Johnny Evers: A Baseball Life

**2015 SEYMOUR MEDAL FINALIST**
**CASEY AWARD FINALIST FOR BEST BASEBALL BOOK OF 2014**
For more than a century Johnny Evers has been conjoined with Chicago Cubs teammates Frank Chance and Joe Tinker, thanks to eight lines of verse penned by a well-known New York columnist. He has been caricatured as a scrawny, sour man who couldn't hit and who owed his fame to that poem. In truth Johnny Evers was more than a part of "Tinker to Evers to Chance." He was a gifted player in all phases of the game, a master strategist, and the heartbeat of one of the greatest teams of the 20th century; he was also the fiercest competitor this side of Ty Cobb. Evers was at the center of one of baseball's greatest controversies, a chance event that cemented his stardom and stole a pennant from John McGraw and the New York Giants in 1908. Four years later, following a stunning set of reversals and tragedies that resulted in his suffering a nervous breakdown, Evers embarked on a comeback that culminated in his leading the 1914 Boston Braves to the most improbable of championships. Spanning the time from his birth in Troy, New York, to his death less than a year after his election to the Hall of Fame, this is the biography of a man who literally wrote the book about playing his position and set the standard for winning baseball.