It’s that time of year again. The leaves are turning red, and so are the cheeks of those sitting in the bone-chilling stands watching postseason action. Several new books examine some of the most exciting World Series matchups in history (with just one featuring the New York Yankees). And when I say “history,” I do not exaggerate. Some of these titles go back practically to the roots of the ultimate interleague smackdown.

Working backwards, we have not one but two books on the 1975 games between the Boston Red Sox and Cincinnati Reds (which seems odd since there’s no “natural” anniversary to make it especially timely).

Thanks to some bizarre circumstances during the sixth game --- a large rat ran across the foot of an NBC cameraman who momentarily (and understandably) lost his concentration --- we have one of the most iconic images in sports broadcasting: Carlton Fisk telekinetically willing his ball to stay fair for the game-winning home run. That the Reds took the Series the following night is anti-climactic.

Joe Posnanski takes the Reds-centric view in THE MACHINE: A Hot Team, a Legendary Season, and a Heart-stopping World Series: The Story of the 1975 Cincinnati Reds, focusing on the corps of players --- Pete Rose, Johnny Bench, Joe Morgan and Tony Perez --- that made the franchise a dynamo for several years during the early to mid-1970s. The author of THE SOUL OF BASEBALL: A Road Trip Through Buck O’Neil’s America, the sweet and sentimental biography of the popular Negro Leaguer, adds another top-notch contribution to the baseball library with his vivid portrayal of locker room life, with its pecking order and constant needling (and not all of it good-natured). Posnanski, the former baseball columnist for the Kansas City Star and now a senior writer for Sports Illustrated, also does a great job profiling manager Sparky Anderson, who, despite the success, privately grappled with self-doubt.

Mark Frost’s deconstruction of GAME SIX: Cincinnati, Boston, and the 1975 World Series: The Triumph of America's Pastime is both fascinating and a bit onerous. Like Posnanski, he focuses on key players from both teams, but especially Luis Tiant, Boston’s Cuban starting pitcher. Frost examines the game pitch by pitch, serving as a sort of literary version of the “color man” in the broadcast booth. This works well the first time through the lineup and again in the final innings, as he introduces each participant as he enters the game. But during the middle innings, this format runs out of steam (four times within 15 pages he refers to the tense atmosphere), and Frost uses non-baseball events, such as Gerald Ford’s difficulties as the new commander-in-chief, that seem forced and out of place.

Reaching farther into baseball lore, Lew Paper follows somewhat in Frost’s footsteps in PERFECT: Don Larsen's Miraculous World Series Game and the Men Who Made It Happen, as he offers chapter-length biographies of key players in the only no-hit, no-run, no-error game in the Fall Classic. Larsen’s story has been told before, and frankly better. The backstories of the Yankees and Dodgers would be fine in and of themselves, but when used in this context, they seem almost superfluous.

One item that seems to come up for the first time is Dodgers outfielder Duke Snider’s claim that the game was somehow rigged by home plate umpire Babe Pinelli. The veteran arbiter, appearing in his final game before retirement, evidently told Snider years afterwards that he wanted to go out with a bang and call a no-hitter in his finale. It’s difficult to conceive that such an allegation could have gone under the radar for more than 50 years.

The Red Sox and Chicago Cubs have been baseball’s lovable losers for generations. Prior to 2004, the Sox had not won a world championship since their 1918 meeting with the Cubs, who themselves have not won a title in more than 100 years. According to Sean Deveney, a reporter for the Sporting News and the author of THE ORIGINAL CURSE: Did the Cubs Throw the 1918 World Series to Babe Ruth's Red Sox and Incite the Black Sox Scandal?, both teams were subsequently saddled with “curses,” ostensibly because of the possibility that the Cubs threw those games. For Boston, it was “the curse of the Bambino,” their punishment for selling Babe Ruth to the Yankees. For the Cubs, it was “the curse of the billy goat,” originating when a local saloon keeper was kicked out of the team’s stadium when he brought his pet goat for good luck.

Deveney would have us believe that this was the harbinger of baseball’s biggest scandal, the 1919 Black Sox. All this is pure speculation. He has nothing concrete to offer, just circumstantial evidence; he doesn’t do his premise any favors when he writes in the introduction, “Though the bulk of this book is strictly historical, these opening interludes are, of course, not verifiable…. The reader simply seeking entertainment may take the interludes on their face. The reader interested in the historical background…is encouraged to find that information in the end notes.” In other words, readers, do your own research. He spends the first 100 pages setting the scene, introducing key players and owners. Only then does he begin the teams’ seasons and their concurrent march to the postseason faceoff.

Too bad he didn’t package this as a history of baseball during World War I; most of the narrative deals with the impact America’s impending entry into the war had on the sport. This definitely impacted the players financially --- World Series revenue, which determined the players’ postseason income, was off substantially, and the players seriously considered boycotting for more money --- and may or may not have led to the Cubs throwing the Series. Deveney concludes the book:

“We know that players and gamblers mixed freely, that few towns had gambling scenes as active as those in Boston and Chicago, and that fixing a game was an easy task. We know that inflation was ruining the economy, that Americans seemed to be surrounded by an odd mix of violence and repressive morality, and that the country was at war and on edge. An extraordinary set of societal circumstances. A 1918 World Series fix. A pair of decades-long curses descending on two of baseball’s best-loved franchises. It’s really not difficult to picture it at all.”

Perhaps not, but that doesn’t prove it happened.

Last, but by no means least, is THE FIRST FALL CLASSIC: The Red Sox, the Giants and the Cast of Players, Pugs and Politicos Who Re-Invented the World Series in 1912 by Mike Vaccaro, an award-winning sportswriter for the New York Post. Although the World Series has always had the nickname, Vaccaro contends that the 1912 meeting between the Red Sox and New York Giants truly was what put these games on the pop culture map. The tension builds as the players battle the opposition and their owners as they try to win baseball’s annual championship. Again, money is a critical component in the narrative: The Red Sox owner tells his manager to withhold his best pitcher so the team will lose the game in New York, thus requiring a return to Boston and additional revenue as they host the final game, win or lose.

Vaccaro blends newspaper accounts of the day with lively dialogue for a “you are there” feeling rather than merely a recounting of stuffy facts (Vaccaro conscientiously warns readers that he “recreated” the conversations based on the best accounts available, perhaps the first admission of such liberties in books like these I have encountered).

Who knows? Maybe this year’s World Series will be deemed a “classic” and warrant more books in years to come.

--- Reviewed by Ron Kaplan