story a miracle is what Hurley has to work with. His players come with large quantities of inner-city baggage, such as broken homes, poverty and crime. Plus, the school itself is barely surviving from year to year. This really is an old school; at St. Anthony’s, the science labs don’t have much equipment and the furnace has seen better days. Hurley is one of the main reasons the school can even stay open. He is in demand at clinics and puts on an annual golf tournament, with the proceeds going to the school.

Wojnarowski obviously put in plenty of time around the program, and he gives thorough profiles of everyone involved. But Hurley is the person you’ll remember, a Bobby Knight-like figure who is one of the greatest teachers of his time. The “miracle” of St. Anthony might help push Hurley into the Basketball Hall of Fame in the near future.

Celebrating basketball’s past and future The life of a legend Providence, Rhode Island, sports columnist Bill Reynolds has written a biography of the man who essentially started “new school” basketball. Cousy gives us a look back at one of the most creative players ever. Bob Cousy was a college all-star with Holy Cross in the late 1940s, turned pro with the Boston Celtics, and was a part of the first half of the Celtics’ NBA dynasty from 1957 to 1963. He was the flashiest player of his time, and the list of tricks he could perform with a basketball was amazing. It was as if a whole new way of playing basketball had been created. Not only did his style impress crowds, his startling passes were effective they got the ball to teammates in shooting position. If you want a treat, find some video of Cousy playing in the 1950s.

Reynolds reviews Cousy’s life, starting with his youth as a shy child of poor immigrants in New York, then concentrates on the Celtics’ championship run. It was a special time in sports history, as Boston went on to win a still-unprecedented 11 championships in 13 years. Reynolds makes a particularly great point when he says that while Cousy, center Bill Russell and coach Red Auerbach couldn’t have come from more diverse backgrounds, they all had something very much in common: an overwhelming desire to win. Cousy cooperated with Reynolds on the book, and his reflections on his own life are especially interesting. The ex-player still feels guilty about not doing more to help black players in their struggles in the NBA during the 1950s, although he was ahead of most in that area.

If a book’s weightiness were measured strictly by the pound, then James W. Finegan’s Where Golf Is Great: The Finest Courses of Scotland and Ireland would have to be the equal of Finnegan’s Wake. Finegan, a veteran golf writer, brings the spirit of great travel writing to this massive tome, which includes 750 color photographs, most of them by Lawrence Lambrecht, documenting more than 150 time-honored courses. Finegan’s descriptive prose is lavished with impressive detail, and his passionate explication on how to best navigate the courses’ challenging fairways and greens will captivate golf-playing readers. Tim Thompson’s ancillary photos provide a charming overview of the surrounding Scottish and Celtic villages and castles. This volume’s a sure winner for that golf-nut guy, who just might be inspired to take the golf vacation of a lifetime.