The characters are college boys in everything but their ability to play baseball. Each represents one of the leading players who are now playing in the American and National Leagues with names slightly changed, but the reader will soon discover that he is reading the early exploits of one of his baseball favorites.
The whole range of interesting features about a ball team and the game itself is covered in successive chapters. One of them contains the secrets of what is known as "inside baseball" and "signal work" with illustrations showing how to do it.
Through the twenty chapters are interwoven many of the stories of actual plays, famous catches, thrilling episodes of games, tricks pulled off and some that did not work, which have come within the author's experience.
A good story of college life runs through the book. The hero gets into trouble and his friends get him out in the usual strenuous style of college life stories.
It is a live book about baseball, with live characters, and written by the one man who knows more about the men who are playing it to-day and the methods by which games are won than anyone else in the sport.
"EDITOR'S NOTE--The Daily News makes no apology for placing in this position of honor on the first page the opening chapters of a serial story dealing with baseball events and baseball heroes.
"The Daily News believes in clean athletic sports, believes in encouraging them and in keeping them clean. Baseball is the national game. It is not only the most popular sport in the United States, but it is national in the sense that it expresses the ingenuity, the energy and the agility of the typical American. Viewed in this light, baseball possesses a dignity of its own and an entertaining and informing piece of literary work about it cannot be trivial. What is elevating, what is interesting, and what is dignified cannot but make a strong appeal to the appreciation of every reader."--_=The Chicago News, March 21, 1910.=_
"The best baseball story ever written."--_=The Evening World, New York, N. Y., March 14, 1910.=_
"I have read WON IN THE NINTH with much interest and it has been very entertaining."--_=Charles W. Murphy, President Chicago National League Baseball Club, Chicago, April 8, 1910.=_