The Year the Red Sox Won the Series: A Chronicle of the 1918 Championship Season - Hardcover

An illustrated chronicle of the 1918 Championship Season which details the players, games and events that lead to the Red Sox victory.

When Babe Ruth pitched and slugged the Boston Red Sox to a six-game World Series victory over the Chicago Cubs in 1918, there was every expectation that the team would continue to dominate the national pastime. It would be another eighty years before fans were delivered from the Curse of the Bambino. Now they -- and baseball fans everywhere -- can relive that glory season as told by the sportswriters and cartoonists of the day. In this thoroughly entertaining and informative chronicle, the reader is transported back to a time when the nation was at war, dozens of baseball players were enlisting in the armed services or jumping their teams to play for shipyard clubs, and the government shut down the season a month early to draft all eligible players. Here one will meet a host of memorable characters -- Harry Frazee, Ed Barrow, Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson, Harry Hooper, Tris Speaker, Carl Mays, and the young Babe Ruth -- and experience first-hand the heroics and antics of the Sultan of Swat and other baseball greats. Here, too, are the colorful and partisan baseball scribes, who themselves become part of the championship story. This lavishly illustrated work offers illuminating detail on the games, the players, and the times, and it contains a treasure trove of baseball lore. Readers will find out why and when the Star Spangled Banner (before it was the national anthem) was played before games and they will learn why the threatened player strike over the World Series' low purse left hard feelings that reverberate today. Baseball enthusiasts, Red Sox fans, and historians will delight in this fascinating journey through the remarkable 1918 championship season.