1914.
It was the midst of the Deadball Era in baseball, but this year the mighty Babe would arrive on the scene and change the game forever. The modern game was coming, and the Boston Braves, a perennially woeful team in the National League would show everyone that it was coming sooner than they thought.
Fifteen games behind John McGraw’s powerhouse New York Giants in early July, this young team of untested prospects in the hands of innovative baseball minds made history. This month, author J. Brian Ross offers a recounting of the last-place-to-first rise of a team of outcasts and also-rans competing with legends in the brilliant new book “BASEBALL’S GREATEST COMEBACK: The Miracle Braves of 1914” (Rowman & Littlefield, August 2014).
About the Author
J. Brian Ross earned a B.A. and an M.A. in history from the University of Michigan, and a Ph.D. from Case Western Reserve University. Born in Boston, Ross frequented Fenway Park, where he gained a lifelong devotion to Boston baseball. He acquired a passion for the 1880–1914 time period, the background years for the “Miracle Braves,” when writing the “The New Philanthropy,” a case study that looks at the politics of charity during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Ross has served as history teacher and department chair at Hawken School and Hathaway Brown School in northeast Ohio, as well as Collegiate School in Richmond, Virginia. He has researched baseball history since 1997, when, at Hathaway Brown School, in Shaker Heights, Ohio, he organized a history conference celebrating the 50th anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s breaking the color barrier of the major league.
