One of the earliest sportswriters to be seriously recognized, Charles Dryden was hailed by The Sporting News (19 February 1931) as the "creator of [a] new baseball literature." Celebrated for his wit, he was widely regarded, according to The New York Times (12 February 1931), as "first and perhaps the greatest of all baseball humorists." In the introduction to his The Champion Athletics: Personal Sketches of the Men Who Have Just Landed the 1905 American League Pennant after the Greatest Fight in Base Ball History (1905), the editors of the Philadelphia North American, one of the newspapers for which he worked, called him "concededly the best base ball writer who ever took up a pencil." Dryden took baseball reporting beyond its limits at the start of the twentieth century, when two or three short paragraphs often sufficed for a featured game, and expanded it to columns of amusing, accurate details about the players on...