Interview by Scott L. Smith of Greenwich Time/Stamford Advocate April 30

Forget politics. If you want to start a heated debate, talk baseball:

* Who was better: Joe DiMaggio or Ted Williams?

* Were the 1927 Yankees the greatest team of all time?

* Was the game really born in Cooperstown, N.Y.?

Baseball history isn't written in absolutes. It's always open to debate - and passionate debate, at that - by fans and historians.

So why did Greenwich native Cait Murphy declare an absolute in her new book? It's right in the title: "Crazy '08: How a Cast of Cranks, Rogues, Boneheads, and Magnates Created the Greatest Year in Baseball History."

The greatest year in baseball history. That's bold for any baseball writer, let alone a business writer.

Murphy is an assistant managing editor at Forbes Magazine in New York. She has written for the Economist magazine and the Wall Street Journal. She is more familiar with the Fortune 500 list of top corporations and the economics of China. So who is Murphy to decide what's the greatest season in baseball history?

"As I write in the introduction, the joy of writing a book is you get to call them as you see them," Murphy said with a laugh after a recent book signing at Arcadia coffee shop in Old Greenwich.

"It's one of the things that makes writing and thinking about baseball great is you get to make your point and argue it and have that debate. But I also think I'm right. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it."

Critics might debate her thesis, but they all seem to agree Murphy has delivered a great story. Her book has been hailed in publications nationwide, from Sports Illustrated to the Chicago Tribune. It got a glowing review by political columnist George Will in The New York Times.

Will is a Chicago Cubs fan, which should be a tip-off if the 1908 season has a familiar ring. That was the last year the Cubs won the World Series, the longest drought in U.S. team sports.

Yet it's not the Cubs' distant success that makes the year special for Murphy (for the record, she's a New York Mets fan). It's the confluence of characters and events, many critical to the history of the game, which give Murphy her impetus for declaring 1908 as baseball's best season.

She acknowledges that people can build a case for seasons such as 1986, 1951 or 1941. Yet, as she says in the book's introduction: "They're all wrong."

"The best season in baseball history is 1908. Besides two agonizing pennant races, it features history's finest pitching duel, hurled in the white heat of an October stretch drive, and the most controversial game ever played. The year is full of iconic performances by baseball's first generation of iconic heroes. Tinker, Evers, and Chance are near their prime. Honus Wagner may have the best season of the century. Ty Cobb would kick, snarl, and manhandle the Tigers into contention; Christy Mathewson has his finest season, and his most sorrowful one; Napoleon Lajoie would never come closer to a pennant. Cy Young, the only man with more than five hundred wins, has his last good season, while Walter Johnson, the only other man with more than four hundred, has his first. Shoeless Joe Jackson would come up from South Carolina, sniff major-league cooking for five games, and decide it wasn't for him. Smokey Joe Wood and Tris Speaker have a few cups of coffee. In the dugouts are Connie Mack and John McGraw. The two managers, opposites in temperament, are united in their passion for the game; they rank first and second in games won."

She boils it down to this: "This is the year that baseball comes of age."

Agree or disagree on that point, the critics have been nearly unanimous in saying she makes that argument strongly, clearly and in an entertaining fashion.

"I've been immensely pleased, thrilled, to be honest," Murphy said of the reviews. "All of the reviews have been positive, even the blogs, which can be notorious.

"It's very personal stuff. I try to use some humor. I think there's some personality in the book."

That personality is a reflection of the author, who showed off her storytelling skills at the Arcadia signing. She held the audience's attention with humor and compelling tales of the 1908 season, such as the game in which New York Giants Hall of Famer Christy Mathewson came on in relief - not from the bullpen, but from the clubhouse showers.

Yet with the tapestry of baseball subjects available, what makes a business writer turn the clock back to 1908?

"I was looking for a book idea. I just wanted the experience of writing a book," Murphy said. "I was considering all kinds of different things. Nothing quite stuck. Then my father suggested this. He knew my interest in early baseball."

Her father, the late John Cullen Murphy, also knew a good story. He delivered one each week for more than three decades as the illustrator of the "Prince Valiant" comic strip.

"His idea was pretty unformed," Cait Murphy said. "He said, 'Why don't you look into the 1908 season? I think some interesting things happened.' And I began to look into the season, realized that was an understatement.

"And I also realized I could do a book about the 1908 baseball season and about America at the time. So two of my interests - early baseball and American history - really came together in a, for me, very serendipitous way."

Murphy's book would have been compelling enough if it stayed in the ballpark. The 1908 season hinged on one of baseball's most controversial moments, the Merkle Game, where New York Giants infielder Fred Merkle was belatedly called out for failing to touch second base amid post-game chaos. The call negated a Giants win over the Cubs, forcing a replay of the game. The Cubs won the rematch and the National League title by one game. Toss in a legion of Hall of Famers and other characters, why would you leave your seat?

"I'm a huge baseball fan, but I find 300-page books that never get out of the ballpark very hard to get through," she said. "What's happening outside the ballpark definitely affects what's happening inside the ballpark."

So Murphy takes her readers into Chicago. She leads them into the notorious red-light district, has them cross paths with corrupt politicians and introduces them to a female mass murderer.

All the while she worked to avoid the downfall of so many baseball books.

"It's hard to talk about baseball without cliches," Murphy said, acknowledging she called in some all-star help. "Robert Creamer, who wrote the forward, was a great clichŽ hunter."

Creamer is a noted baseball writer and biographer of Babe Ruth. Murphy also turned to the New York Public Library, the National Baseball Hall of Fame and a teeming roster of other sources to track tidbits about the season.

She worked on the book for more than four years, including nine months of writing, and never took a break from her day job.

"The hardest thing was finishing it," she said. "I was pretty sick of (writing) it after 8 1/2 months. I had one chapter to go, and I was pretty much done with it."

Now that Murphy is done, she's finding acclaim for her efforts. Not bad for a self-proclaimed "scrappy second baseman" from Cos Cob. "I was one of the first girls to play Little League in Greenwich," she said of her 1973 debut.

"I had my athletic peak when I was 11, when my team won the town (softball) championship under the lights at Byram Shore Park. I was the winning pitcher. I came in in relief."

Her mother, Joan, still lives in the family's Cos Cob home. John Cullen Murphy died in 2004, but he did more than offer the idea for the book.

"The very first illustration in the book, Dad did that," Cait Murphy said proudly.

His daughter has used words to paint a vivid picture of a crucial time in the history of the National Pastime.

"There's a lot of bad baseball books out there," Murphy said, "and I definitely didn't want this to be one of them."

Mission accomplished.