Shoeless Joe and Ragtime Baseball

Harvey Frommer was a sports historian who wrote extensively about the Yankees and collaborated with his wife on lively oral histories of Brooklyn, the Catskills and Broadway. Mr. Frommer had a fascination with baseball that began in Brooklyn during the 1940s and ¿50s, when the Dodgers, Yankees and Giants dazzled New York City with players like Jackie Robinson, Joe DiMaggio and Willie Mays. In his book New York City Baseball: The Last Golden Age, 1947-1957 (1980), Mr. Frommer described a three-team universe captured by radio.He contunued writng for 40 years. His dozens of books include an exploration of Robinson¿s breaking baseball¿s modern color barrier in 1947 and Shoeless Joe Jackson¿s banishment from baseball for his supposed role in fixing the 1919 World Series with seven Chicago White Sox teammates.

He also wrote autobiographies of Hall of Fame personalities like the fireballing pitcher Nolan Ryan and the Dallas Cowboys running back Tony Dorsett. Mr. Frommer focused on the Yankees in the 1990s with books like The New York Yankee Encyclopedia (1997); A Yankee Century: A Celebration of the First Hundred Years of Baseball¿s Greatest Team (2002); and Five O¿Clock Lightning (2008), about the slugging 1927 team led by Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.

Harry Frommer passed away on August 1, 2019, from metastatic lung cancer at his home in Lyme, N.H. He was 83 years old.

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