‘The Grandest Stage: A History of the World Series’
By Tyler Kepner
Doubleday, 314 pages

Do not remind fans of the Yankees or Mets, but the 118th World Series will begin on Friday, pitting the Philadelphia Phillies against the Houston Astros. The Phillies have captured two crowns in their history and the ’Stros one — though that triumph was tainted by a sign-stealing scandal. There has been no World Series title* in New York since 2009, a relative eternity for a city with the highest of expectations.

New Yorkers have no reason to feel warmly toward either of the Series foes. For those who are nevertheless reluctant to entirely take a pass on baseball’s crown jewel, Tyler Kepner’s “The Grandest Stage: A History of the World Series,” presents a perfect fix. It’s less an introduction for rookies than manna for devoted seamheads.

Mr. Kepner, the baseball writer for the Times, is well placed to write the story of the annual championship pageant. He has spent time on both the Mets and Yankees beats, in addition to chronicling a couple of clubs on the coast. A previous book, “K: A History of Baseball in Ten Pitches,” evinced encyclopedic knowledge and a spry pen. In the last 22 years, he has missed only two World Series games.   

“The Grandest Stage” is in seven chapters, mirroring the numbers of games a Series runs when it goes the distance. Rather than a straightforward chronicle, the book swerves like a well-tossed slider. One chapter meditates on the pressure the World Series brings to bear on players who can earn acclaim or suffer ignominy, another on the challenges faced by managers. 

Mr. Kepner recounts the stories of lesser-known players who made a “seismic impact on a victorious World Series while barely registering otherwise in the Major Leagues,” as well as of the franchise architects tasked with executing the trades and signings required to assemble a champion. He recounts the heroes and the heartbreakers, and moves agilely between statistics and anecdotes.

What Mr. Kepner calls his “seven-sided look at the modern World Series, an ode to the most wonderful time of the year,” is full of the voices of those who played the game. A second baseman who missed a hanging slider in a crucial moment recounts how he spent the next week inebriated and sprawled on a basement couch, not a “happy kind of drunk.”

On the joyful side of the ledger, a pitcher for the Pirates, Steve Blass, remembers a hug with a Hall of Fame outfielder, Roberto Clemente, onboard a flight home after winning the 1971 Series. What Mr. Blass called a “singular moment” would prove to be a valedictory one: Just a little more than a year later the great Clemente would be dead, a victim of a plane crash. Mr. Blass would inexplicably lose the strike zone and wash out of baseball.

Mr. Kepner strikes the right balance between reverence for the game’s legends and respect for the randomness in outcome its difficulty ensures. He quotes the right-handed power pitcher Curt Schilling, who before battling the mighty Yankees in 2001 sneered that   “mystique and aura, those are dancers in a nightclub.” He backed up his bark with bite: In their mind’s eye, Yankee fans still see his deliberate windup and overpowering fastball.   

“The Grandest Stage” is full of unexpected facts and lists sure to stir debate through the cold months between the final out of the World Series and the first toss of spring training. For a measure of comfort if “wait till next year” rings hollow, morose fans of the Pinstripers and the Amazins can take comfort in a nugget unearthed by Mr. Kepner: Between 1949 and 1957, a New York team won 47 World Series games in a row. 

*Correction: The New York Mets appeared in the World Series in 2015. An earlier version incorrectly excluded that appearance.