The American League: A History

New York: Gallery Books, 1986. First Printing thus [stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. Format is approximately 9.5 inches by 12.25 inches. 192 pages. Illustrated endpapers. Illustrations (some in color), Index. DJ has slight wear and soiling. Contents include: The Beginnings of the American League; The House that Ruth Built; Heroes of the Depression; The Fighting Forties; The Fabled Fifties; The Sensational Sixties; The Seditious Seventies, and the Unsettled Eighties. Traces the history of the American League from its early years to the present day, highlighting the famous plays, crucial games, and memorable personalities of league baseball. Zoss' professional life has always balanced between prose and music, sometimes weighted heavily to one or the other, as during the 1980s into the 1990s, when he authored or co-authored over twenty five nonfiction books. Zoss has won several awards for his prose and is an International PEN short story award winner and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow of Creative Writing. These included, with historian John S. Bowman, Diamonds in the Rough, cited by The New York Times as one of the 50 greatest baseball books of all times. Since 1964 John D. Bowman has been a freelance editor and writer. The American League of Professional Baseball Clubs, known simply as the American League (AL), is one of two leagues that make up Major League Baseball (MLB) in the United States and Canada. It developed from the Western League, a minor league based in the Great Lakes states, which eventually aspired to major league status. It is sometimes called the Junior Circuit because it claimed Major League status for the 1901 season, 25 years after the formation of the National League (the "Senior Circuit"). At the end of every season, the American League champion plays in the World Series against the National League champion; two seasons did not end in playing a World Series (1904, when the National League champion New York Giants refused to play their AL counterpart, and 1994, when a players' strike prevented the Series). Through 2021, American League teams have won 66 of the 117 World Series played since 1903, with 27 of those coming from the New York Yankees alone. The New York Yankees have won 40 American League titles, the most in the league's history, followed by the Philadelphia/Kansas City/Oakland Athletics (15) and the Boston Red Sox. Originally a minor league known as the Western League, which existed from 1885 to 1899 with teams in mostly Great Lakes states, the league changed its name to the American League for the 1900 season and the next year developed into a second major league as a competitor to the older National League. This was prompted by the NL dropping four teams following the 1899 season after having absorbed it previous rival, the American Association, which disbanded in 1891 after ten seasons. In its early history of the late 1880s, the minor Western League struggled until 1894, when Ban Johnson became the president of the league. Johnson pushed the league to rise to major league status, after the name change to the American League was decided in a league meeting in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, at the former Republican Hotel. A historical marker is at the intersection of North Old World 3rd Street and West Kilbourn Avenue where the hotel once stood. In March 1904, Johnson moved the league's headquarters from Chicago to New York. Babe Ruth, noted as one of the most prolific hitters in Major League Baseball history, spent the majority of his career in the American League with the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees.