"August Adolphus Busch Jr., the new president of the Cardinals, is a chubby gentleman called Gussie, about the size of a St. Louis brewer. He has horn-rimmed glasses, a zillion dollars and an air of pleased bewilderment. He rides to the hounds and travels by bus." It's not hard to pluck a memorable passage from the sportswriting of Red Smith. In more than fifty years as a newspaperman, notably with the New York Herald Tribune and the New York Times, he earned a reputation as the best writer ever to confront the game of baseball—astute, clever, witty, and stylish. In this bountiful selection of his most memorable columns—175 of them, from 1941 to 1981—baseball fans can recapture some of baseball's greatest moments and most unforgettable characters. Jackie Robinson's debut is here, and so is Hank Greenberg hitting home runs; Enos Slaughter scoring the winning run in the seventh game of the 1946 World Series; Stan Musial, Ted Williams, Joe DiMaggio, Lou Boudreau; the sly antics of Charles Dillon Stengel; Durocher's lip; Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra, and scores of others. It's a baseball feast. Readers who are not baseball fans will have to be satisfied with just wonderful writing. With 14 black-and-white photographs.

"If there is one diamond marriage, it has to be the one between columnist Red Smith and the game he covered for something approaching five decades." - Elysian Fields Quarterly

"Perhaps a new generation will pick up this book and discover the poetry in Americas' deliberate game." - Richmond Times-Dispatch

"I would suggest to the editors of Red Smith on Baseball a solution: Red Smith on Baseball II." - The Review of Higher Education

"Smith was sport-writing's voice of sanity...good to have you back, old friend." - Sports Illustrated

"Unrivaled on the sports page...nothing less than Smith at his best." - The New York Times