The premise, as stated in the first sentence on the front flap, is intriguing: “’hero-crafting’ in sports journalism through an incisive analysis of the work surrounding two of baseball’s most enduring personalities.” This sounds like the basis of a promising look at an interesting niche in American sportswriting history. Amber Roessner’s “Inventing Baseball Heroes: Ty Cobb, Christy Mathewson, and the Sporting Press in America,” however, fails to deliver on several levels.

The author’s thesis is basically stated in two sentences within the first chapter: “Top sports journalists formed close associations with baseball’s elite stars and then crafted them into heroes for the masses, using creative literary techniques. Their stories served as public morality tales about success and American manhood.” That theme is then restated throughout the book, whether by paraphrase or example, but beyond that, the book offers little more insight.

An early chapter is devoted to biographical sketches of Cobb and Mathewson, tracing their lives from birth to entering the major leagues, and similarly, the prominent journalists, including Ring Lardner and Grantland Rice, are followed in a similar timeline. In succeeding chapters, Roessner then follows the careers of Cobb and Mathewson, season by season, supplementing the events with some examples of the reportage of the sportswriters. The examples rarely enhance or expound upon the thesis in any significant way, leaving the reader frustrated, waiting for something more meaningful which never arrives. Essentially, the book tells us that sportswriters wrote of Cobb's and Mathewson's baseball exploits, portraying them as sinner and saint, respectively.

The author’s writing style is earnest and workmanlike, but exhibits some distracting elements: stating baseball scores as “five-to-two” rather than 5-2; noting pitchers’ won-loss records as “zero-and-three” rather than 0-3; instances of words misused (Mathewson's “jostled” blond hair; the sleepy “burg” of Cooperstown; Cobb “snatched” 892 bases); and an overuse of baseball jargon, merely for the sake of jargon.

In any book, there are bound to be a few factual errors that slip past the author and editors, but to misstate both the setup as well as the critical play of the infamous 1908 “Merkle Boner” incident in a crucial National League pennant race game between the Chicago Cubs and the New York Giants, as Roessner does, is simply a glaring error which suggests carelessness and damages the book’s credibility. ( )