Every baseball player from little league to the big leagues knows it is illegal to steal signs, yet every major league team assigns someone to do just that. Baseball thrives on trickery and deception. But as our oldest major team sport, its larcenous legacy goes much deeper than the field of play. In LARCENY AND OLD LEATHER: THE MISCHIEVOUS LEGACY OF MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL, Eldon Ham—sports lawyer, professor, and author—traces the game’s lesser-known, roguish past. His wry chapters, filled with anecdotes and statistics, expose both the hidden and the obvious cheating occurring throughout baseball’s history, from corked bats and spitballs to betting and media hyperbole. Here is a book for both seasoned baseball fans and neophytes who’d like to get a look at the game that evolved into an industry. Babe Ruth, Sammy Sosa, Pete Rose, and many other lesser known players make their appearance in this fascinating history, as Ham seeks not only to chronicle the legacy of deception inherent within the game, but also to explore why it is, and how it is, that this deception is exactly what makes baseball the most endearing of American games. It is a testament to baseball's greatness that it survives the flagrant incompetence and chicanery of those who run it. Fans will know too well the tales of "mischief" that sports lawyer Ham relates here: the Pete Rose gambling controversy, New York Giant Bobby Thompson's possibly tainted home run in the National League pennant play-off game against Brooklyn in 1951, Sammy Sosa's corked bat (2003), baseball's unlawful reserve clause, the curses on the Cubs and Red Sox, the rogues' gallery of spitballers who have thrived in the game, and many more. Ham's strength is purely as a legal analyst of these issues, not as a baseball historian--he wrongly attributes baseball's record 56-game hitting streak to Lou Gehrig, not Joe DiMaggio, for example. And, stunningly, he only mentions in passing the time-bomb issue of performance-enhancing drugs in baseball. Still, hard-core baseball fans, eternally forgiving, will find something of worth here. Alan Moores Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved "Larceny and Old Leather is a unique, informative, and often humorous glimpse into some of the secret and not-so-secret dirty tricks, thefts, vaudeville pranks and just plain cheating that dot the long, colorful history of America's most beloved game." — Chicago Tribune Eldon L. Ham  has taught sports law at Chicago-Kent College of Law since 1994 and was one of the first lawyers to challenge the NFL's drug policy in court ("Richard Dent v. NFL", 1988). He is the sports legal analyst for WSCR sports radio in Chicago and has appeared on dozens of radio stations coast to coast as a sports lawyer, expert, and historian. He is also the author of The Playmasters: From Sellouts to Lockouts an Unauthorized History of the NBA ; Larceny & Old Leather: The Mischievous Legacy of Major League Baseball ; and Broadcasting Baseball: A History of the National Pastime on Radio and Television . He lives near Chicago. Used Book in Good Condition