Turn-of-the-century Chicago has proliferated widely in literary document—Carl Sandburg and Chris Ware come to mind as the more singular writerly ambassadors of this time and place. To that list add Cait Murphy, whose Crazy ‘08 pitches a tent with other of Chi-town’s idiosyncratic text-based love songs, with its colorful centennial ballpark jargon, edge-of-the-seat pennant-race plot line, and delightfully obscure microhistoricism. Forgetting the wide-eyed metaphoric praise heaped on the American Pastime—what Murphy would dismiss as “twaddle”—Crazy ‘08 is as beautifully sprawling and all-revealing as baseball itself. That’s owed in equal parts to the character of the subject and the author’s expert treatment of it.

Cubs vs. Giants. In 1908 it was a stirring rivalry, one that pitted Christy Mathewson against Mordecai Brown. The book tails the Cubs through what a far-from-fascetious Murphy contends is “[t]he best season in baseball history.” And she makes a darned fine argument for that assertion along the way, following this stunningly weird and undular baseball season shot through with, appropriately, some of the more colorful historical sidebars available (immigrants! whores! murder!). There’s baseball being played by Napoleonic scholars, iron foundry workers, aspiring lawyers, and a heap of other SABR-sounding cats whose demographic wouldn’t make it past the PONY leagues these days (this critic not excluded). This stuff is very good, and so is a live band vamping “Wacht am Rhein” as Honus Wagner comes to bat (he’s five for five that day); and so is a “[d]ripping, half-naked” Matty arriving to the mound early shower interruptus to save a ballgame. On top of that weirdness, in 1908, there were the six teams contending for the pennant with just two days left in the season, if you’re more the conventional rush-on-the-field-during-a-mid-season-victory type (the you of 100 years ago certainly was, swilling whiskey and smoking cigars).

The year 2007 is an optimal coin of vantage for a look back on the historical moment of early 1900s urban America, which is already famously rife for fantastic retelling in letters. We look on ourselves, unknowing, through a glass darkly. It’s urban yet unsanitary; recent enough to be familiar yet distantly unknowable, with virtually zero survivors around to nay-say. Murphy is apparently aware of the narrative leeway this affords the author, and it comes out in the writing, which is a cool, armchair-conversant, late-Capitalist American Samuel Richardson. So the writing is a much fun as what it describes. People exert “hoodoos” over each other (you can sort of osmote the meaning of this one); baseball is said to never to sleep, instead it “huddles around the metaphorical hot stove to rehash the past and dicker about the future”; and “Chicago and baseball fit like pork and beans—the ingredients are modest, but the result is appealing to all palates” (thankfully, in Crazy ‘08, that’s true).

Like any non-linear game, this literary work seems the product of some delirious, unfathomable algorithm. Fans of baseball and of America should love it, redolent as it is of the glorious holy stench of the game—b.o., alcohol, pork products, industry. The author writes it like her subjects played it—with a verve and panache that could invest even the sorriest of outings with spectacle and imbue it with cathartic meaning. And, like the ballplayer, the author should be praised for her technical savvy and hard work, both of which Murphy displays here in spades. Yes, Murphy has hit (sorry—ballgame verbiage) the books hard and she’s not afraid to call her shots (double sorry). While the endnotes indicate some of the book’s most titillating and bizarre facts come straight from the era’s Chicago Tribune Cubs beat writers, an obvious source does not preclude solid research. Murphy even goes so far as to take on, swoon, Ken Burns. The daring of an old-time player grimacing before hitting the dirt with spikes flying high—that’s the kind of confidence Murphy brings to the authorship of this book (have to say, it is so cool that Crazy ‘08 was written by a woman, not that this tidbit has anything to do with the laudatory tone of this review): “The Ken Burns television documentary on baseball states that Rube Foster taught Matty the fadeaway. This is not true.”