Player-Manager
Price: $3,500.00
Hard Cover. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1949. First Edition. Good / Dust Jacket Included.
First edition, first printing. Signed by nine players on the verso of front free endpaper and half-title page, including Hall of Famers Tris Speaker, Lou Boudreau (inscribed), Hank Greenberg, Bob Feller, and Bill McKechnie. Additionally signed and inscribed by four Boston sportswriters on recto of frontispiece page: Franklin Lewis, Burt Whitman, Jack Berry, and Jack Malaney. With a JSA Letter of Authenticity. Publisher's red cloth, with front board and spine stamped in black; in its original pictorial dust jacket, with a photo of Lou Boudreau to front panel, lettered in orange, white, and black. Good book, with some toning to spine, front board slightly bowed, corners gently bumped, faint staining to front pastedown, and a crack between verso of half-title page and recto of frontispiece page; good clipped dust jacket, with heavy toning to spine, wear to spine ends, a closed tear to lower edge of front panel, shallow chip to upper edge of rear flap, nicked corners, and some dark soiling to rear panel. Overall, a fantastic grouping of Hall of Fame signatures. With a lifetime batting average of .345 and a record for doubles hit (792) that is still unbroken today, Tris Speaker is considered one of the greatest to ever play the game of baseball. He won three World Series titles (1912, 1915, 1920), and when the Red Sox traded him to the Cleveland Indians in 1916 many Red Sox fans considered it an even worse trade than when they traded away Babe Ruth. In 1937, he was voted into the second ever Hall of Fame class. He was posthumously selected to the All-Century Team in 1999, and that same year he was ranked #27 on Sporting News' list of the greatest players of all time. Lou Boudreau (1917-2001) excelled as a player, manager, and broadcaster. He was an 8x All-Star, and in 1948 he won the AL MVP award and led the Cleveland Indians to a World Series title as player-manager. He famously developed the "Williams shift" to counter left-handed hitter Ted Williams, which involved an ingenious realignment of the defense. He was elected to the National Hall of Fame in 1970. Hank Greenberg was a 5x All-Star, 2x World Series champion, and 2x AL MVP, and Bob Feller was an 8x All-Star, World Series champion (1948), Triple Crown winner (1940), and 7x MLB strikeout leader. Bill McKechnie was the first manager to win World Series titles with two different teams (Pittsburgh Pirates in 1925, and Cincinnati Reds in 1940) and accumulated 1,896 wins over the course of his career. Item #LBEF001
