Ring Lardner was a sports columnist and acclaimed short-story writer. He worked for several newspapers throughout his career, including the South Bend Times, St. Louis Sporting News, Boston American, and Chicago Tribune. His stories were notoriously filled with satire, grammatical errors, and everyday events. Lardner passed away in 1933, at the age of 48. John Thorn is the official historian of Major League Baseball. Apart from his creation, with Pete Palmer, of Total Baseball, he is often visible on ESPN, MLBTV, the History Channel, and other television outlets as a sports authority and commentator. He was also a major on-screen presence in and chief consultant to Ken Burns’s 18½-hour PBS film, Baseball. Thorn cowrote The Hidden Game of Baseball, which established alternative statistics later recognized and adopted as official by Major League Baseball, notably OPS. His many baseball books over the past three decades also include Treasures of the Baseball Hall of Fame, The Game for All America, and Our Game, a history of the game that also supplies the title for his twice-weekly blog at MLB.com. In 2011 Simon & Schuster published his major work, Baseball in the Garden of Eden: A Secret History of the Early Game.