Rube Foster in His Time: On the Field and in the Papers with Black Baseball's Greatest Visionary

Lester, Larry. Rube Foster in His Time: On the Field and in the Papers with Black Baseball's Greatest Visionary. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012.

Despite being the cynosure of black baseball for over twenty-five years, Andrew "Rube" Foster has to this point mostly escaped the direct gaze of biographers, with Charles Whitehead's A Man and His Diamonds (1980) and Robert Charles Cottrell's The Best Pitcher in Baseball (2001) being the exceptions rather than rule.

While not a straight biography, Rube Foster in His Time effectively tackles the complex and expansive story of the legendary pitcher/manager/organizer from Winchester, Texas. Subtitled On the Field and in the Papers with Baseball's Greatest Visionary, Lester's book is centered on Foster's own writings, originally published in the pages of African American newspapers such as the Chicago Defender and Indianapolis Freeman. A great player and team leader, Foster was also an inveterate letter-writer and astute commenter on the black baseball scene, although as one rival succinctly noted, Foster's words were sometimes colored by his propensity for "self-aggrandizement," and an oft-repeated tendency to shape the facts to fit his narrative.

Lester, an esteemed historian, has assembled a treasure trove...