“Good guys” of the dead ball era?

[destijl03]

Originally Posted by G1911

Biographies skew negative in the last few decades. Good upstanding people who quietly lived a decent life don't make good fodder for books, and usually don't get as much press as people who broke rules and did unusual or exciting things, which for an athlete usually means something negative. A juicy attack on a person sells more copies than a fair portrayal in recent times, and so the laudatory biography has mostly died outside of the political realm and been generally replaced with its opposite.

Billy Sunday will be hard to top.

I think about this sometimes when looking at tobacco cards, how it’s a shame that we’ll likely never know more than a few stats and a paragraph-long on-field bio of the majority of the players, especially the commons, either because they lived quietly or didn’t make for an interesting story. I’m much more interested in reading the stories of the guys who made a positive difference in their teammates’ and families’ lives rather than the guys who berated, scuffled, or cheated.