"The great trouble with baseball today is that most of the players are in the game for the money that's in it - not for the love of it, the excitement of it, the thrill of it."

That quote does not come from Fay Vincent or Bud Selig in the 1990s. Nor was it said by Marge Schott in the 1980s. Nor by Bowie Kuhn or Calvin Griffith in the 1970s or Walter O'Malley in the 1960s. Those prophetic words were uttered by none other than the great Ty Cobb - in 1925.

John Helyar, reporter for The Wall Street Journal and co-author of the number one bestseller Barbarians at the Gate, says in Lords of the Realm, "Before it was a business, it was a game." But as Helyar discovered, and as he shows in his extraordinary new book, baseball has also been a business for a long, long time.

Lords of the Realm is not a sobersided look at the problems of high salaries and free agency. It's also not a romantic homage to the heroes of the game. It is a penetrating, take-no-prisoners look at the hundred-year history of what's become a billion-dollar machine, a cutthroat industry that, while supposedly capturing the soul of America, is and has always been dominated by such greed, back-stabbing, and double-dealing that it puts the insanity of the RJR Nabisco takeover to shame.

As Richard Moss, a baseball agent, has said about his chosen line of work: "There's so much money and so many good people. Why does this work so badly?" After hundreds of interviews and several years of research and digging, John Helyar knows the answer to Moss's question - and lays it all out before us in a way that is both horrific and hilarious.

From the despotic lunacy of Gussie Busch, George Steinbrenner, and Peter Ueberroth and the maverick antics of Branch Rickey, Charlie Finley, and Ted Turner to the chaotic, yet near-heroic rise of the union, the ever-more-mysterious dealings that baseball maintains with television, and the murky back-room maneuvers behind collusion, expansion, and the battle for and against profit-sharing, Lords of the Realm is an utterly compelling, picaresque epic that perhaps does discover the real soul of America.

Bryan Burrough is a reporter for the Wall Street Journal in New York. In 1987 he won the John Hancock Award for Excellence in Business and Financial Journalism. John Helyar worked for the Wall Street Journal for nine years. He is now a senior editor of Southpoint, a business magazine based in Atlanta, Georgia.