Honus Wagner

“Dennis and Jeanne DeValeria pay overdue homage to the Pittsburgh Pirates’ Flying Dutchman, perhaps the premier shortstop in baseball history.” —The Toronto Globe and Mail

Honus Wagner is generally acknowledged as the finest shortstop in baseball history. Along with Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Christy Mathewson, and Walter Johnson, he was one of the first five players to be elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. His rise paralleled the development of baseball as the national pastime, and his playing skills remain legendary. He was, possibly, the first superstar of American sports.

And yet, amazingly, a full-length biography of Honus Wagner had never before appeared. Here, Dennis and Jeanne DeValeria tell the sports hero’s whole story. The son of German immigrants, Wagner (1874–1955) grew up in Andrew Carnegie’s Pittsburgh, working in coal mines at age twelve. At age thirteen he worked in a steel mill; at twenty-one he was a professional baseball player.

At a time when baseball was a raw, aggressive game played by rugged men, the unflappable Wagner's humble ways enhanced his miraculous performance throughout his twenty-one-year career, including three seasons with the Louisville Colonels and eighteen with the Pittsburgh Pirates. Wagner’s gradual emergence from the pack into stardom and popularity is described here in rich detail. But the book also reveals much of Wagner’s family and personal life about which, until now, there had been no well known narrative.

Neither the “rowdy-ball” ruffian nor the teetotal saint constructed of legend, Wagner is presented here in a complete portrait—one that offers a vivid impression of the era when baseball was America’s game and the nation was evolving into the world’s industrial leader.