Runs, Hits, and an Era: The Pacific Coast League, 1903-58

It's hard to go wrong when you write a book about old-time baseball, and the Pacific Coast League might have been the best of the best.Paul Zingg's and Mark Medeiros's book is in much the same vein as the equally classic Dick Dobbins books on this subject. However, "Runs, Hits and an Era" is a little more fortified with statistics. The names of Jigger Statz and Buzz Arlett are hardly household words today, but they truly must have been the Henry Aaron and Barry Bonds of their league and era.And the authors rely less on interviews with the participants and more on traditional written sources - newspaper articles and other books written on the subject. In this book, there is perhaps slightly more emphasis on the Pacific Coast League's relationship to the other professional baseball leagues, major and minor, and on its relationship to the world at large.This book has the usual collection of wonderful baseball photos from that era but also some photographs from the historical period in general. On page 3, there's a photograph from 1869 of the meeting of the rails of the Transcontinental Railroad that joined the eastern and western parts of the country. This enabled professional eastern teams to compete on the West Coast. The barnstorming tour of the first Cincinnati Reds baseball team took them to the West Coast, and while they bowled over the local teams with the same regularity that they bowled over everyone else during their incredible 130 game win streak, their visit did help set into motion the forces that would promote professional baseball on the West Coast.Zingg and Medeiros also provide more information on the "color line", which was practiced by the PCL as unjustly and almost as rigidly as that practiced by the majors. Its existence was also just as predictably doomed, as the influx of "colored" talent would prove to be too overwhelming to be denied. Names such as Luke Easter, Minnie Minoso, and Artie Wilson might be familiar to many, but I was surprised to see the name of Piper Davis alongside these others.A mainstay of the old Negro Leagues that played in the shadows of the white major league teams in the east, Piper Davis is largely known for having first signed Willie Mays to a Birmingham Black Baron contract in the 1940`s. I had not known that he made his way to the Pacific Coast afterwards and established himself as a PCL pioneer.Who hit the longest home run in the history of professional baseball in the San Francisco Bay Area? The first five names that likely came to your mind were Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, Jose Canseco, Reggie Jackson and Willie McCovey. The name Roy Carlyle of the Oakland Oaks probably wouldn't have ranked high on your list, but with the immortal Buzz Arlett waiting his turn on-deck, Carlyle's 618-foot Fourth of July blast in 1929 off of the San Francisco Missions' Ernie Nevers (yes, the old football star) probably traveled farther than any "splash down". Carlyle looks like an ordinary-sized chap in h