The Crackers: Early Days of Atlanta Baseball [Paperback]

TIM DARNELL is an award-winning journalist who has written for numerous Atlanta sports and political publications. He is also the author of 101 Atlanta Sports Legends and The Georgia Tech Trivia Book.

Beginning in an era before traffic jams, air-conditioning, and Atlanta’s ascension to international fame, Tim Darnell chronicles the emergence of amateur and minor-league baseball in various forms in Atlanta from just after the Civil War through the rise of the Crackers (1901–65).

Through never-before-published player interviews, rare illustrations, extensive charts and statistics, and thorough research, Darnell examines the drama and politics that affected the Crackers over the years. Also profiled is the Black Crackers, Atlanta’s Negro Southern League franchise whose success and popularity paralleled those of their white counterparts.

The Crackers is a light-hearted, fun, and engrossing history of a time, a people, and one very special centerfield magnolia tree whose stories are legend to this day.

Includes a Crackers Trivia Quiz, and appendices with records and statistics.

The best of Blount—and Blount at his best.

Page for page, Roy Blount is as funny as anyone I've read in a long time.

Roy Blount, Jr., establishes himself as a major humorist.

The funniest book I've read in a decade.

[Crackers] serves as a springboard for all manner of wild, outrageous, incisive, iconoclastic observations about the South in particular and the American Reality in general.

This book contains pop zest and folk wisdom . . . deep-dish country humor and acute sensibility. . . . Like Mark Twain, [Blount] pits the sagacity and saltiness of the cracker barrel against the smooth, evasive rhetoric of the soapbox.