Ed Delahanty in the Emerald Age of Baseball

Description

Jerrold Casway’s fascinating biography of legendary baseball player Ed Delahanty (1867–1903) offers a compelling examination of the first “King of Swatsville’s” life and career, including the enigma surrounding his tragic and untimely death. Through Delahanty’s story, Casway traces the evolving character of major league baseball and its effect on the lives and ambitions of its athletes.

Delahanty’s career spanned the last decades of the nineteenth century during a time when the sons of post-famine Irish refugees dominated the sport and changed the playing style of America’s national pastime. In this “Emerald Age” of baseball, Irish-American players comprised 30–50 percent of all players, managers, and team captains. Baseball for Delahanty and other young Irishmen was a ticket out of poverty and into a life of fame and fortune. The allure and promise of celebrity and wealth, however, were disastrous for Delahanty. He found himself enmeshed in desperate contract dealings and a gambling addiction that drove him to alcohol abuse. The owner of the fourth highest lifetime batting average, Delahanty mysteriously disappeared and was found at the bottom of Niagara’s Horseshoe Falls.

This rich biography, which relies on previously unavailable family papers and court transcripts, as well as the colorful sports reporting of the period, will appeal to anyone interested in baseball, sports, or Irish history.

Author Bio

Jerrold Casway is professor of history and chair of the Social Sciences/Teacher Education Division at Howard Community College in Columbia, Maryland. He specializes in early modern Irish history and nineteenth-century baseball.

Reviews

“Long before the Red Sox traded Babe Ruth to the Yankees, Ed Delahanty was the 'King of Swatsville.' A player for the Philadelphia Phillies and the Washington Senators who still holds the record for the fourth highest lifetime batting average, Delahanty “personified the flamboyant, exciting spectator-favorite, the Casey-at-the-bat, Irish slugger” writes Jerrold Casway in Ed Delahanty in the Emerald Age of Baseball. He was the “handsome masculine athlete who was expected to live as large as he played.” And he did: Gambling his way into a drinking problem, he turned up dead at the bottom of Niagara's Horseshoe Falls.” —The Washington Post

"Jerrold Casway. . . has written a book that takes the romantic sheen off nineteenth-century baseball. The focus of his study is the Hall of Fame outfielder and first baseman Edward Delahanty, one of the most feared batsmen of his time. More substantively, Casway places Delahanty at the fore of the ethnic and labor strife that marked early professional baseball. Poor Ed Delahanty ended up at the bottom of Niagara Falls. Whether he jumped, was pushed, or dumped remains a mystery, although each scenario was plausible given professional baseball's penchant for treating its ethnic workforce as interchangeable parts in its myth-making machine." —Journal of American Culture

". . . Casway provides valuable insight into baseball's past, paying tribute to an athlete, who, as fellow Irishman John McGraw noted, was unquestionably the Babe Ruth of his day." —North Dakota Quarterly

“. . . Casway. . . provides a colorful study of the life and times of one of baseball’s earliest sluggers at a time when the game was the unchallenged national pastime. Casway has written a fascinating, carefully researched biography of a long-neglected baseball hero that will appeal to scholars as well as general readers. Ed Delahanty in the Emerald Age of Baseball is a valuable contribution to our understanding of the culture and evolution of the national pastime at the turn of the century.” —History: Reviews of New Books

“Baseball enthusiasts will find this book one of the most satisfying biographies of recent years. . . Readers who approach this volume from the perspective of Irish Studies will find something even more rewarding in the larger story that underpins Casway’s book. —Irish Literary Supplement

“. . . impressive and persuasive. . . Casway. . . shows us how baseball when it was evolving. . . can help us better appreciate the joys and miseries of baseball today.” —The Virginia Quarterly Review

“. . . this book presents an interesting picture of the early days of baseball. One hundred years hasn’t really changed the sport. Many young men still come into fame and fortune before they are mature enough to handle it. Delahanty’s demise stands as an eerie precursor to those athletes of the modern era whose careers were cut short by drug use.” —The Tampa Tribune

"I recommend Jerrold Casway’s new book. . . . Through Delahanty’s career, Mr. Casway ably tells the story of the wars between the National League and the upstart American League that culminated in the National Agreement and ended in the comparably settled Deadball Era." —New York Sun

“Sad and compelling . . . this is a lucid examination of the ‘behind the scenes’ complexities of the national pasttime. . . . This is not an uplifting story, but it is essential for understanding how difficulties in a fledgling sport led to the unfortunate downfall of a great athlete.” —ForeWord

". . . this is an estimable biography. If Ed Delahanty has been a neglected figure in baseball history, now, thanks to Jerrold Casway's dedication and perseverance, he has finally received the kind of thorough treatment he has long deserved." —Journal of Sport History