Chatham Coloured All Stars: The Chatham Coloured All-Stars Barrier-Breaking Year

(Paperback)

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Description

The true story of the first Black team to win an Ontario Baseball Amateur Association championship.

The pride of Chathams East End, the Coloured All-Stars featured a roster of players who drew fans to the field with their high energy, no holds-barred style of play while they confronted challenges both on and off the field. Drawing heavily on scrapbooks, newspaper accounts, and oral histories from members of the team and their families, 1934: The Chatham Coloured All-Stars Barrier-Breaking Year tells the story of the first Black team to win an Ontario Baseball Amateur Association championship. More than a baseball story, this is a book about a neighbourhood, its citizens, and their pride in an astonishing team. Until recently, this vital story of Canadas racial history and the teams indefatigable spirit was preserved only in family stories, scrapbooks, and ephemera. 1934 introduces readers to these players and to the people who have worked to preserve and celebrate their legacy.

Reviews

Praise for 100 Miles of Baseball

Inspired They soulfully documented a 2018 road trip to the obscurest of play ball destinations, all within a limited radius The married authors complement each otherhes the play-by-play guy; she, the colour commentator."
Globe and Mail

Their account is presented in each writers voice, alternating throughout the text, and is an effective way to describe the games and their reactions to them ... Together they present a full, absorbing account of any level of ball, making the point that the precision of the major leagues and the error-prone play in the minors all contain the same elements ... A solid win for the authors, who rediscovered a genuine joy in watching baseball wherever it is played.
Winnipeg Free Press

"Dale Jacobs and Heidi LM Jacobs wrote this book to renew their love of baseball, and reading it will renew yours. Together they successfully capture the ritual, romanticism, and enduring beauty of this beloved game, with a back-to-basics approach that will appeal to self-proclaimed experts and perceived outsiders alike. At its core, 100 Miles of Baseball is about endurance, nostalgia, hope, and gratitude, and is a book that handily affirms the game's very best rule--that baseball is for everyone."
Stacey May Fowles, author of Baseball Life Advice

In 2018, Dale Jacobs and Heidi LM Jacobs set out on the quixotic mission to take in fifty baseball games, from high school parks to the major leagues, in an effort to recapture the magic of the sport as seen live from the stands. Most of the games were played in Michigan and Southern Ontario, but this account will delight any true fan of any team, anywhere. The unexpected twists and turns of the seasonlike a meaty novelcan disrupt expectations and break hearts at any time. This book is timely, because it explains why the Covid-disrupted sixty-game MLB season in 2020 was so unsatisfying. In sixty games, there was simply no time or space for the joy and redemption this book captures so vividly.
Susan Jacoby, author of Why Baseball Matters

Praise for Heidi LM Jacobs

Heidi LM Jacobs nails it. Molly of the Mall relentlessly, hilariously conveys the ennui felt by anyone who has ever read a book and then gone to the mall ... Wicked good fun.
Kit Dobson

I am positively besotted by Heidi LM Jacobs debut novel, Molly of the Mall, which I kind of suspect was written just for me."
Kerry Clare

Inspired They soulfully documented a 2018 road trip to the obscurest of play ball destinations, all within a limited radius The married authors complement each otherhes the play-by-play guy; she, the colour commentator.
Globe and Mail

Their account is presented in each writers voice, alternating throughout the text, and is an effective way to describe the games and their reactions to them ... Together they present a full, absorbing account of any level of ball, making the point that the precision of the major leagues and the error-prone play in the minors all contain the same elements ... A solid win for the authors, who rediscovered a genuine joy in watching baseball wherever it is played.
Winnipeg Free Press

Author Bio

Heidi LM Jacobs previous books include the novel Molly of the Mall: Literary Lass and Purveyor of Fine Footwear (NeWest Press, 2019), which won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour in 2020, and 100 Miles of Baseball: Fifty Games, One Summer (with Dale Jacobs, Biblioasis, 2021). She is a librarian at the University of Windsor and one of the researchers behind the award-winning Breaking the Colour Barrier: Wilfred Boomer Harding & the Chatham Coloured All-Stars project. 1934: The Chatham Coloured All-Stars Barrier-Breaking Year is forthcoming from Biblioasis in 2023.