Silver Bats and Automobiles: The Hotly Competitive, Sometimes Ignoble Pursuit of the Major League Batting Championship

by David L. Fleitz

Almost from professional baseball's birth more than 130 years ago, the batting championship has been one of the sport's most highly coveted awards. Since 1949, the Louisville Slugger company has presented the man with the highest batting average at season's end with the Silver Bat Award, a regulation-sized metal bat plated in sterling silver with the winner's name and average engraved upon it. Throughout the years, heated battles for the Silver Bat Award have featured unusual machinations by players, managers, and entire teams, including allegations of cheating, bribery, deliberate misplays, and questionable strategies, and, in one especially bitter campaign, charges of racism. Here are the stories behind these races.

222 pages, Paperback

First published May 2, 2011

Reviews

[Blaine DeSantis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful book about all that has gone on in baseball history and those who have won or come in a close second in the yearly race for the batting title. Love these stories about baseball and the quirks and shenanigans that players and teams have done to either help or hurt a player win the batting title.
If you are a fan of baseball, baseball history and baseball lore than this is a great book to read for pleasure and fun. Broken up into about 23 chapters, each of which goes in great detail over different batting title battles, the chapters are short, easy to read and as a lover of baseball history I love all the stories, anecdotes and the pure mystique of the game. You will find a lot of that here in this short, but extremely well-researched and insightful book.

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A valuable resource for baseball fan and scholar alike, "Silver Bats and Automobiles" is the story of the pursuit of the annual batting championship in professional baseball (primarily the major leagues, although there is a discussion of minor league championships as well), and the machinations of players and managers alike to game the system so the player they wanted to win would. Not originally considered an official statistic by the leagues, the rules for determining batting champion were so vague and statistics so poorly kept that there remain questions as to who actually won the championships in some years, and the question of how much someone needed to play to win one was not settled until well into the modern era. Trickery, questionable tactics, and downright cheating have long been overlooked, if not outright accepted in the pursuit of the title. Fascinating stories that will leave you scratching your head at the ethics of some of the favorite players of your youth - in my case, I came out with a much different view of George Brett than I went in with. Why? Read the book.

[Mr. Kovach · Rating 4 out of 5]

An easy and fun read about baseball and the endless and fascinating quest for the highest year-end BA.