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LATE INNINGS by Dean A. Sullivan

LATE INNINGS

A Documentary History of Baseball, 1945-1972

edited by Dean A. Sullivan

Pub Date: April 1st, 2001
ISBN: 0-8032-9285-6
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska

A compilation of box scores, news clippings, legal briefs, and legislation that traces the social undercurrents of baseball’s postwar history through 1972.

Sullivan (Early Innings: A Documentary History of Baseball, 18251908, not reviewed) has assembled a third collection of important historical documents for hardcore baseball fans and interested historians. Soon after team-owners elected Senator Albert “Happy” Chandler to replace the late Kenesaw Landis as Commissioner of Major League Baseball, memoranda from Branch Rickey and a report from the House Judiciary Committee meeting on organized baseball show, Chandler dashed the owners’ desire to keep the sport racially segregated by publicly accepting the Dodgers’ decision to sign Jackie Robinson as the first African-American to play major-league baseball. This decision, Sullivan argues, eventually changed baseball from a provincial sport into a national passion. Broadcast technology fueled this transformation by extending rooting interests across state lines. A series of news clippings from baseball’s “golden age” traces a dramatic spike in individual performance as black players like Willie Mays and Henry Aaron pushed white stars like Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris to new heights. Sullivan also excerpts congressional documents and news articles that show how a renewed nationwide interest in the sport pulled many teams from their longtime East Coast homes into the American West. He ends by suggesting that Curt Flood’s legal challenge to the reserve clause shifted baseball’s attention from ending segregation on the diamond to addressing tensions between justice for individual players and the owners’ financial well-being. Throughout, he prefers to let the collected sources tell baseball’s history for him—an effective strategy for a sport that inspired much of the century’s best journalism.

Though a bit specialized for general readers, a goldmine for students and fans of baseball history, as well as readers with interests in mid–20th-century race and labor issues.