John Douglass Wallop was the 17th John Douglass Wallop from an old Eastern Shore family. His love of baseball began when he was 5 years old, when his father took him to a Senators' game. A newspaper reporter by profession, he was the author of 13 novels, the second of which, The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant, was published in 1955 and became his best known work. Wallop died in 1985