Oscar Charleston might be the best baseball player you’ve never heard of. His career, which spanned the early 20th century and bridged two world wars, is buried under decades of segregation, lost records, and a lack of descendants to champion his story. Jeremy Beer’s Oscar Charleston: The Life and Legend of Baseball’s Greatest Forgotten Player aims to change that — and largely succeeds, though it’s a book that will resonate more with the baseball historian than the casual fan.

I picked this one up right after reading Joe Posnanski’s The Soul of Baseball, which spent time with Buck O’Neill, another great ambassador of the Negro Leagues. O’Neill mentions Charleston in passing, but Beer puts him front and center, using exhaustive research and a mountain of old newspaper clippings to rebuild the legend of a man Bill James ranked as the fourth greatest player of all time.

Charleston was, by all accounts, a force of nature — a blend of speed, power, and defensive brilliance. Old-timers once said that Willie Mays reminded them of Oscar Charleston, not the other way around. He was also a pioneer off the field, becoming the first Black scout in organized baseball and playing a role, albeit indirectly, in the eventual breaking of the color barrier.

Beer’s work leans heavily on the kind of research that only the most dedicated archivists can appreciate. Much of the book is built on newspaper game accounts and box scores, many of them preserved in a scrapbook kept by Charleston’s niece. As someone who’s spent hours combing through old newspapers myself, I couldn’t help but marvel at the sheer dedication behind that effort. The recent statistical work by Seamheads helped fill in some gaps, painting a clearer picture of Charleston’s extraordinary career.

That said, this isn’t a book I’d hand to a casual reader who just wants a good baseball story. This is a historian’s book — meant for those who memorized the backs of baseball cards as kids, who devoured Bill James’ abstract, and who check Fangraphs before breakfast. Guilty as charged. It’s dense, detail-rich, and unapologetically nerdy in the best way possible.

I’d give it 3 out of 5 stars — not because it’s lacking in quality, but because its appeal is narrower. For those who live and breathe the game, it’s a fascinating excavation of a nearly lost legend. For everyone else, it’s a history lesson in the best sense: one that reminds us just how much of baseball’s greatness was hidden in plain sight.