Also, to touch on something else JJ mentioned, I think its' really interesting to hear some of the accounts of how hard certain pitchers threw back then. Some might be folklore, legends, but nearly every pitcher or player of his era swears Smokey Joe Wood could hit triple digits. There were no radar guns, but scouts did have a way of measuring ballspeed: they would race a pitch against a motorcycle.
On this same subject, one of my favorite players is
Steve Dalkowski, who never reached the majors but is still a legend to most hardcore baseball fans because of his fastball that was once estimated at 110 mph. Ted Williams once faced him in a spring training game and said "I never saw the first pitch".
Dalkowski was the model for "Nuke" Laloosh, as writer/director Ron Shelton played on the same minor league team as him.
