My latest Chicago Tribune column is about a new book celebrating Chicago sportswriting. You also can access the column via my Twitter feed.

Here’s an excerpt.

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Ron Rapoport decided there only was one fitting place to have a signing for his new book on Chicago sportswriters. Thursday at 5 p.m., he will be at Billy Goat Tavern underneath Tribune Tower, the famous newspaper haunt where the ghosts still linger.

“It seems only right to do it at the place where so many of them drank over the years,” Rapoport said. “Where the column logos of the likes of John P. Carmichael, Bill Gleason, David Condon, Mike Royko and many others will be looking down at us.”

Those legends and more are featured in “From Black Sox to Three Peats: A Century of Chicago’s Best Sportswriting.” The new book, published by the University of Chicago Press, is a collection of 100 columns by 59 Chicago sportswriters. They span from Ring Lardner and Arch Ward to David Haugh, Rick Telander and Rick Morrissey.

Rapoport, the former Sun-Times columnist who now lives in Los Angeles, served as the book’s editor. It was a daunting task to distill more than 100 years of Chicago sportswriting into a single book.

“Many of the people who wrote about sports in Chicago over the last century were as good at their jobs, or better, as the players they were writing about,” Rapoport said.

Rapoport viewed part of his mission to use the book as a way to document the history of Chicago sports. Yes, Cubs fans, there’s an actual story of the team winning the World Series: I.E. Sanborn’s account in the Tribune of the 1908 clincher. The Tribune’s Westbrook Pegler wrote vividly of Babe Ruth’s Called Shot homer at Wrigley Field during the 1932 World Series.

“Nor will you ever see an artist call his shot before hitting one of the longest drives ever made on these grounds,” Pegler wrote.