Dominionball: Baseball Above the 49th

 

This volume contains essays that describe many leagues now long gone, and teams that fostered a love of the sport in communities where fans never saw or even heard a major league game. There are personal pieces by players and a coach, vignettes of their baseball careers in Canada. There is sadness in the account of the untimely death of Linus "Skeeter" Ebnet on the diamond in 1938. Humour is not lacking here, though, with lighter pieces by David McDonald on the WWI-era Canadian League, and Kit Krieger's account of his meteoric rise to PCL stardom. Before there were Expos and Jays, there were great International League teams now in Montreal and Toronto, when the International League contained players of renown. The sport has a peculiar hold on the imagination of the French, as we see in Michel Nareau's piece on baseball in Québécois fiction. Inevitably, this journal is about the past rather than the present, but not always the distant past.