I'm almost as big a sports fan as I am a reader, but books about sports often leave me cold. I usually find them too argumentative or too hagiographic -- too consciously subversive or too wide-eyed and faux-innocent. I'd almost always prefer to just watch a game. There are exceptions, though, and one of them is recently out in paperback: Cait Murphy's Crazy '08.

With the new baseball season just a few weeks away, it's the perfect time to go back exactly a century to a time when the sport was making the transition to its modern incarnation. Murphy argues (persuasively) that 1908 was the best season on record, featuring a tremendous three-way battle for the National League between the New York Giants, Chicago Cubs, and Pittsburgh Pirates.

Murphy does a rollicking job of recounting several pivotal games, but equally terrific are the more tangential anecdotes that she seamlessly includes: How and why team nicknames stuck; how a series of fires led to the creation of new stadiums; and how an 11-year-old boy got thrown in jail, prompting a judge to rule that fans could keep the foul balls they caught.

Titans of the game like Christy Mathewson, Cy Young, and Ty Cobb were playing in those days, but the sport was also undeniably less regulated (and zany) in many ways. It was also the source for great stories, as it has been and always will be, leading to sentences like this one in Crazy '08: "The Pirates are going to be weak if Honus Wagner makes good on his promise to skip the season in order to raise chickens."

Pretty soon, there will be fresh box scores to read. To get ready for them, pick up Murphy's book.