The new book by long-time FOX broadcaster Greg Lucas, “Baseball: It’s More Than Just a Game,” is a lot more valuable than the time it takes readers to work their ways through the 214-pages of of the facts presented and then clear by the bibliography that supports their authenticity.For me, it truly was – and still is – one of those books that “you just can’t put down.” – You can’t put it down because, once you get beyond the mere considerable entertainment value that awaits any reader who lives, eats, and breathes baseball, it remains forever an excellent reference book on all the intricate parts that go into making up the body of the soulfully giant American game of baseball.
I even awoke this Saturday morning from a dream about the time my father hired me at age 14 for the first paying job I ever had beyond the nickles and dimes he paid me for extraordinary chores at home. Dad was the Parts Department manager for Bill Lee Studebaker on Lawndale near 75th in the Houston End back in 1952 and he had hired me to help him do the dealership’s annual stock inventory. In the dream, it was almost as though it were happening again. I could hear Dad’s instructions. I could even see what appeared to me as hundreds of little drawers that stacked high to the ceiling of the Parts Department with all the smaller items that a car needs to keep running properly.
“In these drawers, Son,” Dad said, “you will find all the small parts you could ever need to put together one of those whole cars you see out there on the showroom and, while that’s not your job today, remember the idea. Anything worthwhile is put together with a lot of lesser things that together add up to something bigger than each of the parts themselves.”
“Wow,” I thought this morning. “Dad might as well have been talking about Greg Lucas’ new book. It’s in many ways like the parts manual I found that day in 1952 that both identified and filled in the connections on how the various parts fit together for all the different purposes that cooperatively propel a good working automobile in the way it is intended to go. Wow,” I thought again. That’s very close to a description of what Greg Lucas has done here with his book on baseball.
Greg Lucas
Author
There is nothing less in Greg Lucas’ wonderful new baseball book. It is an item by item inventory of all the essential smaller areas of history that go into making up the whole roll of growth that has evolved around the heart and soul attraction so many of us for the game of baseball over the nearly two hundred years that make up the identifiable history of the American game.
Jacques Barzun, the great French scholar, once said, if you want to know America, know baseball. We say, if you want to know baseball, know what’s in “Baseball: It’s More Than Just a Game.” Do that much and you will be closer to the heart and soul of the game we all love than ever before. Greg Lucas hasn’t missed a beat here, but not in a know-it-all way. When you read Greg’s book, you are reminded too of how much we all have in store for us in the area of our need for continuing education about baseball.
From the early history of the game in the 19th century to the development of organized baseball, from the bare handed playing days to the evolving equipment we know today, from changes in the rules to the formation of both universal and variable distances that exist on each ball field, from the personalities and performances of players coming of age to the kinds of ballparks where they played their games, from the dead ball game of a more conservative America to the unsurprising power game that exploded with Babe Ruth and the culture of the “Roaring Twenties,” readers will find the baseball that Barzun suggested people needed to know if they care to know America – and it’s all here in the Greg Lucas book for a reasonable price through Barnes and Noble, Amazon, and other fine booksellers.
Get it. You won’t regret it. And you will use it forever.
Thanks, Greg Lucas, for writing baseball’s much needed version of the important automobile parts manual. Everything you’ve included is good-to-go information about the game – information that will never be out of date and always close at hand to all of us through your book.
The Pecan Park Eagle 
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