Oscar Charleston: The Life and Legend of Baseball's Greatest Forgotten Player

Jeremy Beer fills a glaring gap in the canon of Negro Leagues books with one of the best baseball books of the year, Oscar Charleston: The Life and Legend of Baseball’s Greatest Forgotten Player. Alternately compared to Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, and Tris Speaker, Charleston somehow was largely overlooked as the history of the Negro Leagues was researched and written over the past half century. Relying heavily on Charleston’s personal scrapbook, Beer effectively stitches together the life and career of one of the finest ballplayers ever, who combined power and speed with superb defensive capabilities. The book also chronicles the many on-the-field incidents Charleston had, as he was notoriously one of the most combative players of the era. show more He rounded out his career as a manager and then as a scout, playing an important role in Branch Rickey’s signing of Jackie Robinson. Beer astutely notes that “Charleston filled an imaginative need within the black community: he was more representative than either the theatrical Satchel Paige or the California-bred, college-educated Robinson.” Though temperamentally flawed, the black community looked up to Charleston as a hard-working, blue collar hero. As with many baseball biographies, the book suffers from an abundance of box score recaps, but this is nevertheless a solid account of one of the game’s greats, lending definition to a previously shadowy figure of Negro League baseball. show less