The Best Pitcher in Baseball: The Life of Rube Foster, Negro League Giant--#74 finished

A very interesting person, a famous black pitcher at the turn of the century. He was one of the best pitchers at the time of any race. Towards the end of his time pitching he had moved over to manager and basically general manager and in charge of scheduling. Then he was also in the forefront of starting the Negro League and was the first commissioner. It was basically through his efforts that a Negro League was formed, he was the large personality that provided money, connections and overall ability to run the league. Like I said a truly interesting person.

The book itself wasn't as good as I hoped it would be. I understand that writing it 75 or so years after his death with no one around that personally knew him that information would be hard to come by. After reading this book, I now have a very baseline understanding of him but really nothing about the person. No information about his family life, no information about his kids or future generations talked about him as. Even the information on baseball is sketchy in that there were no complete records from the games at that time. When he played in was more of roving teams, there was no league and no set schedule.

Everyone does pretty much credit him with being a Hall of Fame pitcher, a Hall of Fame manager and a Hall of Fame type commissioner or league founder type. It is really a shame that more is not known of him because this book really just touches on this larger than life person.

I have posted the book at PBS, there was 1 WL for it. I will hopefully finish my other baseball related book tonight as well. I can't think of the name of it, but I will be loaning it out to a person at work before mailing off.