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Best Legal Thriller of the Year
I am especially pleased to share the news that The Federal Case has been selected as the year's outstanding legal thriller. After placing as a Finalist in the Thrillers.Com competition, the book came up the winner in the 2024 American Fiction Awards.
And more good news: The Keystone Corner was a Finalist for Best Historical Mystery/Suspense in the same AFA competition.
Thanks to the judges, and thanks to the readers who have had so many nice things to say about the books, and about The Deadball Files.
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"If you like baseball and history, read this [series]."
-- Readers' Favorite
Baseball... America's National Pastime for going on two centuries.
It all seems so simple, so pure. But behind the green grass and iconic heroes, professional baseball has always been driven by greed, ambition, a thirst for fame, a lust for power, and a ceaseless conflict of motives that goes far beyond winning and losing. The hope is that no one notices. Arguably, no American institution outside of politics has replicated so well and for so long the seething social cauldron that bubbles just below the surface of American life, and none has hidden it so effectively. Perhaps in that sense as well, baseball truly is our National Pastime.
Take the many real and known missteps, mysteries, scandals, lies and coverups that have characterized the history of the sport. Mix in a few more that can seem just as real. Add a dash of realism that might be fiction, a dash of fiction that might be more real than you imagine, and you have the recipe for a series of baseball thrillers that take you to the secret heart and soul of baseball. That is The Deadball Files.
JB Manheim brings to life his decades of expertise in persuasion and strategic communication through these fictional stories of baseball behind the scenes. The Deadball Files will lead you to question whether what you think you know about the game and about the powers who control it is real, or whether it is just a carefully nurtured product of deception, misdirection, and propaganda.
It all seems so simple, so pure. But behind the green grass and iconic heroes, professional baseball has always been driven by greed, ambition, a thirst for fame, a lust for power, and a ceaseless conflict of motives that goes far beyond winning and losing. The hope is that no one notices. Arguably, no American institution outside of politics has replicated so well and for so long the seething social cauldron that bubbles just below the surface of American life, and none has hidden it so effectively. Perhaps in that sense as well, baseball truly is our National Pastime.
Take the many real and known missteps, mysteries, scandals, lies and coverups that have characterized the history of the sport. Mix in a few more that can seem just as real. Add a dash of realism that might be fiction, a dash of fiction that might be more real than you imagine, and you have the recipe for a series of baseball thrillers that take you to the secret heart and soul of baseball. That is The Deadball Files.
JB Manheim brings to life his decades of expertise in persuasion and strategic communication through these fictional stories of baseball behind the scenes. The Deadball Files will lead you to question whether what you think you know about the game and about the powers who control it is real, or whether it is just a carefully nurtured product of deception, misdirection, and propaganda.
Or Read About Each One After This Brief Intermission
If You Are Interested in Baseball Cards, Baseball History, or Thomas Edison, You'll Be Interested In This
While I was doing research on Edison for Book 5 of The Deadball Files, I came across a previously unnoticed box of T206 baseball cards that the inventor's youngest son, Theodore, had collected during 1909-1910. The T206 cards from American Tobacco Company are the most coveted bits of cardboard among baseball card enthusiasts, and Ted had some five dozen of them, including the cards of nine future Hall of Fame players (the Hall did not open until three decades after he was acquiring his cards), among them three of the first five inductees -- Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson, and Christy Mathewson.
Together with Lawrence Knorr of Sunbury Press, I have been able to tell the story of these cards and to bring them into public view in this new book, What's in Ted's Wallet?
You can read more about the book HERE.
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And Now Back To Our Regularly Scheduled Program
The Deadball Files: Book 5
The Keystone Corner: Thomas Edison Turns Two
Thomas Edison didn’t invent baseball any more than Abner Doubleday did. But he was a big fan of the game. Fresh from his victory in The Federal Case, young attorney Andy Dennum and his cartographer girlfriend Keiley Barefoot use Edison’s love of baseball to uncover the secrets hidden in the estate of the inventor’s last surviving offspring, “Uncle Frank” Culbertson. You won’t believe what they find.
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The Deadball Files: Book Four
The Federal Case
Professional baseball has not always been as organized as it is today. The so-called "National Agreement" that established the American and National Leagues as the only "major" leagues brought order to the game at the highest levels, but it was not unchallenged. Perhaps the most significant threat came from the eight-team Federal League, which began play in 1914 and aspired to major league status. But that was not to be.
A century old legal battle between Major League Baseball and the upstart Federal League. An old legal document, once lost, now found. Young night-schooled lawyer Andy Dennum takes on the baseball establishment, the law firm that fired him, and a mystery from his own past. At stake? The viability of Major League Baseball's business model, and Andy's future as a lawyer.
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The Deadball Files: Book Three
For a century or more, Civil War hero Abner Doubleday was credited with inventing the modern game of baseball in Cooperstown in 1839. His name is on historical markers, playing fields, and for a time, even a professional baseball team. The Hall of Fame opened in Cooperstown on the hundredth anniversary of his invention.
More recently, however, baseball historians have taken a more nuanced view of the game's inception, and have discounted Doubleday's role altogether. Some have gone so far as to speculate that, being long dead when the myth was created around 1905, Doubleday was a convenient foil for a conspiracy led by Albert Spalding, an adherent of a prominent philosophical and religious movement of the day, to set in stone the American roots of the game.
What if the historians are right? And wrong? At the same time? What if we have only begun to grasp the true dimensions of the mystery surrounding Abner Doubleday and the origins of baseball?
Tech entrepreneur Paul Chi Mannington is after a still deeper truth, and Doubleday may point the way. Paul calls on baseball sleuth Adam Wallace to put the Doubleday myth to the test. But he's not the only one on Abner's trail!
More recently, however, baseball historians have taken a more nuanced view of the game's inception, and have discounted Doubleday's role altogether. Some have gone so far as to speculate that, being long dead when the myth was created around 1905, Doubleday was a convenient foil for a conspiracy led by Albert Spalding, an adherent of a prominent philosophical and religious movement of the day, to set in stone the American roots of the game.
What if the historians are right? And wrong? At the same time? What if we have only begun to grasp the true dimensions of the mystery surrounding Abner Doubleday and the origins of baseball?
Tech entrepreneur Paul Chi Mannington is after a still deeper truth, and Doubleday may point the way. Paul calls on baseball sleuth Adam Wallace to put the Doubleday myth to the test. But he's not the only one on Abner's trail!
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The Deadball Files: Book Two
What if there was a secret society of Baseball elders, who in the wake of the Black Sox scandal, decided that to preserve the sanctity of The Game they would create a secret repository where they could bury forever its most explosive secrets? And what if these “GameKeepers” formed an underground organization to guard any evidence of these dangerous scandals, a mysterious organization with a failsafe security structure, an inviolable oath of silence for its members, and an ironclad hierarchy of succession to perpetuate its mission across the generations? And what if it all worked perfectly for nearly a century. Until it didn't. Suddenly new questions arose: Who would control these secrets, and to what end? Would The Game itself survive?
Enter Liz Fairchild, the innocent bystander who literally holds the key to the entire mystery. Liz enlists the help of baseball sleuth Adam Wallace, fresh from uncovering the secret behind Christy Mathewson's death. Together they break through Baseball’s most impenetrable wall, only for Adam to be faced with an excruciating choice: Which sacred oath would he break?
Enter Liz Fairchild, the innocent bystander who literally holds the key to the entire mystery. Liz enlists the help of baseball sleuth Adam Wallace, fresh from uncovering the secret behind Christy Mathewson's death. Together they break through Baseball’s most impenetrable wall, only for Adam to be faced with an excruciating choice: Which sacred oath would he break?
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What is the REAL story behind the death of baseball icon Christy Mathewson? Why has it remained a secret all these years? This twisty-turny tale, featuring Ty Cobb and several other future Hall of Famers, starts from some genuine but little-known WWI documents that call into question the traditional account of Mathewson's exposure to poison gas in France and his subsequent early death. Was the poison gas incident merely a myth? If so, what darker reality was it designed to cover up? And what uncomfortable truths might lie behind this "official" history, truths that the government, the Army, and Baseball have kept hidden to this day?
A dead reporter's buried notes. A lost journal. A secret code. Award-winning writer Adam Wallace and his friend Jason Drumm are on the trail, and you won't believe what they discover.
But maybe you should.
But maybe you should.
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Books One through Three of The Deadball Files were originally published by Summer Game Books as The Cooperstown Trilogy.
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