Tombstone Whispers

Following up on Professor Wood’s 2016 Beyond the Ballpark: The Honorable, Immoral, and Eccentric Lives of Baseball Legends, which was listed in Sport’s Collector Digest’s top forty baseball books of 2016, he examines twenty-five additional legends. Included are such notables as the lovable Yogi Berra, Stan Musial, and Gil Hodges, the feisty Billy Martin, the complex Ted Williams, the tragic Shoeless Joe Jackson, the delightful Pepper Martin, and the crook Hal Chase. Wood tracks down how these players acted away from the ballpark, and the circumstances surrounding their deaths. The author also includes his pictures of all the gravesites, except for two who were not interred. There is much funny and sad stuff here.