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The 26th Player is the long-awaited account of the most colorful population within America's pastime, the fans: Season-ticket holders and impulse ticket buyers, gamblers and groupies, the radio audience of Red Barber and Vin Scully, obsessive collectors, even some of the executives and players themselves. All have invested their dollars and passions in a sport that has sometimes repaid them in spades and at other times broken their hearts. The interplay among owners, teams, individual players, and the folks in the seats is laid out in vivid and highly entertaining detail. Its characters--from Brooklyn's Hilda Chester with her clanging cowbell to Margo Adams with her palimony suit--sit everywhere from the center field bleachers to the luxury boxes behind home plate. Its plot reveals how the game's entrepreneurs have repeatedly done their utmost to sabotage their own industry while the fan response has been consistently inconsistent. The fan reaction to the Black Sox scandal, America's adoration of Babe Ruth, white baseball's reception of Jackie Robinson, the 1981 players' strike, and the internationalization of the game all are part of this rich and varied history that every fan of baseball has had a hand in creating.