The Boys of Autumn

The Wall Street Journal takes a look at baseball books as the World Series comes close.

From the introduction to the piece...

Almost 32 years ago to the day—on Oct. 18, 1977—I stood in the runway behind home plate at Yankee Stadium, reporter's notebook in hand, when Reggie Jackson hit his third home run in the sixth game of the World Series against the Los Angeles Dodgers. It was the game that won the championship for the Yankees, but my assignment was not to chronicle what turned out to be a memorable night of baseball. Instead, my job was to report on the celebration outside the Bronx ballpark in case it got out of hand (it did).

Baseball writing back then was already turning into a search for news beyond the ballfields and locker rooms, when just a few years earlier it had been focused almost exclusively on the game and the inspiration it could offer. The trend only accelerated with the arrival of the steroid era. As the latest World Series nears, fans might welcome a trio of baseball books that step back to the days when—for better or worse—we did think of these guys as heroes, and of the game as American as, well, apple pie.

And, talking about the World Series, here's about the most famous home run ever: